Time is an unusual concept for the human being. We don’t have any senses that directly perceive it. It can’t be seen or felt or tasted or heard. It has to be noticed. And therefore time requires a certain kind of thinking. In his essay Symbolic Representation of Time the noted anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach explains, “We recognize repetition. Drops of water falling from the roof; they are not all the same drop, but different. Yet to recognize them as being different we must first distinguish, and hence define, time-intervals.” A day is accepted as following the previous day because we have noticed and noted the night between. Years and longer periods are denoted by tracking the rise and fall of seasons. The moon helps, too.

It goes relatively unmentioned but one of the firmest demarcations of human progression is the way we’ve dealt with time. Agriculture is time based. Science begins only when we have an appropriate measure for time. The development and transmission of ideas, the organization of people, all of this happens when we can place ourselves within time’s dimension. The built world folds around time, whether it’s the clock tower, bus schedules or that number you called for the atomic clock every time the power went out and you needed to reset your stove. The more sharply we can position ourselves, the more precise our thinking and actions are. Consider meeting someone at sundown versus, say, 7:22. Consider an assembly line where things are put together, oh, whenever they get there. Technology progresses with our ability to accurately subdivide units of time. Processor speed is a good example of this.

And though it’s critical to our existence, our understanding of time is based on systems humans have imposed. Imagine what you’d know of a given day, month or year if all your traditional time marking were stripped away. No watch, no computer, no meetings, no classes, no train departures, no appointments, no picking up the kids, no evening news, no bedtime. The rigidity of our systems is what helps us understand our clock. These systems fold together to reinforce how we actually perceive time.

In New Orleans, the city itself has responded to an unusual ecology, geography and relationship with randomness. What’s come out on the other side is something more akin to cobbling than calculation. And it has the effect of accordioning the way a given minute feels here.

Geologically, New Orleans is a newborn. There are churches in Europe older than the land underfoot the French Quarter, “whose crust dates to the Mississippi’s last shift in course. . . around 1400 C.E.,” according to Lawrence Powell’s excellent history, The Accidental City. It’s a place that doesn’t have geologic inevitability. While most other port cities were founded in obvious places, their address with a river and surrounding body of water clear from the get go, New Orleans was a discussion. The elevation drop for the river’s last 70 or so miles is so slim that the river never really gave itself a carved place. Instead it slithered whimsically, choosing one course then another the way water might flow across your kitchen counter. “Why Bienville selected the river crescent as the place to build the principal town of a revamped colony is really a matter of conjecture. It wasn’t a choice he had been mulling over for months or years. It feels more like a spur-of-the-moment decision,” Powell writes.

When you look at a map of New Orleans you’ll see an extreme bend in the Mississippi River that defines the city. And while the river makes many significant curves as it snakes its way through the continent, it never does this quite as dramatically around another metropolitan city. In Memphis, for example, the Mississippi lays itself fairly flat and then gently nudges alongside. It’s a kiss rather than a wrestling move. In St. Louis the river is half as wide and its curve twice as open. As an aside, do at some point follow the river on a map. You’ll find this incredible point where Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee all meet each other and the river makes a sharp arch that carves land for Kentucky that logically would fall Tennessee’s way. A little Kentucky island nestled between Missouri and Tennessee.

What the Mississippi gives most of New Orleans is its city plan. In places, the streets and avenues make slow, graceful arcs that parallel the bend. Incidentally, we don’t use compass directions here, we use the river and the lake. We’ve chosen water over René Descartes. Therefore, to ride the Saint Charles streetcar from the west toward downtown is to head “downriver.” There is a “lake side” of New Orleans and a “river side.” On the river side, as you pull up and around the French Quarter, according to John M. Berry’s Rising Tide, the Mississippi’s “turn is so sharp that the water surface on the outside of the bend rises a foot higher than on the inside, as if banking around a racetrack.” A container ship coming the other direction will slide itself sideways, seemingly headed straight sidelong into the bank, and then gun it the second the bow is pointed upriver, its back end fishtailing away like Jim Rockford’s Firebird. The first time I saw this I assumed I was just about to witness a major accident. Every time after this it sends my heart soaring, the lithe mass and near catastrophe.