sweaty trees

I never knew what heat was until New Orleans. I've never been to a place where my eyes burn at the end of the day, for no other reason than the sun is so incredibly bright. I couldnt come to grips with how people cope with living in this kind of environment, until I remembered my drive into New Orleans. My first observation of this city was that of a city where buildings were pulled down and trees were pushed up over their roofs. I had always wondered what it would be like to visit a city in the middle of the jungle, city enguled and overgown by nature. This ironic twist on a city that has been at odds with nature for virtually all of its existance. The view from the interstate was that of a city in ruin. Tangled in a web of giant trees, a subtle haze rises shallowly above the treeline. As I exited the Interstate and dipped from my birds eye perch above the city and onto the streets I could feel that I was entering a place alltogether alien. Wherever you're from, trees play a large role in daily life, but here the relationship between trees and their surroundings seems completely different. Scraggly Live Oak trees rise through the sidewalks creating a canopy over the streets. Trees that would be cut down to make way for power lines in almost any other city in the country, here are allowed to take their toll on city infrastructure. Roads are built around trees that have overgrown their lots, sidewalks crack and bend over and around the root system of these giants. At first i could not understand why the city would allow this to happen, but after my first run through the streets of uptown and Audubon Park, I realized how precious these co-inhabitants of the city really are to this place. In a city that should have a welcoming natural breeze off of a major river and lake bordering most of the city, it is instead surrounded by levees, shielding most of the city from any sort of cool air that could be moving through the city. Shade then becomes New Orleanians only reprive from the sometimes unbearable heat and humidity. Without them the city would fry. Their natural shade becomes a spot of social interraction, people meet to eat lunch, rest and play. In this, people form a bond with the trees, willing to leverage public infrastructure in order to retain the benefits of these ancient oaks and beautiful magnolias. In the aftermath of the Hurricanes and the flooding of the city, trees were listed right alongside homes and businesses in describing the destruction. This somewhat uncanny relationship permeates indiscriminantly throughout neighborhoods, races and any other socio-economic divider that people would like to put up. New Orleans depends on trees to keep itself livable. the sweat is manageable because there is no place in this city that is more than a couple yards from a tree.