Rising. Elizabeth Rush
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I am reminded of something John Bear Mitchell said when my students asked him how the Penobscot people of Maine have responded to centuries of environmental change. “Our ceremonies and language still include the caribou, even though they don’t live here anymore…. The change is in how we acknowledge them.” His response surprised my students. He seemed to be saying: learn the names now, and you will at least be able to preserve what is being threatened in our collective memory, if not in the physical world. His faith in language clearly eclipsed their own.
And then there is the pleasure of it. I like my excursions best when I am alone. Waking early to ride to a slender little marsh that most overlook. The wild blackberries, ripe from summer heat, seemingly fruiting just for me. The black needlerush dried in logarithmic spirals, and patches of salt marsh cordgrass that look like jackstraws and blowdowns in an aging forest. Both bearing the delicate trace of the last outgoing tide.
Beyond the stand of tupelos, the marsh still hums with the low-grade sound of honeybees hunting in loosestrife. The ospreys cast their creosote shadows over cicadas and lamb’s-quarters and bay-berry. This tiny journey into the marsh feels like a grand field trip. Mud snails wrestle in the ebb tide, a great egret hunches at the far horizon scanning for mummichogs, and the sea balm rushes through the tree of heaven. I walk out only a fifth of a mile farther than most people go, and yet there is so much happening, so many unexpected gifts and self-made surprises.
Dropping down, I arrive at the water’s edge. I pull on my bathing suit and dive into the bay, but not before stubbing my toe on a barnacle-covered rock submerged just beneath the surface. I care intensely about being here, about coming back alone and often, and I don’t really understand why.
Sometimes the key arrives before the lock.
Sometimes the password arrives before the impasse.
Speak it and enter a world transformed by salt and blue.
Say: tupelo.
PART I
Rampikes
Persimmons
Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana
SOMETIME DURING MY FIRST WEEK ON THE LOUISIANA bayou, I walk to the Isle de Jean Charles. The Island Road, built in the early fifties right after the first oil rig went in, runs eight miles southwest from Pointe-aux-Chenes out between two expanses of water so new that neither has a name. Since the little remaining land is incredibly flat, the sky’s extravagant clouds serve as a sort of alternative to topography. Hoodoo-shaped cumulus formations hug the horizon, where a storm is fixing to start. Snowy egrets dig in the few remaining bayou banks, and mullet throw themselves out of the water as the first dime-size droplets of rain fall. Less than halfway to the island, my gut confirms what I already know from my research. This is a world unto itself, coming undone.
Just fifty years ago, the surrounding geography was complex and interconnected—a network of lakes and marshes that were navigable in flat-bottomed boats called pirogues. If you didn’t have a boat, you could walk between places by sticking to the higher ground abutting the arterial bayous. This word, bayou, sounds French, but it is actually Choctaw in origin. It means “slow-moving stream.” Today it is used in a general sense to describe Louisiana’s rare riparian coast, even though the bayous themselves are disappearing. The natural ridges and pathways that the Choctaws used to travel are going with them. Nearly every defining feature has been replaced by a single element: salt water.
The loss is pronounced enough that a few years ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to remap the nearby Plaquemines Parish and in so doing removed thirty-one place-names. Yellow Cotton Bay, English Bay, Cyprien Bay, Dry Cypress Bayou, and Bayou Long; none of these individual bodies of water exist anymore. The wetlands that once gave them shape have disintegrated, making the bayous and bays indistinguishable from the surrounding ocean.
“Maybe you could swim,” the owner of the Pointe-aux-Chenes marina tells me when I ask if I can get to the Isle de Jean Charles without a car. “But I wouldn’t, on account of the gators. Better just to take a right off of Highway 665 and stick to the Island Road.” Behind him stands a fifteen-foot-high statue of Jesus. The martyr’s body is lank and lean, his arms outstretched toward the watery expanse. Next to the statue a dead cypress tree looms. Its empty branches mirror the man’s sacrificial gesture. It too has passed beyond the barest version of itself into death. Its roots soaked in salt.
The film Beasts of the Southern Wild, a postapocalyptic tale of a band of homesteaders who survive a fierce storm and eke out a living in the drowned world that follows, was shot on the island and is based loosely on the lives of those who still reside out there, many of whom identify as Native American. I remember watching the film and thinking it remarkable that I was seeing environmental destruction bringing a community closer together instead of breaking it apart. I wanted desperately to know what that might look like in real life. This was long before I moved to Rhode Island, long before I saw my first dead tupelo, but after my initial trip to Bangladesh. It was the summer of 2013 and I was looking for proof of the rise in the United States, so I flew to Louisiana.
When Benh Zeitlin, the director of Beasts, told me that the island “felt like the end of the world,” I wasn’t sure if he was speaking of its remote location or of something less literal. The farther I amble out the single-lane highway to Jean Charles, the more I realize that both explanations make sense. The Isle de Jean Charles is where North America’s immense solidity ends, the frayed fingers of fine tidal lace splaying seaward. It is also possible to catch a glimpse of the future out here, of a world where the ocean covers what we used to think of as the coast. That is because over the past sixty years the wetlands that once surrounded the Isle de Jean Charles have all drowned, the rate of accretion trumped by land subsidence, erosion, and sea level rise. When I squint, it is difficult to tell just where the Island Road ends and where the water begins.
A man in a black pickup slams on his brakes and rolls down his window. “There’s gonna be some rain. Need a ride?” he asks, leaning back against the cab’s cracked leather and pulling at the brim of his baseball cap.
“I’m just walking out to the island,” I answer. This doesn’t clarify matters for him, so I add, “I’m OK,” and shake open my umbrella. He shrugs, rolls up his window, and keeps driving in the other direction, back toward Houma and firmer ground.
I repeat the phrase I’m OK in my mind as I walk along the rock-lined road. Three nights before flying to Louisiana, I fled the apartment I shared with the man I was to marry. For months I had sensed that this was not the relationship that would buoy me through the long passage that is adulthood, but I resisted leaving because there was still love, if fraught, between us. Eventually the levee of my optimism broke, and I stuffed my rolling suitcase with clean underwear, empty notepads, and a tent. It is not the first time, nor the last, that I turn my back on something I care about immensely. Though it is the first time it feels like a form of deceit.
Soon the road makes a sharp left along the highest and most stubborn spine of land. Two miles long and a quarter mile wide, this is what remains of the Isle de Jean Charles. Less than half a century ago, the island was ten times larger. Waterfowl marshes surrounded this chenier, or wooded ridge, atop which hundreds of residents built their lives. Now many of the homes that flank the Island Road sit on sixteen-foot-high stilts. Briars billow from the windows of those remaining on the ground, undoing the frames one growing season at a time. The ratio looks like one-to-two: for every lifted house there are two abandoned ones. For every person who has stayed, two are already gone.
Out toward the island’s tip, a man sits underneath his raised home enjoying the storm