Hell and High Water
On rising and loss.
Folks,
This past weekend, the tide in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina rose and flooded the city, tying it for the 10th highest tide on record. It was also marked as the highest tide we have seen since 2018. In my eyes, these two facts— plus all the photos shared of the water pouring over the edge, the road indiscernible from the shore— point out that the climate emergency is not something we can ignore any longer, nor imagine as a future possibility. What had my whole childhood seemed something distant and far off has now become our lived reality.
Last week, I read and then promptly re-read this incredible interview with author Claire Vaye Watkins in the LA Times. Watkins is to the American West what I hope to be to the American South, but I was especially struck by this line in the article: “Instead, her fiction knows that paeans are lovely, useless things. The West needs to come alive in fiction, but also to die. It needs to make humans hurt the way humans have hurt it.”
I read Watkin’s novel, Gold Fame Citrus, last year during the early days of the pandemic, when I wanted fiction to come alive to me in a way that could mirror what seemed to be happening in the world outside. I wanted stories that I could relate to and find myself in in this new reality, one that every day seems to become our irreversible future. Last week, I wrote for this newsletter about nostalgia, about the idea that you can never go back. And this week I am thinking still about that idea, but also about how so little of the nostalgia I feel for places is actually about those places and more about who I was in them, or at least who I hoped I could one day be. I am part of a generation that grew up still without the internet but has been thrust into it in our teenage and young adult years. And yet, growing up, the ideal of adulthood I clung to could not be further from what we see today. I think it is perhaps why I feel myself so drawn to music and films from the early 2000s lately— they strike a chord of resonance that gives that familiar feeling. It is a chord that dissipates when the screens go dark, when the audio fades out. In its wake, I am left looking for stories that can tell me how to survive in this new era and place that I never had a vision for. I am looking for someone to tell me how to get through this, and to give me the words and the hope to do so.
I didn’t love Gold Fame Citrus— a novel deeply concerned with the aftermath of climate crisis and water loss in the California desert, and how people will live there in the future— as much as I wanted to, but it was the kind of book I did not stop thinking about. Likewise, I keep circling back to this piece in the interview about hurt and regionality and karma. I spent much of my summer back in Charleston researching flooding, art, and spirituality for a Bitter Southerner piece, which incidentally became a piece about how we are to cope. How will we cope with the history of the places we love coming to light and then growing further tainted. How will we cope with them changing. How will we cope with the world dying all around us. How will we cope with the loss of our homes, the places that feel known and familiar. How will we go on at all.
I love what Watkins is doing for the American West in asking these questions, and likewise, I think we need to ask them of the South. I have struggled so deeply in finding love for this place when I think about all that has gone on here. At the same time, I know that I have felt more love in this place, more community, more joy, than anywhere else I have ever been. What does that mean, to fall in love with a dying place? What does it mean that, when insurance companies stop covering cities and towns most likely to experience coastal flooding, I will never be able to go back to my home? What does it mean that the floods are getting worse and worse, and we seem powerless to stop it? How do we grapple with that? How do we grapple with the fact that sometimes it seems impossible to rebuild these places— that sometimes it really does seem it would be easier to just let it all wash away.
I have been asking these questions for a long time. I still do not have the answers, and I am not sure any of us ever will. I think that I have put my roots down and one day they will be ripped from me like a tree in a hurricane, like a great oak sunken beneath the river, algae-washed and slick. I will learn to be slippery, to fit myself in wherever I can. I will learn to float.
In the meantime, I take refuge in the work that is being done in these places, and I want to divert this newsletter here to give a massive shout out to my friend Jared Bramblett, a photographer and storm drainage engineer who runs the incredible project, Mean High Water. The photos, below, that Jared posted this weekend tell us so much about this place. And they also tell us so much about where we are headed.
If you are in Charleston and have questions and don’t know where to turn for answers, or for community, or for some semblance of hope, I’m going to turn your attention to a great event being hosted by the Charleston Climate Coalition, where Jared will be featured alongside a plethora of other activists, artists, and individuals covering the climate crisis in the American South. I wish I was home to attend this.
Your prompt for today is to write about something rising. It could be a force of nature, such as water. It could be a movement or collective gaining fame. It could even be bread in the oven. Be as descriptive as possible with how it looks, feels. What happens once it has risen?
This week’s song is Daniel by Bat For Lashes because it came on shuffle while I was driving home over the lake tonight. It was sunset at 5pm, the first of the season, and time still had that feeling of being false and strange. It struck me as the kind of moment I will put in a film someday, and I will play this song when I do.