A shotgun wedding

Any momentary hesitation I had about signing the marriage licence was dispelled when the registrar pulled a gun on me.

Pam had already appended her flourish, and now it was my turn. As I stood there in the registry office in the sleepy little Puerto Rican coastal town of Dorado, a cheap plastic ballpoint pen in my right hand as I prepared to take one of the most important decisions of my life, I must have paused for the merest fraction of a nanosecond.

The woman ducked beneath the counter behind her glass screen for a moment, and reemerged brandishing a pistol. "Sign it now," she snapped, gesturing impatiently at the blank space on the piece of paper.

It took a moment for me to notice the huge grin on her face, another to spot that the gun was made of plastic.


We'd already had the blood tests required of anyone planning to marry in Puerto Rico, and were relieved to find that neither of us had gonorrhea or chlamydia. How romantic. We'd shuttled back and forth between various government offices, nerves fraying in the tropical heat, dispensing substantial sums of money to substantial numbers of people.

As I stared down the barrel of the gun, I had another of what I call my Moments, when I think: is this real? how did I get here? I've had a lot of those in the past few years.

Bureaucracy aside, it was a thoroughly happy and wholly unforgettable week. We rented a house with a pool on this beautiful island and invited a small selection of our nearest and dearest to share our wedding with us. Here they all are.




From left to right, they are Pam's daughter Dana and her son Rowan. Then there's my friend Bill, who I'll tell you more about in a moment. Behind him is my brother-in-law Richard and his son Alfie. Pam is standing on the doorstep with her two-month-old granddaughter Arden. Next come my sister Jacqui, Bill's wife Daff, and Dana's husband Scott.

Bill was a secondhand book dealer until a few years ago, but in a dramatic midlife career change he became a Church of England priest. He was kind enough to conduct the marriage ceremony for us, cheerfully tolerant of my lack of religious belief.

I met Bill at university thirty years ago, where I formed a Scrabble club and he was one of the first members. Since then, our every encounter has been accompanied by the rattle of plastic tiles.

I suspect that for him the highlight of the week was not presiding over his friends' marriage, not the lush, mountainous scenery, not the convivial company or generous quantities of Caribbean rum, but the poolside game on Sunday, our wedding day.

He scored an extraordinary personal best of 205 points in one go, spread across two triple word scores and with a fifty-point bonus for getting rid of all his letters. He played crappily. No, sorry, he played CRAPPILY, off my LATRINE.



And so to the wedding itself. We held it on a quiet little stretch of wave-lapped, palm-fringed sand decked with long strings of beach morning glory, candles and coconut shells. Pam made her entrance from several hundred yards away and gingerly picked her way across a stream in her long coral-coloured dress before she reached us.

The only thing missing was sunshine: a tropical depression was brewing, and there was drizzle in the air. But the brightness to the west could have passed for a sunset, and the rain obligingly held off until the end of our short, simple ceremony; next day, the island suffered major flooding.

Here's some pictures. I thought Pam looked wonderful. I don't have any of both of us yet, because I took them, but as soon as someone sends me some I'll put them on here.

New Orleans has by far the most poetic street names of any city in North America, many of them bespeaking the high-minded ideals of the nineteenth century.

I've already mentioned Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-i-TOO-lus, sometimes shortened to "Chop"), named after an extinct Indian tribe.

And then there's Desire, as in A Streetcar Named. There's Elysian Fields, Chartres ("Charders"), Royal, Burgundy ("BurGUNdy") and Frenchmen, all within five blocks from here. There's Prytania, Chef Menteur, Mardi Gras, Cucullu, Fleur de Lis, Annunciation, Manhattan, Stumpf.

There's a street for each of the Muses: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene,
Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.

I even quite like the name of our own street, Spain. I have an apartment in Tenerife (which I'm actually trying to sell at the moment - anyone interested?), so I can say I have a place in Spain and a place on Spain.

This is almost as good an address as Gay Close in northwest London, where I used to rather shamefacedly reside - in fact, given the demographics of the Marigny district where we now live, Gay Close would be a great name for a new street here.

But it occurred to me the other night, when I took these pictures while out riding my bike, that the honours for best-named set of intersections must surely go to New Orleans Street. I'm sure this was deliberate on the part of the person or persons responsible for choosing street names all those years ago (what a great job! how do you apply? what qualifications do you need?).

Apart from Humanity, the names of the thoroughfares which cross New Orleans Street include Benefit, Treasure, Abundance, Agriculture, Industry, Hope, and Law. And this one.

New Orleans

We got home on Saturday night, weary from our 400-mile journey and not sure what to expect.

There was very little hurricane damage in evidence, and the main victims were the trees, huge numbers of which had blown over or lost branches. One big bough had flattened half of our lovingly tended garden, but things grow so quickly here that we'll be back to normal in a month or so - unlike the thousands of Cubans and Haitians with homes and livelihoods dashed to pieces by Gustav and Ike.

It's also going to be a busy few weeks for the dustmen or garbage collectors or whatever you want to call them, because the accepted way of dealing with fallen trees is to stick them in your bin for collection.

And we're now out of the cone for Ike, meaning that if it continues on its current track, the good citizens of Corpus Christi, Texas will bear the brunt of this weekend's visitation.

On Sunday, I went for a bike ride round the Lower Ninth Ward, which Katrina wiped off the map. It was the first time I'd been there since November, but unlike so much of New Orleans, little had changed; it was as desolate as ever. Most of the houses in this once bustling and mostly black district had been razed to their concrete foundations; others had been smothered by a blanket of weeds.

Here and there people had rebuilt, with whimsical details like fountains and garden gnomes creating an illusion of normality.

I couldn't live here, I thought; it wouldn't matter how picturesque the house, it would be like living in a cemetery, constantly surrounded by absence: silent, empty streets, roofless houses, the ghostly voices of long-departed neighbours blowing in the wind.

But then I turned the corner into Tennessee Street, and suddenly, even on this hot, somnolent Sunday afternoon, it was a hive of activity.

I'd stumbled on actor Brad Pitt's Make it Right project, a community of 150 low-cost, sustainable houses being built right in the shadow of the Industrial Canal levee which breached during Katrina.

Each of these stunning creations, which Pitt commissioned from leading architects, will house a displaced family from the Lower Ninth. Each is raised well above ground level so that when the floods return, as they will sooner or later (thanks to Gustav, they almost did last weekend), they'll suffer the minimum of damage. And each, while firmly rooted in the southern architectural tradition, is very much a product of the twenty-first century.

I coveted all of the houses, none of which will cost more than $175,000, but sadly I'm not a part of the project's target market.

Make it Right is an example of an individual putting his money where his mouth is, and taking direct action to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. In a city where one third of the houses are still uninhabitable, he's planted a few green shoots in a huge, muddy brown expanse of alluvial nothingness - but like I said, New Orleans is fertile ground, so let's hope they take root and flourish.

Shreveport

There's a simple way of finding out whether your electricity supply has been restored when you evacuate for a hurricane: leave your answering machine on, and call at regular intervals until it responds. We don't have one, but I phoned the neighbours today and they said the power had just come back on, so we're leaving for home tomorrow. The house is undamaged, apparently, but there's a lot of debris lying around.

Gustav has been a wonderful demonstration of the power of the internet. I've been keeping a close watch on www.nola.com, the website of our excellent local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. They've been publishing every day throughout the storm and giving the paper away as a PDF, and they also have local forums for every district of New Orleans, mostly populated with hundreds of messages from evacuees asking whether the power has been restored on their particular block.

One woman on our local Marigny-Bywater forum stayed at home during the evacuation and invited people to send her their addresses, so that she could go and photograph their houses to provide reassurance that they hadn't blown away.

I'm immensely grateful to Bill, Marnie and Garett for putting us up in such comfort for over a week. The local TV stations have been showing footage of the alternative, the hurricane shelters in Shreveport, which makes for pretty grim viewing. Visitors are greeted with the stench of urine and vomit, and showering facilities have been woefully short - a source of considerable local controversy.

Several people were arrested after a fight broke out in one shelter, and some inmates have been demonstrating against the unpleasant conditions. I have some sympathy with their plight, but 96 percent of respondents to a local TV survey thought the refugees were ungrateful whiners who shouldn't come here if they didn't like it.

There's a small but significant chance that we'll be back in Shreveport in the not too distant future. Hurricane Ike, the next but one in a queue of tropical disturbances backed up across the Atlantic, could be heading for the Gulf of Mexico.

Shreveport

This is three-and-a-half-year-old Garett, my second cousin-in-law.

He's looking miserable because Gustav, now downgraded to a tropical storm, is passing overhead. It's been raining solidly for 24 hours so he can't play outside, and his back garden is fast turning into a lake - they're forecasting ten inches in two days.

Also, he has to put up with me and Pam till Friday when Ray Nagin, New Orleans' much-loved mayor, says we can go home.

Shreveport, LA

It's been another surreal day.

The sun has been shining, as usual, and we've been doing all the things a family does on a Sunday at home: reading the papers, playing board games, swimming in the communal pool across the street. I went for a run, but it was too hot and I ended up walking for much of the way.

The Weather Channel has been glowering at us all day from the corner of the room, an ever-present reminder of what's happening to our home town. I wondered irreverently whether they'd called all their advertisers and said sorry, we're having a major weather event and our audience figures have skyrocketed, so we're doubling our rates.

This is when the channel truly comes into its own, with the country's top meteorologists enlightening us about the finer points of surface water temperatures, storm surges and tornadic activity. But it all seemed so abstract. I found it hard to relate to all these fancy graphics and colour-enhanced satellite images, until about 7 this evening.

Gustav's wispy outer fringes had just started to stalk New Orleans, and the reporter was standing in a very familiar location: Canal Street, the city's slightly down-at-heel main shopping street. With 95 percent of the population gone, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew in force, it was eerily deserted.

In the background, rain-lashed traffic lights cycled pointlessly from red to green and back again. The long rows of stately date palms, planted to cheer the place up after Katrina, were already straining at their hurricane tethers.

A tornado warning was in progress, which means that tornadoes have actually been spotted in the vicinity. And already, long before the full fury of the storm erupted, the reporter was lost for words and struggling to stand upright.

I'm glad we're well out of it, and I know we've made the right decision, but part of me wishes I could experience Gustav at first hand. Pam's best friend Toni is staying, together with many of her friendly and supportive neighbours, and at least one person on our block has decided not to evacuate. When we go home, all we'll see is the destruction, not the cataclysm that wrought it.

Another thing I'm very aware of is our good fortune in having relatives with whom to take refuge. The storm has displaced some 1.9 million people, many of whom will end up on makeshift dormitory beds in shelters just miles from here, surrounded by noisy, anxious and sleepless strangers.

Shreveport, Louisiana

Storm, model, cone, voluntary, mandatory, contraflow: the language of hurricanes takes innocuous-looking everyday words and endows them overnight with new and sinister significance. Next day, they're on everyone's lips.

Everyone here is an amateur hurricane expert, though they don't call them hurricanes: they're storms. Everyone has the National Hurricane Center bookmarked on their computer. Everyone knows that a model is one of up to twenty lines on a map showing a storm's possible track, calculated by supercomputers crunching trillions of numbers every second.

The lines form an inverted cone spreading out from a storm's current location and showing the area which it could hit: in the case of Gustav, anywhere from southwest Texas to the Florida panhandle.

When things start to look especially grim, the authorities will declare first a voluntary evacuation - we strongly suggest you get out now - and then a mandatory one, meaning if you don't get out now, you're on your own, and if we catch you in the street, we may arrest you.

They'll also introduce a contraflow system on major highways out of cities like New Orleans so that all lanes flow inland towards safety. Hurricanes are dependent on warm water for their energy, so much of their force is spent after they hit land.

It's not just words that acquire special meanings: so do the numbers from 1 to 5.

If the storm is a category 1 or 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of up to 110 mph, people will consider battening down the hatches and sitting it out. If it's a 3, 4 or 5 and you have any sense, you'll evacuate.

If you return home a few days later after a false alarm - the storm hit some other poor unfortunate further down the coast, or it was only a 1 instead of the forecast 5 - no one will laugh at you. Better safe than sorry.

Katrina was a 5, but slowed to a 3 by the time she made landfall - it was the storm surge and poorly engineered levees that made her the most destructive hurricane in US history. Gustav is already a 4, and still has a thousand miles of open water from which to suck up fuel.

Pam and I left on Friday in the car which we'd conveniently and coincidentally bought only a week earlier; otherwise we'd have had to wait for one of the 700 buses that ferry people out of the city to shelters inland. As I write this on Saturday morning, the lines at the main bus terminal are already more than a mile long.

It was a beautifully, sunny, hot day, which made it hard to summon a sense of urgency. We emptied the fridge (if Gustav hits, the city will almost certainly be without power), closed the shutters and put away objects like flowerpots and dustbins that could cause damage if they blew around. But we made the hopefully realistic assumption that there wouldn't be any serious flooding: our house is in the 20% of the city that didn't flood during Katrina.

Outside was a flurry of activity as the neighbours loaded their cars with food, water, pet carriers and elderly relatives. The traffic on the interstate was stop-go, stop-go for the first hour and a half - it's also Labor Day weekend - but at least it wasn't gridlock. Pam once took thirteen hours just to travel the seventy miles to the nearest big city, Baton Rouge, during an evacuation.

After that, the 340-mile drive to Shreveport was relatively painless, and we're now staying with Pam's cousin Bill and his family. It's very strange not knowing whether we'll be returning home some time later next week (Gustav is expected to show up early on Tuesday morning) or remaining for much longer. I hope we don't outstay our welcome.

In an ironic coincidence, Friday was also the third anniversary of Katrina, and as a result we received an unexpected visit just before we left.

My sister Jacqui lives in Florida, and was the only British journalist in New Orleans on that fateful day in August 2005. She spent weeks here covering the aftermath and subsequent anniversaries, and has a deep affection for the city.

Recently, on a whim, she called the state coroner and asked whether there were still any unclaimed and unidentified bodies left over.

"Funny you should ask," he said. "It's three years now, and there are still eighty left. Three of them were babies. I was thinking I'd hold a jazz funeral to lay them all to rest." So Jacqui came to cover this moving story for several UK papers: here's one of her pieces.