August is a mixed blessing for a New Orleans visitor.On one hand, hotel rates are cheap and you can get into some of the city’s greatest restaurants, like the superb Irene’s on St. Philip Street, with no reservation and no waiting in line.
On the other is the weather. For someone not accustomed to the South’s tropics, the blanketing heat and humidity can be devastating. Even for longtime residents, August is a month to get out of south Louisiana.
Sometimes it was easy to imagine that we were in a Central American rainforest. Skies that were hot, open and blue in the early morning soon became smeared with dismal, low-hanging clouds. Usually by noon, it was pouring. The rain would linger like a bad hangover, sputtering into the evening.
From the fourth-floor balcony of our room on Toulouse Street, I watched one of the late-morning showers, fascinated by the image of the rain falling in one direction as steam rose in the other.
The rain had abated when we stood in front of voodoo queen Marie Laveau’s tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, but the sky was a threatening slate-gray, the color of some of the markers in the city’s oldest burying ground.
Early on, Orleanians learned to build tombs above ground, our guide was telling us. The practice was dictated by high-water tables and frequent storms, which tended to wash coffins out of the gumbo mud.
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