Driving towards New Orleans, I had thought that we would at some point enter the South, crossing over the Mason-Dixon Line into another America. But the modern freeway imparts sameness on either side like the wake of a ship and the brown landscape emerged slowly from under the dwindling patches of sodden and isolated snow. Kentucky slumbered under dry winter thickets and a sallow, low-slanting sunshine. We came at midnight to a motel, featureless and isolate, like something fallen from the back of a truck, where we occupied a chilly room decorated in wan pastels. A flap of damp wallpaper bulged behind the door and the heater, when activated, emitted a tepid, monotonous sigh. The coffee machine was broken and the beds were thinly blanketed, so that we slept on the very edge of actual coldness.

The next morning, we ate miniature cinnamon rolls and drank hot coffee in a small cafeteria maintained by a small Indian couple. From a bracket high in the corner, television news flashed, beamed and chortled. Outside, hardened patches of ice clung to the grass; glinting and trickling in the sunshine, and our breath smoked. Overlooking the highway, a full-sized fiberglass Tyrannosaur bared its teeth ferociously, but its small eyes looked desperate. A sign proclaimed that we had just missed DINO WORLD and to come back soon. The roadside is littered with these weird attractions; who conceives and executes them? Who suddenly decides that his quiet spot shall be home to the world’s largest baseball, or a giant piñata warehouse, or a replica of the Taj Mahal?

The journey is littered with towns and villages romantically named, in which little or nothing ever happens. Venice, Sparta, Athens, Troy, all flew past unnoticed. No signs indicated Birmingham; Peter thought this might be because it is known as a black city. At the last stop for gas before New Orleans, the pump was old-fashioned, with a lever that had to be raised to reset the counter. I puzzled over it shame-facedly until a young woman came out from within to show me what to do. At the next pump, frat boys on their way to Mardi Gras joked.

The sedgy land remained brown, falling down to the flat monotony of the Mississippi Delta. Signs of devastation appeared; ramparts of splintered trees, whitened and twisted, stood like a sunken garden of bones. I was reminded of the shattered landscape around Mount St Helen’s, where the forest was blasted by a lateral volcanic explosion more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped at Nagasaki, which withered the land like the breath of a basilisk. Concrete barricades blocked many of the highway exits; we guessed that they had served communities that were now erased and desolate. Ghost suburbs began to appear; the tall plastic signs that declared gas stations and chain restaurants struck up from the roadside, but they were headless or faceless; their message blown out by the hurricane. Suburbs are lifeless places enough; at first glance these looked like any strip mall anywhere. But the car parks were utterly empty and plate glass windows lay shattered everywhere, revealing rectangles of darkness. Clapperboard houses lay tilted, cracked and sagging like Dorothy’s house from Kansas, dropped from the sky onto the Wicked Witch of the East. Through their gaping dormer windows nothing can be seen but the daylight glimmering palely from the other side of the gutted and rotten buildings. They are drift houses, thrown up on the beach to die like whales. Everywhere, there were the grim family similarities of all natural disaster; as all burn-victims have the same face, washed and smoothed by flame into an inexpressive waxen ball, so these drowned ghosts resembled their victim cousins in Sumatra, Bangladesh and Florida. The vegetation had the pallid look of the grass under a stone; sun-starved and sodden.

The road began to rise up out of the Delta in a long slow arc over the bridge that leads into the city of New Orleans. We were driving west, and the sun was cold but fiercely orange, flaming through the dead houses as light from a grinning pumpkin at Halloween. The bridge crested and the city floated before us in the amber light that burned on the flat dead water of the delta, the light that turned everything to rust and embers; the light of winter and of war; the light of disaster.

And then the sun fell behind the horizon and a blue twilight rose like smoke. The houses on either side were whole now and occupied; with the happy light of dinnertime streaming through windows, through curtains and glass. We took an exit from the highway downtown, where sombre office blocks make deep trenches of shadow that the sun rarely penetrates. But among the hard-shouldered monoliths also stand fine old Southern belles; still brave in their scrollwork and white paintwork and to one of these; The Pavilion Hotel, we came at six o’ clock.

A Southern Lady, the Pavilion is conscious of standards that are her own and that are scrupulously maintained. The gentility is not faded; the lobby blazes with chandeliers and brass; the ceiling is all twisting rococo foliage and the wallpaper is crimson. Breakfast was not included but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are served with hot chocolate between ten and eleven every night. The guests gather for their comforting childhood snack before setting out in search of more adult divertissments.

It was Friday; the Mardi Gras celebrations had been underway for several days already but the larger krewes and displays are for the weekend, Lundi and Mardi Gras. At midnight on Tuesday, the masks are put off and the city falls silently to the forced contrition of the hangover; to sackcloth and Ash Wednesday.

But that is five nights away still.

Along Canal and Royal Street, bleachers had been erected for city dignitaries and those who like to watch the parades from a higher point of vantage. On Friday night, they stood mostly empty. Small groups of people stood about in the streets, watched over by indifferent police. Mobile restaurants selling po’-boys, corn-dogs, ice-cream and cotton candy stood at the junctions, generators roaring. Giant stadium lights stared whitely down on the entire scene. The city was chilly and there was a slightly pointless atmosphere about, of nothing left to do but wait for the signal to begin.

For those who don’t know, the New Orleans Mardi Gras is dominated by krewes; organized groups small and large who work on their costumes and themed floats all year round. Some krewes are small neighborhood affairs, others are lavishly funded and mounted; super-krewes that enjoy corporate sponsorship and have as their grand-marshal some reigning celebrity of film or television. Many have names drawn from the mists of Classical mythology; Orpheus, Endymion, Bacchus and Morpheus. The decorated floats, accompanied by school-bands, military parades and cheerleaders, sail down through the neighborhoods towards the Financial District and the French Quarter. “Throw me something, Mister!” is the constant scream of the crowds but it is only after dark on Bourbon Street that young men and women yank up their shirts, flaunting breasts, bellies and toned abdominal muscles in return for some gaudy trinket. In the neighborhoods; the mood is of a County Fair, with families setting up deck-chairs and windbreakers and the lines of step-ladders from which small children can watch the show while their fathers crack open can after can of beer fished from loaded plastic coolers. Wizened grandparents, swaddled in heavy cardigans, peer from the safety of front halls and stoops. I had to keep moving; people don’t like people to spend too long standing in front of their little darlings as they beg for beads in spots that their parents regard as their private stake-hold.

The beads thing has really gotten out of hand. One hardly needs to make any effort at all; just stand in street long enough and as along as your head isn’t too large, you’ll be festooned with strings of them after a half-hour. The smaller beads are regarded as practically worthless and usually end up hanging from trees and overhead wires. What people really shriek for are the large heavy ones or the beads particular to each krewe, with their commemorative medallions. Floats also routinely distribute stamped metal doubloons, stuffed toys and small noisy musical instruments. Paying attention to what’s going on around you is good idea; sometimes a krewe-member can become overly generous and launch a sack of beads, unopened, into the crowd. Being clonked on the head by a kilo of plastic is not an experience easily forgotten and there were stories of near-injury and nasty shocks. After a few hours, most people have a huge collar of glittering junk piled up around their necks like Mister T and have to start discarding the surplus. By the small hours, the gutters are clogged with silver, green, gold, scarlet and purple trash that you crunch through to get across town.

Before Hurricane Katrina, an effort was being made, Giuliani-style, to clamp down on the carnival-esque excesses of Mardi Gras. Extra police were being deployed under orders, not only to stop robberies and assaults but to regulate public drinking and indecent exposure. After the disaster, the situation is even more frantic. The Hurricane blew away enormous amounts of paperwork; entire criminal records were lost as the jails emptied. Of the thousands of people displaced; the ones who stayed away were the ones with families to protect. In the streets, a common and poignant scene is of two people reunited in their old neighborhood. Two years ago, this was their home; now they are just visitors. They embrace and slap each others’ backs and ruefully exchange details of the places where they live and work today. “Man, I’m in L.A. now. Where you at?” “Boulder, Colorado; can you even believe it?” His friend replies with a disbelieving shake of the head. Boulder City is infamously Christian-conservative; a world away from New Orleans, with its Catholic churches, strip-joints and dives.

In one such dive; part-liquor-store, part smoke-shop, part-speakeasy, an Asian shopkeeper handed out smokes and half-pints of bourbon to a predominantly black clientele. A drunken couple bawled abuse at each other through a thick fug of cigarette smoke. A man lay insensible in the corner, attached to his dog by a piece of string. I received the impression that I was under wary surveillance. A man queuing at the counter told me that because I am white, people assumed that I am a policeman. I assured him that I was not and he began talking casually about the situation in the city since the hurricane. Half the houses in the city may be vacant and the future of the city may be entirely in doubt, but the cost of living is rising rapidly and the contractors are moving in. There is a bad element loose on the streets and the murder rate is the highest it’s been for a while. There are a lot of police about but the feeling is still chaotic and morose, with the need to attract visitors outweighing pettier concerns about public decency and alcohol. When the federal compensation cheques arrived, some people got little in comparison with what they had lost; others received more money that they had ever seen before. There’s a mordant optimism in everything he said, with hope and fatalism mixed in equal measure. Things will go on, he supposed; what’s the alternative?

The alternative is the sort of defeat that Americans are conditioned to believe impossible; the absolute end and destruction of an American city. About the catastrophe, an atmosphere of unbelief still lingers. The images of huddled crowds of terrified people crouching on rooftops and rounded up in the grim concentration camp of the superdome are an ugly dream. Some people choose to protect themselves from it by apportioning blame; trying to characterize the people of New Orleans as bringing disaster upon themselves, as being inherently corrupt, disorganized and chaotic. There is an inescapably racist undertone to this frame of mind, together with a religious smugness. New Orleans was Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah; New Orleans was Catholic; New Orleans was full of blacks and homosexuals and French-speakers. New Orleans was not America. America is still safe.