Blog #52: Somebody’s Water

Nicholas strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane Monday as it headed toward landfall along the Texas Gulf Coast and it was expected to bring heavy rain and floods to coastal areas from Mexico to storm-battered Louisiana.

https://apnews.com/article/mexico-texas-louisiana-miami-floods-8e71e24a3c0f8fccd493426edab757aa

It is always somebody’s water, because of what water is, what water does. Water moves along the chain of towns that line the Mississippi; if one town erects a barrier, the water moves across the river or downstream to flood another. Water seeks out weakness, low ground, open ground, poverty. In Texas, richer towns and neighborhoods widen their bayous. These places become safer and perhaps more beautiful. Downstream, the water surges into narrower channels, becoming faster and dirtier. We all want our water elsewhere, although some places are more elsewhere than others.

Civilizations are built by following the flow and surge of water. Civilizations are built on flooding.  In ancient Egypt crops depended on the annual flooding of the Nile. Until recent changes in climate interrupted thousands of years of agricultural practice, the yearly flooding of the Mekong Delta made possible the rice fields and the fishing that sustained human life and commerce in Vietnam. For millenia humans have moved with the rhythm of water, leaving riverbanks during wet seasons and returning after flooding was over. We do not move. We stay put, wall ourselves in, push the water away, hide if we can behind barrier: seawalls, levees, levee systems. 

And yet the water comes, and it must go somewhere. Not my back yard. Not my city. Not into my house. In Houston, during heavy rains, water pours from the gutters of taller houses to the smaller ones beside them. We build higher houses. Just after Harvey, the city chose to open reservoirs, flooding some neighborhoods to save others.  We know more about this than we often do because some of the neighborhoods that were flooded were affluent. In Galveston, after the hurricane of 1900, the city raised first the island itself and then a seawall. Now during the many storms that rock the coast, water surges where the seawall is not. More famously, in New Orleans, levees hold (as they recently did during Ida) or break (as they did so spectacularly during Katrina). In Ida, outside the levee system, water poured onto streets and into homes. Many engineers now say that levees do not even protect those behind them, but this does not stop us from wanting more and higher barriers. There is a guilty thrill in feeling safe, in knowing that when the water comes it will be—given technology, luck, and perhaps prayers—directed elsewhere.

Here on the Gulf Coast, as we wait for Hurricanes, tropical storms, tropical depressions, we live with a recurring mix of fear, desire, and guilt as in our minds’ eye we push the eye of storms west or east—to somewhere else. 

The process begins with a dot on a map. One day something forms, becomes a form off the coast of Africa. We know this because the weather people on TV tell us so. The men are in slightly rumpled suits and post crowdsourced pictures of sunsets. The women always wear sleeveless dresses and are frighteningly thin. They point to something small on the screen, a circled speck in a vast coastless ocean. The weathermen and the weatherwomen, who are sometimes meteorologists, will keep an eye on it, they promise. Even those of us like myself who love maps struggle to find landmarks; this requires an expert eye.

Two days later, perhaps, the thing is closer, the map on tv features not just water but landmasses that I recognize. The names on the map are still names of bodies of water. The Caribbean, for example, or more ominously, the Bay of Campeche. Although each year I go online to refamiliarize myself with facts about the Bay of Campeche, the facts slip away with the end (whenever that might be) of hurricane season. For me, it is a little like throwing a football: I must learn again what I knew around the same time the year before. In this case at least my ignorance is a form of denial; the Bay of Campeche is where storms come from the west; it is a narcissistic projection; it exists for me only in relation to my fears. Each year, I learn that the bay is a “bight”, and that “bight” is not a typo, but a word for a curve on the coast. Each year, I try to imagine myself not in Houston, waiting for what develops in that bay to come ashore, but in Tabasco, Mexico, or Vera Cruz, where the bay might be part of everyday life. For a long time, the Bay of Campeche was the biggest source of oil in Mexico. For Mexicans on the shore, that body of water might mean an income, a source of pleasure, or for almost  ayear in the late ‘seventies, the site of a devastating oil spill and an environmental disaster.  People living or vacationing in Veracruz might frame everyday sentences like “I have a house on the Bay of Campeche,” or, more familiarly,  “the bay smells funny today,” or “I am going to fish in the bay.” From me there is only one kind of sentence for which the Bay of Campeche is the grammatical subject or object. That kind of sentence has a positive and negative form: “A tropical depression has developed in the Bay of Campeche” or “the tropical depression in the in the Bay of Campeche has not developed.” Verb tenses are key here, but the syntax does not change. At key moments in August and September—perhaps earlier or later with global warning—the Bay of Campeche returns to my storehouse of sentences and to my mental map. After November it is someone else’s water.

If the first sentence is in force, I enter a different relation to names and to naming. Until it forms, a “disturbance” over water is an “Invest,” short for “investigation.” In the idiom of COVID, it might be something like a “variant of interest.” The interest, the need for investigation, results in a complicated numbering and lettering system: from 90-99, with an added “L” indexing its  location in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. The generalized  name “Invest” suggests a form of distance, of curiosity: again, something on which to keep one’s expert (or simply experienced) eye. The numbers  that follow are themselves perhaps intended to be reassuring; they suggest a form of taxonomy and control that is blown apart by the advent of a human name. I have kept my eye on dozens of Invests now, most of which, meteorologists concluded, had a low change of development—a comforting 20 or 30 percent. Surely, I am wrong, but it seems to me they all developed, passed the 39MPH threshold for naming, and added themselves to a list of anthropomorphic forces that occluded any sense of safe distance. And about those names—it seems odd that one place in which some version of feminism has taken hold is in the recent addition of male names to the hurricane list. Women are still paid less than men for the same work; they are still subject to male violence, they still do not have bodily autonomy. But when your house is in the way of a storm, it is exactly as likely that it will be destroyed by one named as a man as one named for a woman. This is progress of a sort.

First the name, and then the cone. As Ida, or Harvey, or Nicholas, “barrels” (they always barrel) towards the coast, there is a scramble to ascertain where she/he/they will make landfall. Everyone on the Gulf Coast has many times gone to bed at night outside the cone of uncertainty, only to wake up within the triangle of land and sea marked by red lines. We have all watched as spaghetti models emerge and then coalesce, as the European model and the American model disagree, only (eventually) to meet on somebody’s shoreline.

And this is where the guilt comes in, on the back of hurricane winds, on the back of fear. It is impossible for those of us who are not saints to want the cone to shift away from us, to be liberated from its geometries. Although we want the storm to weaken and to disappear, we know that this is unlikely; we root instead for the water and the wind to go elsewhere. This impulse, stronger as storms draw nearer and as their effects pile up with the seasons, requires a complicated moral calculus. We might not want the storm to land in Louisiana because folks there have already sustained so much damage from previous storms; because we might have relatives there; because FEMA does such a bad job in Louisiana; because a storm to the east of us  will result in an influx of refugees from this neighboring state to Texas and specifically to Houston. Reasons for trying to push the storm out of Louisiana can come from empathy, from self-interest, from racism, but the fantasy of pushing is irresistible. I find myself practicing a version of nineteenth-century felicital calculus: “Where,” I ask myself, unconvincingly,  can the storm go where it will affect the fewest people? Many of us in Houston hold to the convenient fantasy that the central Texas coast is virtually uninhabited; we want the storm to “go there” where there are wide open spaces. Of course, this means that we in Houston would be on the dirty (wet) side of the storm, which is not a good place to be.

There are no good choices, and of course, we do not get to choose. The water goes where it goes, despite our fantasies of control. We cannot pray a hurricane away, seed the clouds with bullets, nudge it to the east or the west, declare it elsewhere with a sharpie. Even our technologies falter; our dikes and levees and concrete channels are insufficient at best and at worst a fatal mistake. Our models are flawed, our scientific knowledge upended by a new, unthinkable climate. Last week, Hurricane Nicholas took an unexpected path to the east of the Houston metro area. I went to sleep to the howling of winds and to a strange accompanying silence as little rain fell. The city woke to a sense of relief, and then to the more-than-inconvenience but less-than-tragic effects of relatively brief power outages. A huge elm tree had fallen on my neighbors’ roof, but since such events were relatively rare, there were men on the roof to fix it by the next afternoon. The world was not upended. Water stayed mostly in its place. We know we will not always, in the words somewhat chagrined meteorologists, “dodge the bullet.” Some day—probably soon, almost certainly in my lifetime—a hurricane will make a direct hit on Galveston or on Houston—or worst of all for the area and the planet—the Ship Channel. Houston and its alluvial plain might once again become a swamp, a wetlands. It might return to what it was before European explorations of the Gulf; it might, if the wind is wrong, be covered in toxic chemicals. Until then, we rely on walls  and on the ever more sophisticated predictive technologies that tell us what might happen but can do nothing to stop it, nothing to stop the water. As I venture to the Gulf on a late September evening, watching the pelicans swoop for fish that flash silver in the setting sun, I feel deep in my sun-warmed bones that this is my water. It is my water too when storms threaten and I huddle with my family and friends my built-up house. A given storm might go east or west taking its water with it, but there is finally no elsewhere in this story.