Rising. Elizabeth Rush
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rel="nofollow" href="#u81902207-9394-595a-80a4-889a425415cc"> Listening at the Water’s Edge
Attention is prayer.
SIMONE WEIL
Within a single human existence things are disappearing from the earth, never to be seen again. In Passamaquoddy [Maine] our sacred petroglyphs—those carvings in rock that were put there thousands of years ago—are now being put under water by the rising seas. We’ve seen this happen for a long time—this diminishing of our natural resources—through climate change and invasive species. The losses have been slow and multigenerational. We have narrowed our spiritual palettes and our physical palettes to take what we have. But the stories, the old stories that still contain a lot of these elements, hold on to the traditional. For example, our ceremonies and language still include the caribou, even though they don’t live here anymore. Similarly, we know the petroglyphs still exist, but now they’re underwater. The change is in how we acknowledge them.
JOHN BEAR MITCHELL
Penobscot scholar and member of the Penobscot Nation in Machiasport, Maine
RISING
The Password
Jacob’s Point, Rhode Island
I HAVE LIVED IN RHODE ISLAND FOR ONE WEEK WHEN I SET out to explore the nearest tidal marsh, the landscape I know will be the first to show signs of sea level rise. I bike across the Washington Bridge, past the East Providence wastewater treatment plant, the Dari Bee, and the repurposed railway station, through Barrington to Jacob’s Point. As expected, out along the Narragansett Bay, a line of dead trees holds the horizon. Some have tapering trunks and branches that fork and split. Bark peels from their bodies in thick husks.
The local Audubon ecologist tells me that they are black tupelos. I roll the word in my mouth, tupelo, and cannot put it down. Tupelo becomes part of the constellation of ideas and physical objects that I use to draw up my navigational charts—I aim toward tupelo. Words can shuttle us around in time and space from New England to old England, from Rhode Island back over two thousand years to when the Wampanoag and Narragansett first harvested shellfish in these tide-washed shoals, to a time when language tangibly connected the physical world and the world on the page and in our conversations. Take tupelo, for instance. It is Native American in origin, and comes from the Creek ito and opilwa, which, when smashed together, mean “swamp tree.” Built into the very name of this plant is a love of periodically soaking in water. Word of tupelos once told marsh waders what kind of topography to expect and also where to find relatively high ground.
A month or two before I witnessed my first dead tupelo, and right before I packed up my apartment in Brooklyn and moved north, I found a scrap of language in an essay on Alzheimer’s and stuck it to my computer monitor, thinking it might serve some future purpose. It read, “Sometimes a key arrives before the lock.” Which I understood as a reminder to pay attention to my surroundings. That hidden in plain sight I might discover the key I do not yet know I need, but that will help me cross an important threshold somewhere down the line. When I see that stand of tupelos I instinctually lodge their name in my mind, storing it for a future I do not yet understand.
Chance has sent me to Providence, but the move feels deeply fortuitous. Here, I think, I will become immersed in the subject matter that has begun to obsess me: the rate at which the ocean is rising. No state (save Maryland, and only by a hair) ranks higher in the ratio of coastline to overall acreage. It is no surprise, then, that 15 percent of Rhode Island is classified as wetlands—and of that 15 percent, roughly an eighth is tidal, both one of the most nimble types of ecosystem in the world and one of the most imperiled. Over the past two hundred years, Rhode Island lost over 50 percent of its tidal marshes to the filling and diking that come with development. Today the remaining fields of black needlerush and cordgrass are beginning to disappear thanks to higher tides and stronger storms.
When I first learned that I would move back to New England in 2015, I also felt a little sick. I grew up seventy-five miles north of here, as the crow flies, in a small seaside community split down the middle between those who came from centuries of money and those who worked in the industries the wealthier residents controlled. My midwestern parents and I were neither. We lived on the nice side of town, but I was the only kid in my neighborhood to go to public school. When I hung out at the private beach I always felt I laughed too hard, that my body moved too wildly. I can still remember one mother loudly telling my own, “Elizabeth plays awfully rough.”
“If you have a problem with her behavior you can speak with her directly,” my mother responded, gesturing to the water’s edge.
Even though I have spent more time in this region than any other place on the planet, coming back didn’t feel exactly like coming home. In part because the New England of my childhood is not the New England I encounter now.
In the mornings I ride down the path lining the Narragansett Bay to Jacob’s Point just to look at that stand of dead trees. I secure my bike to a wooden fence, then walk across the width of the marsh to shoot black-and-white photographs of their ghostly silhouettes. The trees’ bare limbs twine and reach, a testimony to the energy once spent searching for light. I picture the shade they used to cast and the bank swallows awash in that balm, diving like synchronized swimmers, one after another, from the lowest branches.
Or at least that is how I imagine it once was—before the ice sheets started sloughing into the sea, before the shoreline started to change its shape, before the tupelos along the East Bay started to die.
Three years earlier, I’d inadvertently become interested in sea level rise while working on a magazine article about the completion of the longest border fence in the world, which separates India and Bangladesh. As it turned out, the fence was a technicality; people bribed their way through. Water was the real problem. Over the previous fifty years, upstream irrigation projects had diverted over half of the Ganges River’s flow. Meanwhile, the Bay of Bengal was seeping into the empty space left behind. Together these two factors led to widespread crop failure.
I will never forget walking the dusty spine of a char, a river island formed by sedimentation, behind a boy named Faharul. It took us two hours just to reach his patch of failing mustard greens. A decade earlier this area had been considered one of the most fertile in the region. Now the sere land cracked open, each fissure lined with the white of dried salt. Faharul and I were 150 miles from the coast, and yet what little food he raised often wilted. If the vegetables he depended upon to survive had not carried a trace of salt in their veins he would not necessarily have known that sea levels were rising, and that he himself was vulnerable to this faraway phenomenon. Faharul spoke of the possibility of pulling up his own roots and leaving his family land. His cousin had already fled to India.
I understood then that sea level rise was not a problem for future generations. It was happening already, exacerbated by human interventions in the landscape. And perhaps even more importantly, I sensed that the slow-motion migration in, away from our disintegrating shorelines, had already begun.
My article on the border fence contained none of this. I didn’t have the word count, and I was reluctant to play into one of the earliest climate change clichés, that of a drowning Bangladesh. Instead I tucked the knowledge away and returned to the United States. But I was changed, haunted. I had begun to be able to see what those whose lives are in no way dependent upon the coast could not—the early signs of the rise. I found myself reading an unfathomably large