09:13 AM EDT on Tuesday, August 30, 2005

You'd never see this in Rhode Island.

Thousands of cars, barely moving for hours on end on the interstate, and not a single one swerves into the breakdown lane to go zooming past.

Anyone who commutes into Providence gets passed by some speedster in the breakdown lane a half-dozen times on an average day.

But, on a day when most of the residents of New Orleans were evacuating the city as Hurricane Katrina came storming in from the Gulf of Mexico, the scene on the highway -- which I'd feared might make Saturday night on raucous Bourbon Street seem like a decorous evening at the public library -- couldn't have been more calm and orderly.

In the four hours it took my family and me to drive the normally 25-minute trip from downtown past the airport, heading west on Interstate 10 toward Baton Rouge, there was no honking of horns, nothing foul in the way of gestures or language to be seen or heard, nobody was being cut off. And there was no one in the breakdown lane.

Except, that is, for a few unfortunate folks who'd actually had breakdowns, their vehicles overheating in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of an exodus that some in the city had feared might resemble the final days of the fall of Saigon.

I'd never been so happy to leave New Orleans.

Of course, prior to Sunday, I'd never wanted to leave New Orleans. Why would I? The food, the music, the nightlife, the architecture, the history, the laissez les bon temps rouler -- let the good times roll -- approach to life in the Big Easy, charmed and delighted me on my first visit 32 years ago, and has continued to do so in numerous trips since then.

I was in New Orleans over the weekend with my wife to settle our older son, James, at Tulane University. As it turned out, he so far has spent more time at Jackson State than on Tulane's campus, uptown in the Garden District.

Freshman orientation had barely begun Saturday morning when it was announced that all activities would cease at 1 p.m. Just a few hours after moving into his dorm room, James was on a bus on his way to Jackson, Miss., with about 700 other freshmen who were going to ride out the storm there while camping in the school gym, hoping to be back on their own campus by tomorrow.

At that point, I'd tried to reschedule the flight my wife and younger son, Ben, and I were supposed to take yesterday, but nothing was available out of Louis Armstrong Airport on Sunday.

So, at 4 o'clock Sunday morning, we checked out of our hotel on Canal Street, on the edge of the French Quarter, to begin what we thought would be no more than an eight-hour ride to Houston, where I'd managed to find a flight to Providence that afternoon.

We were fortunate to have a rental car. Many other visitors didn't, and so were stranded in the city when flights were canceled. There was no question that it was time to leave. Residents of the Big Easy, living, as they do, below sea level between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, long have been expecting the Big One -- the hurricane that would inundate the city -- and the forecasts certainly made it sound as if Katrina would be it.

By 7:30, however, instead of being well on our way to the Houston airport, we'd barely gotten past the New Orleans airport, having spent hours stuck in traffic on I-10, not moving for minutes at a time.

So-called "contra" lanes had been set up west of the airport -- every lane on both sides of the highway was used to get people out of the city -- but, in order to reach those lanes from the east, you had to wait in what seemed like an endless line.

But people did.

They were frustrated. And probably a little worried. But they were patient.

Long before the sun came up, it dawned on us that we were never going to get to Houston in time. So, when we finally got west of the soon-to-be-overflowing Lake Pontchartain, we decided to head north to Memphis. That turned out to be for the best, because, by then, the Tulane students staying at Jackson State had been told there was no way they could expect to return to campus before Sept. 7.

We picked up our older son in Jackson, and flew home yesterday morning.

He can't wait to get back to New Orleans. And neither can I.

There's never been a better reason to sip a hurricane in the French Quarter and toast the resiliency of one of the world's great cities.