Bursting Bubbles

It's not that I wasn't looking forward to spending fourteen straight hours with my daughter. It's just that I would have preferred it not be in a car. At least, I thought, as we make our way south, we will leave the frigid temperatures behind us.

Not so much. By the time we got to Mississippi, the temperature had only inched up to 24. We chuckled at the radio warnings about treacherous black ice. Go out only if you absolutely have to, they drawled. We stopped chuckling when we hit the first of many patches of slick, hardened mud, lurking beneath underpasses, where the sun don't shine. Emergency vehicles lined the road, tracing skid marks to cars littering the bluffs in varying degrees of about face. Mississippi was desolate, daunting, and cold. We decided to keep going. By the time we reached New Orleans, around midnight, we barely noticed that the temperature was still below freezing.

Civilization, at least I thought, as we crossed Lake Pontchartrain toward the finish line. I figured I would need some warmer clothes, so I asked my daughter which department store we should visit in the morning. There are no department stores in Louisiana, she told me.

She was clearly delirious, maybe forgot she was no longer abroad. I checked with Siri: Department stores in Louisiana. I smiled smugly as I waited for her to give me directions to the nearest Bloomingdales. She worked on it for a while.

Walmart. Walmart. Walmart. That's what she came up with, for the entire state.

In all my visits to New Orleans, I've always thought of it as a bit, well, different, but I suppose I had never realized the extent of the divide. There's a McDonald's on the Champs Elysees

, for goodness sake, but no Bloomingdales in the bayou? How did globalization go so awry, so close to home?

I had lots of time to think on that fourteen hour drive, fourteen hours in which the landscape changed about as little as the weather. But as we sped south, I was acutely aware that somewhere, tucked away at a safe distance from the highway, were small towns where people live lives quite different from mine. Not just because a rare cold snap wreaks havoc, not even just because there's no Bloomingdale's. Mostly because there's so much space, and so few people and buildings to fill it up.

I was reminded, on my drive south, about the bubble I live in, and all the other bubbles out there. We all tend to go out only if we absolutely have to.