August 2005
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The swarm:
An eruption in the French Quarter
On a May evening in New Orleans, three days after Mother’s Day, I stand beneath a large live oak at the corner of St. Peter and Decatur streets with two young men in T-shirts. One fiddles with a barometric gauge and wind meter while the other climbs up an aluminum ladder, peering into the main fork of the tree. Parents and children wander past us on the sidewalk, lugging bags and packages from the Hard Rock Cafe and the Café du Monde. Some stop briefly to ask us about our work. Oh, they say.
The change happens so quickly and with so little fuss that at first all I notice is that the halo around the streetlamps has atomized into floating, darting pieces, hovering for a while before falling to the ground. I am the last of the three to realize what this means.
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