Yep, another beautiful day in New Orleans, as evidenced by the sky in this picture. I decided to take an easy ride today, as I’m a little sore from the past week of near-constant riding. After work I took Jack down to the Marigny to do a little writing at the coffee shop. Then we tooled over to a bar for the infamous Tater Tachos (nachos, but with tater tots instead of chips) and a beer. I was going to head home, but as the sun started to wane, just a little bit, it was a touch cooler and I decided to zip up the St. Claude bike lane over to the Lower Ninth. Thankful for gears, I raced up the levee incline only to be stopped by the safety arm thing-y as the bridge was raised to let some boat traffic through. I stood there for about ten minutes, waiting. A bus idled noisily behind me, two men sat in their SUV next to me–we exchanged friendly nods–and kids and dogs and people ran up and down the levee banks. This levee didn’t hold after Katrina, and right over this bridge was completely flooded. But today it was just a levee and a bridge, and two large boats passed under it, one flying LSU flags at high mast. The Mississippi is an incredibly active waterway, but it’s easy to forget that since so often the river, though largely responsible for the geography, economy, and politics of this place, is most often kept out of sight. That, of course, is usually how it is with structures of all sorts. The scaffolding behind life as we live it is invisible, and we assume the way life is organized right now is the way it has to be. After taking this picture–that’s my shadow, with camera and bike–I got impatient, tired of waiting, ready to go back to forgetting the action on the river, so I turned around and rode home.