The Moon Blooms

Anna Pigeon: An Angel of Wrath in Minnesota's Rugged Iron Range

A dozen years ago, while I held down the business desk at a nearby newspaper, my wife and fellow Nevada Barr fan traveled to that inimitable bookstore near the old Oxford, Mississippi, courthouse – Square Books – to hear a reading of Barr's latest mystery and to secure a signed copy of the book. Upon reaching Nevada's table, Joy told her about my own tilting at literary windmills in search of an agent and publisher, and Nevada – proffering her father's best advice that kept her going at a similar stage in her career – signed our copy with the sagacious line, "Keep wearin' the bastards down! – Nevada Barr."

Barr and her resourceful National Park Service ranger/protagonist Anna Pigeon have been doing precisely that to villains for decades now. The formula for Barr's mystery series succeeds because it is, in fact, no rote formula at all. Oh, there's a pattern, to be sure. The series is rooted in the spectacular scenery of natural U.S. wonders and flames to life in the discerning eye of a naturalist author, who herself served a long tenure in the U.S. Park Services and is a one-time theater actress with a great ear for the dramatic.

One stays with certain authors because of such talent – and for their tenacity, their propinquity to the reader's heart, and their ability to tell a tale well. So it is with Nevada Barr, whom I discovered a generation ago with A Superior Death and, bracktracking to the beginning, Track of the Cat. Protagonist Pigeon, then and now, is tough as nails but graceful and erudite, too. She's a stunning combination, particularly when set against the backdrop of the nation's most beautiful but rugged territory.

In Destroyer Angel, Piegon joins two friends and their daughters on a vacation to the remote Iron Range territory of northern Minnesota. Anna's desire to take a peaceable solo canoe ride pays dividends when the rest of her party is taken hostage by a motley crew of street criminals led by a towering, intelligent man known only as "The Dude." There's no Coen brothers romp here, but a ransom thriller ensues, with The Dude mushing his retinue of hostages while Anna, unknown to the kidnappers, stalks them through the Minnesota woods. One of Anna's hostage friends – thirtysomething Leah Hendricks – is a brilliant inventor of recreational gear and possessor of a fortune The Dude and his associates covet. There's a paraplegic female friend of Anna's on the trip, Heath; a pair of plucky, petulant teens – Katie and Elizabeth; and a dog named for the Looney Tunes Wile E. Coyote character. By Page 290, with Leah and Katie being held elsewhere by The Dude, Barr describes the beleaguered band this way: "Between them, Anna, Elizabeth, Heath, and Wily had five good arms, seven good legs, one set of pointy teeth, a sharp-edged chunk of twisted aluminum, and a clock." We don't learn the full identity of The Dude until Page 300, and that's the prime carrot Barr dangles before the reader in what likely is the most intensely physical, brutal case of Anna Pigeon's career.

The hunt is the thing here. And with it, the violence can be unrelenting, the humor dark and the observations scatalogical. I offer my four-star rating with some reservations for those reasons, and this reality: You'll enjoy less of the scenery and the park culture here than is typical for an Anna Pigeon novel. (For a cracking good portrayal of the physical facets of the Iron Range and its fascinating Native American culture, see William Kent Krueger's outstanding mystery, The Vermilion Drift.)

There's no denying the palpable suspense in Destroyer Angel – which crackles at the close with a brilliant use of flora suggested by the title – and Anna Pigeon never worked so hard to wear the bastards down. She's tracking an existential code here, one that pits woman against nature, and women against the depravity of mankind. It's a code more civil than Thelma & Louise and less morally complex than Deliverance. Still, it's Anna Piegon's deliverance, and we sit back, enthralled, and drink in the drama.

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Tourism Zeal Threatens to Trample Iconic New Orleans Structure

They're cooking up a big demolition party in New Orleans to eradicate one of the city's iconic structures: No need to waste one's weary little gray cells on this building, the story line goes, it's just a humdrum piece of mid-20th century architecture whose date with the wrecking ball has come.

Previous developers have failed to revive the 33-story office tower at the foot of Canal Street on the Mississippi River. And while lip service is being paid to two proposals to renovate the building, the mayor's money is on a third option that would demolish the city's one-time World Trade Center for an ersatz Eiffel Tower, an artificial St. Louis arch, an ineffably New Orleans-esque symbol of statutory grace. See Exhibit 3 here.

Exhibit 3 is an effort to build something tourist-worthy for the New Orleans tricentennial, which looms just around the corner in 2018. I salute the ambition, idealism and civic swing-for-the-fences this plan represents, but it's a hollow knock. Five reasons (and then some) why I hope this never happens:

1) The World Trade Center, which I prefer to call by its historic name -- The International Trade Mart -- is indeed iconic, which is all the more reason to save it rather than scrap it. Heed this passage from Alonzo Ensenat's 1974 history of this place and its purpose:

"One has only to look toward the head of Canal Street, our main and wide thoroughfare, to see a visible monument to New Orleans' internationalism in the towering International Trade Mart building. ... What made New Orleans the natural soil for such consciousness of the worth and importance of international trade? Obviously it was necessity born of its very geographical location. Trade is the lifeblood of New Orleans, and the Mississippi River at its door gave that trade a magic impulse that made New Orleans grow from a humble village on the fringes of the wilderness in the mid-1750s to the modern metropolis it is today."

2) From such noteworthy New Orleans names as Archie Jewell (whose three-minute Toastmaster speech launched the World Trade Center movement in the city), Rudolph Hecht, William Zetzmann, Edward LeBreton, Theodore Brent, Clay Shaw, Hale and Lindy Boggs, deLesseps Morrison, Andrew Higgins, Alton Ochsner, Bud Walther and many more, this trade movement flourished. It was Mrs. Boggs, in fact, who contributed the early mission statement: "Dedicated to world peace, trade and understanding" long before Messrs. Lowe and Costello made their musical marks with a similar credo.

3) Deep into its mission, when the earlier Trade Mart building had been sold to a New York investment group and leased back, the organization began facing financial challenges when sublessees began flocking to finer accommodations in the Central Business District. Led by board President Lloyd Cobb, the group packaged city, state, port and railroad properties in a blighted riverfront area to form the basis of a $17 million tax-exempt bond issue under the city's bonding authority. By pursuing tax-exempt bonds, this nimble public-private partnership figured out a frugal way to bring back tenants in a new building at lease rates lower than competing CBD buildings. The structure was built at-cost by Memphis-based builder Bloomfield & Associates on the condition that Bloomfield receive a 25 percent share of lease proceeds. What a concept! What a public-private partnership concept! What a pre-New Markets Tax Credit concept!

4) The International Trade Mart was christened in conjunction with the 250th birthday of New Orleans on April 30, 1968, amid great civic pride and fanfare. Now, less than 50 years later the plan is to plow it asunder so some silly new sculpture can replace it on the same site for the tricentennial? No, don't do it. Especially considering that ...

5) Quoting Ensenat, "It is a beautiful building, designed by famed architect Edward Stone and now stands as a distinguishing symbol at the entrance to New Orleans harbor, just as Sugar Loaf Mountain does as the entrance to Rio de Janeiro or the Statue of Liberty when entering New York harbor." True, its height has long since been eclipsed by taller CBD towers, and the World Trade Center organization now resides in swankier climes in One Canal Place, but consider, too, that it was one of the International Trade Mart fathers -- Clay Shaw, before history cast him a dreadful curveball -- who successfully lobbied for the iconic Rivergate Convention Center that now is also gone with the wind.

Ironic, isn't it, that those who worked to establish New Orleans as a major trade, convention and tourism capital will now be ignominiously honored with the removal of their legacy? It took terrorists to remove the iconic World Trade Center towers in New York, but even before those towers were a gleam in David Rockefeller's eyes in the 1950s, these proud New Orleanians were making plans to propel the city into a new era of greatness.

The same founders of the World Trade Center movement in New Orleans coined a plausible idea in 1939 to stage a Pan-American Fair in New Orleans in 1942, the 450th anniversary of the landmark Columbus voyage. The leaders, among them Mr. Hecht and Mr. Zetzmann, were lobbying the Louisiana Legislature for $1 million that in theory would be matched by $5 million federal dollars to pull the grand event off. The idea reached as far as Secretary of State Cordell Hull, according to Ensenat, when World War II's ugly head ended the entire idea.

Today, this proposed tricentennial plan feels like little more than heartless hegemony on the part of the current crop of convention leaders, a crass commercialism that drapes itself in a faux public art tribute with little regard for its own significant local history. At the expense of more than $200 million in state funding? Really?

I understand the arguments about the International Trade Mart's unusual shape not lending itself to many contemporary hotel and office floor plans and, hence, the inability to forge a successful private redevelopment of the building so far. But heck, for the kind of money we're looking at spending here, the International Trade Mart could be made to be a Taj Mahal, one even fit for a future New Orleans City Hall. Cannot a public-private partnership today come close, even remotely close, to the wise frugality shown by the group that first built this iconic building?

I like Alan Maclachlan's idea (see comments in The Lens) of a crescent piece of public art. It's perfect, even should it amount to a relatively frugal but spectacular topping of the International Trade Mart with a brilliantly lit crescent as its crown. If the hegemonists must have their way and the structure must be demolished, one would hope that at least the dream of the Pan-American Fair would finally be born as a permanent tribute to the "world peace through trade" idealism these founding trade visionaries sought.

I spoke with a New Orleans CVB leader the other day who, though he admitted a personal preference for seeing the International Trade Mart remain above ground, concedes that Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been lobbying for demolition and a clean slate for some time – and the clean slate crowd seems to be winning. History only matters in New Orleans, it seems, when the pedigree in question can claim Jackson, Lafitte, d'Iberville, Bienville or Napoleon as contemporaries.

Meanwhile, the $5.5 billion-a-year New Orleans tourism drumbeat marches on, crushing significant modern architecture in its path ...

Though it matters little (elsewhere in this debate), on a personal note I recall riding in a yellow school bus with my brown bag of sandwiches and banana on an exciting field trip that led to the Musée Conti Wax Museum, the Cabildo and the International Trade Mart in the very year that the Trade Mart opened. Standing at the observation level of the Trade Mart and staring awestruck at the grandeur of the river and the city, I could never have contemplated anyone at any time wanting this compass-shaped marvel to go away. With the perspective of several more decades, my needle still can't contemplate such a grave end.

In St. Francisville, the Little Way Goes a Long Way

Review: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life / By Rod Dreher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here's the thing I want you to know about Rod Dreher: He evokes a loving but imperfect family in rural Louisiana, a bucolic oasis along the Mississippi River that paradoxically threatens to drown him in his youth, a life-changing experience at the Cathedral de Chartres near Paris, a brush with death on 9/11, a career climb through the corridors of big-city journalism, a spiritual search along orthodox and unorthodox paths, the small miracles of marriage, the burdens and joys of fatherhood, and the crushing saga of a sister who won't survive cancer, a sister who is the cement of this entire memoir devoted to a search for meaning in contemporary life. Dreher evokes all this wonderfully, and through the binding love of his sister for her community, through the community's reciprocal, abounding love for her -- through this crucible of community, tragedy and celebration emerges a perfect book.

Oh, Dreher might have included a bit less of himself, as some have suggested, he might have chased fewer rabbits in his spiritual hunt, he might have made his sister's illness a subtext to grander themes -- but he would have missed the magic of Ruthie Leming's little way, her pathway to a life beautifully lived. Dreher's reportorial zeal in seeking out his schoolteacher sister's character -- from family, students, colleagues and friends -- elevates the story. There's not a lazy bone in this full-bodied, flesh-and-blood examination of what makes families and communities tick.

Though the Dreher home place resides in the unincorporated community of Starhill, the cultural center of this memoir is St. Francisville, the historic river community with deep ties to the antebellum South and avian artist John J. Audubon.

It's a beautiful place of green hills and clay bluffs, one of my favorite places in the world, but it's also a place of incongruities. A generation ago, The New York Times fixed upon St. Francisville and its county-level jurisdiction, West Feliciana Parish, as a gold-digger's dream: 212 men for every 100 women, the best odds for Miss Lonely Heart in the entire nation. Then came the deflation: More than half the men were full-time residents of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the largest prison, geographically, in the U.S. It's a place that's fiercely fought commercial progress of a kind. Though West Feliciana is home to a massive prison and a nuclear power plant, many of the Starhill faithful fought off a mixed-used development recently that would have buoyed the parish's tax base with new housing and retail stores near the foot of the Western Hemisphere's longest cable-stayed bridge, the $409 million John James Audubon Bridge.

From my vantage point 30 miles south in Baton Rouge, such opposition didn't make sense. But a recent visit to St. Francisville reminded my wife and me that Ruthie's little way, writ large across the community, is a thing worth protecting from threats real and perceived. We stayed at our favorite bed & breakfast, K.W. Kennon's Shade Tree Inn, a rustic but luxurious hillside retreat in the same neighborhood where Rod Dreher now lives. At the coffee shop in the town center, we enjoyed a Bird Man Blast and later dined at the Magnolia Cafe, where Baby and the Boomers played a kaleidoscopic mix of George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dwight Yoakum and Van Morrison hits for patrons aged eight months to 82 years.

Upon departing Sunday, we drove down Royal Street and I spied through the open doors of the venerable First United Methodist Church sanctuary a sight of standing bodies singing their final hymn. An iridescent light filled the stained glass behind the altar, where Ruthie Dreher's friends kept an all-night vigil before her 2011 funeral.

As chance would have it, we forgot our reading material at the Shade Tree Inn when we left. After picking up our cat at my mother's house in a neighboring town, we stopped back in St. Francisville. I knocked on the kitchen door of the Shade Tree Inn and K.W. Kennon was reading The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. He'd been planning to buy a copy and had become transfixed by reading ours.

"You know, Rod's a great writer," said K.W., the son of a former Louisiana governor.

Indeed, he is. If I read something grander than this book this year or next, or even in the next decade, I shall consider myself as rich as Ruthie Leming herself.

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