This morning I had (which should hopefully be the last in a very long time) a kidney scan and appointment at the hospital. It was early, and I was up way earlier than the appointment, so I decided to travel there on way of the bicycle. But first, I wanted to see the sun rise in New Orleans.
So I left on a two-hour trek around Uptown, the Garden District, the French Quarter, the Marigny, CBD and Jefferson Parish. Instead of going the 3 miles down River Road to get to Oschner, I took a 35 mile circuitous route by way of what happened to be, maddeningly, some of the city’s most gravely streets. And despite the fact that it ended with a pretty gnarly fall (the second in two weeks), it was a very remarkable morning. Plus, my kidneys are great and there was a code red in the hospital.
The most spectacular thing about getting out early is having the chance to wake up with the world. Things take on this very ephemeral feeling, like dominos falling one after another, unstoppable and flowing, when you have the chance to watch things wake up. When you’re up before the sun, you’re part of this very small slice of the world. Everyone else is put away, quiet, on pause. And here you are, moving and alert and aware. Here you are, there, out, open. And there the rest of the world is, tucked under the covers, dreading the alarm, reticent to roll over and slip out of the cocoon of covers. But there’s this moment where you feel a sense of ownership over the quiet world in front of you. Everyone is entitled to that powerful solitary feeling you get when you sense being alone in the world, but it’s hard to feel when the world is awake and loud around you. Being awake early, you’re able to see this very different world, and be there when it opens it eyes.
And when you can time it right, something kind of magnificent happens. If you wake up early and stay moving, you can see different stages of all this happening. I left at 6:20 when Tulane was silent. Then went through Uptown where the fog created these vertical stripes down St. Charles that, enveloped between the streetcar lines, the cars, the mansions, and empty lanes of traffic, created these very balanced lines of symmetry. As the fog cleared, by 6:30, people were emerging, misty and misty-eyed — students waiting for a ride to school, runners, old couples. Then after to downtown, where the carefree tudor mansions give way to Spanish architecture, flashing neon signs and rickety cobble stone streets replete with history and mistakes. It’s a different kind of wakeup there, where strippers from Bourbon were waking up after a night of club darkness, men were stumbling and women were following them and fatigued street cleaners were blasting the area with soapy water. By 7:10, the horses in front of Jackson Square were starting to line up, Cafe Du Monde was warming up the oil and powdered sugar and jazz artists were flirting around with their trumpets and trombones in front of the cathedral.
This summer I tried for a week to see seven different sunrises in DC. It didn’t work perfectly, because it’s always harder to get up at 5:30 then you think it’s going to be the night people in your wave of romantic idealism. And in a way, I’m glad I only got to see four. Because part of what makes moments like this — the kind of moment were you are sitting on the River Walk in front of St. Louisa Cathedral looking out as the sun rises through the fog over the Mississippi — so moving is that they aren’t routine.
What did I get out of this morning? I got to see the sun rise over the Mississippi River downtown, three pretty nice scratches in my bike frame, a road rash on my hip, scrapes and bruises all over, a bruise that feels and looks like an eggplant under my quad, blood on my handle bar tape, an appreciation of irony in waking into the hospital for my appointment and having a hard time finding a first aid kit, the play count of “Shell Games” by Bright Eyes go up to 54, seeing New Orleans on pause, and seeing it blink its eyes open and stutter a bit and then finally turn on. And it all happened before 8:30.
And the events of today were enough that I was in bed asleep when the sun set. That’ll be a moment for another day.
