In Greek mythology, Elysian Fields was the final destination of good souls after death. The Fields were a land of song and sunshine where the air was sweet and cool. The good souls existed there in the flowery meadows for eternity.

In New Orleans, Elysian Fields is the name of one of the hundreds of boulevards, this one stretching from the Mississippi River, alongside the back of the French Quarter, all the way north to Lake Pontchartrain. A block from where it begins by the river sits the French Market. A couple of blocks north and one block west on Frenchman Street lies one of our favorite restaurants, the Praline Connection, where you can get a plate of crowder peas and turnip greens, fried chicken or meat loaf or breaded pork chops, then top it off with a slice of sweet potato pie with praline sauce, all for less than ten dollars. It’s as New Orleansy as they come.

A block or two further up Elysian Fields sits the Baptist Friendship House, where NAMB missionary Kay Bennett and her staff do an incredible job of ministering to troubled women and needy children of this section of the city. These days, while the neighborhood lies mostly vacant, the Friendship House is hosting volunteer church teams from Oklahoma. Gradually, the homes in the area show signs of returning to life. They have electricity, but the last I heard, no phone service.

As you get closer to Interstate 10, the signs of the floodwaters that followed Katrina are everywhere, the high water marks on the sides of houses and businesses, most still lying vacant. In the area around Interstate 610, and north to the lake, it’s a dead zone. The yard plants are dried and dead, businesses untouched, the houses still adorned by their National Guard insignia from the first days when searchers would check the homes for survivors and spray the results on the outsides or roofs.

The traffic lights are still out. It’s a gentleman’s game at the four-way stop signs with a dozen vehicles lined up behind you and that many staring at you from each direction. Elysian Fields is a wide street, with six lanes in places, and no one is choreographing the movements through these cross streets. You pull up, look around, wait, and go forward, hoping for the best.

Just north of Interstate 610 sits our ill-fated Elysian Fields Avenue Baptist Church, waiting patiently for the demolition teams. The few members who have returned are meeting weekly in the home of Dr. Bob and Linda Jackson, a block away. The last time I was there, the home was gutted and stripped to the bare essentials. They had brought in folding chairs and were making do. When Pastor Ken Taylor can’t make it down from evacuation-land (aka Lynn, Alabama), Dr. Jimmy Dukes preaches. My understanding is they plan to rebuild after their ruined structures are removed. This time, no doubt, something smaller and more functional for their purposes.

I noticed Thursday morning something I had not seen. Workers driving big machines were bull-dozing my favorite lunch place, the Wendy’s located halfway between I-610 and the lake. Across the street, truckers were beginning to haul off the pile of lumber and trash that used to be Ferrara’s Supermarket. “Founded in 1906” the sign on the side of the grocery used to say. In the afternoon, both lots were as clear as though nothing had ever occupied those spaces.

In the average residential block there will be one FEMA trailer in a driveway. Most of the homes sit vacant, some with no windows and doors either open or removed, standing gaunt and eerie as though the looters took everything of every house. Here and there in front of a home, a pile of rubbish waits on the sidewalk, indicating that someone has gutted out the house with plans to restore. Still no electricity anywhere on the street as far as I could tell. I’ve seen two homes in the area that were stripped to the bare bones, then raised several feet by hydraulic jacks, and workers were building a foundation underneath. The next hurricane and flood, these folks plan to take a pass.

Plenty of traffic up and down Elysian Fields. Construction trucks of all sizes, most bearing out of state plates. College students rushing to UNO classes they should have started for a half hour ago, barely slowing down at the four-way stops and scaring or enraging the other drivers. Debris along the streets, blown from large trucks that were supposed to secure their loads before starting for the landfills.

At the intersection of Gentilly Boulevard, cater-cornered, two lunch trucks are working out of parking lots. A man with a sign “Eat Here” runs in and out of traffic every time the light changes to red, trying to direct attention to his van. The fare seems to be mostly hot dogs and hamburgers and soft drinks.

A new Popeye’s restaurant, only half-built when Katrina landed August 29 and untouched since, sits on a knoll where the owners had thoughtfully planned to protect it from stormwaters. Halfway up the glass doors, the highwater marks indicate that even at that level, the little restaurant took in three or four feet. The owners must be shaking their heads in bewilderment.

As you approach Lakeshore Drive, the culmination of Elysian Fields, you are facing what used to be the old Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park. Roller coasters, ferris wheels, sandy beaches, and lake swimming drew thousands of kids and their dates all summer long for decades. When the lake became too polluted for swimming, the Orleans Parish Levee Board, owners of all this property, closed the park down. These days, large shiny research and development businesses occupy the land. However, a single memento of the past stares you in the face as you come to the roundabout at the end of Elysian Fields, something I find completely captivating.

It’s a Civil War lighthouse. Still standing there where it was erected in another age, built of stone and metal, and originally situated 3,000 feet into Lake Pontchartrain. In the 1930s when the authorities decided to create a new residential area on the north side of New Orleans, they built the sea wall 3,500 feet out into the lake, then pumped sand behind it, creating all the land northward of Robert E. Lee Boulevard. They left the lighthouse, and it sits there as it did, but with one big exception. It’s no longer head and shoulders above everything around it. Half its height lies buried; what you see is only from the waist upward. The last time I took visitors up close to check out the lighthouse, a guard asked us to leave. Something about the area around it being unstable and they’re trying to protect it.

Turn right on the frontage road that runs alongside Lakeshore Drive and drive slowly. The Episcopal Church immediately to your right runs a day care, and young mothers with toddlers are in and out all day long. The large structure next to it did not exist August 29; it’s some sort of pre-fab site for either the Corp of Engineers or a construction firm, with vehicles and trailers everywhere. Just before you arrive at our offices, sits the state headquarters for the Lutheran Church in a lovely gray, modern one-story building. Oddly, it’s still boarded up and clearly untouched since the storm. I’ve not seen a single car in front of the offices.

The last structure on this frontage road is the Baptist Center. Our offices, built of drab brown brick in the late 1960s. The part of the building to your right was the Baptist Student Center at the University of New Orleans for forty years, until Keith Cating decided last year he wanted to get his directors out of the buildings and into the student centers. He gave them lap-tops and said, “Here is your office.” Mostly that part of the building sits vacant now. Word of Life Mission used to meet there on Sundays, but Pastor Cedric Murphy’s little flock was scattered to the winds and the church exists no longer.

On Saturday before Easter, which would be April 15, one of our student workers will be bringing international collegians from Tulane to our center for a time of fellowship and food, providing an occasion to explain the significance of Easter to them. Then, on Sunday morning, April 23, at 10 am, Pastor David Arceneaux and any members of Gentilly Baptist Church he can assemble will meet in the center. They will worship, have lunch, and conduct a business meeting in which they try to make a decision on what to do for the future.

We’re in our associational offices only from 10 to 2 pm each day. We have power, but no phones and no internet. Any phoning and e-mailing has to be done from home. Since we’re so close to UNO, we’ve been told by the phone company that this area has priority and we should get service by May 1. Earlier, they had said March 1.

On a typical day, I get home in the middle of the afternoon and go immediately to my computer. The e-mails have stacked up and I write for this website. Sometimes, it’s eight o’clock when I shut it down.

To this day, I get cell phone calls and e-mails on my home computer from people who are almost upset with us. “I’ve left all kinds of messages at your office and no one calls me back.” Or, “How come you don’t answer the e-mails I send you.”

I force a little smile and say something like, “Well, you see. We had this little hurricane down here.”