There’s nothing like a week in Louisiana to make one long for home — even if it is Toronto.

Nothing against Hogtown, of course, but the more one sees the more one realizes no city can take its continued wellbeing for granted. In New Orleans, they still talk about the “Storm” — Hurricane Katrina — as if happened last week. A limo driver will mention in passing that she lived in Toronto — “loved it” — but returned home in 2005 when the Storm drowned her sister in her own home, leaving three young children to raise.

Visitors encounter this sort of casual heroism all the time in New Orleans, which has yet to recover fully from Katrina’s devastation.

One also can’t help but notice that the devastation wrought by Louisianans upon Louisiana far outweighs anything a hurricane can do. The mighty Mississippi, invisible behind vast levees, is lined with trailer parks and oil refineries. The bayous are degraded, the cypress swamps compromised beyond recovery. It is a landscape of desolation, broken only by the exquisite remnants of 19th-century plantation culture, as refined as it was corrupt.

Indeed, corruption remains a subtext of Louisiana politics. Though its natural resources make this one of the most richly endowed states in the Union, it ranks with Mississippi as one of the poorest. More young black men end up in jail than graduate from high school. And although slavery might have been abolished 150 years ago, blacks continue to sweep the streets and clean up after the rest of us.

But then, the U.S. is a nation founded by slave-owners whose radical proposition was that “all men are created equal.” This contradictory mix of enlightenment and brutality lies at the heart of the American psyche, still unresolved and rarely questioned.

Of much greater local interest, however, is the price of gas, now almost $4 a gallon. Though New Orleans takes great pride in its streetcars, they are antiques run largely for the pleasure of the tourists who are this city’s prime industry. The basic means of transportation down here is the car. It is also the most obvious thing Canadians have in common with Americans.

And despite the vast differences between New Orleans and Toronto, the automobile has brought a startling degree of sameness, similarity, even homogeneity, to the two centres. Notwithstanding the modernist architecture that turned cities around the world into copies of one another, it is the car that reduces even the most idiosyncratic urban form to a monotony of asphalt and empty spaces, not to mention congested highways and traffic reports.

We have reached the point where the drive home from the airport in Toronto feels like a continuation of the drive to the airport in New Orleans. One leads seamlessly into the other. Everything else about the landscape might be different, but the topography of traffic remains constant.

Along with it come billboards, gas stations, and the whole paraphernalia of driving. In this terrain, the most memorable feature may be the signs marking official evacuation routes — that’s something you don’t see around here.

Not until one leaves the isolation of the automobile does the rest of the landscape reveal itself — the palm trees, the heat, the smells, the architecture … . Not until one steps out of the car does one cease to be an observer and become part of the landscape.

But with its drive-thru banks, drive-thru pharmacies, drive-thru restaurants and drive-thru daiquiris, the temptation is to stay behind the wheel. The only thing missing is Tim Hortons, drive-thru or not.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca