It’s raining outside. Again.
Not for the first, second, or even tenth time in my life I am awaiting the arrival of a hurricane.
I am presently in Alexandria, Louisiana—far from Houston, but directly in the path of a now much diminished Tropical Storm Harvey.
I remember standing just off the French Quarter in 2005, a week or so after the flood waters had receded from New Orleans, and staring at a forty-five foot long yacht positioned perfectly in the middle of the road. It looked untouched by the surrounding apocalypse, as though someone had sailed it down Canal Street and tied it off to one of the ruined high-rises.
I also remember these:
It’s hard to watch what’s happening in Houston and not go back to that time in my imagination.
Or the time I watched Gustav uproot a brick wall like a turnip and fling it like it weighed just as much. Or the time, when I was a kid, that I swam around my neighborhood--my feet unable to touch the bottom--courtesy of Tropical Storm Allison.
She flooded Houston, as well.
And I know a lot of people who won’t, or can’t, watch Houston drown because they’ll be dragged under too—even though they are 347.8 miles south-east of the Bayou City.
We swamp folk have an unusual relationship with these storms.
They are a cause of consternation, but also—oddly—of celebration. They are how we divide our lives. Before and after Andrew, before and after Isaac. I watched the outer bands of Katrina roll in, tall and black and evil, from my neighbor’s swimming pool. My brother was there too, getting drunk.
A lot of people in the rest of the country think we’re damn fools for living here, but a lot of people in the rest of the country have never even met their neighbors—much less pulled them from a rooftop.
A lot of people in the rest of the country can go fuck themselves.
I’d like every insufferable west-coaster sniping at us on social media to try and swim a lap through the flames the next time their neighborhood spontaneously combusts.
You can at least float on water.
Dummy.
This feels different, though.
A few months ago I went to visit a friend in Baton Rouge, where I grew up. He took me by his parents place to look at their new FEMA trailer. They’d waited almost 6 months to get it, their entire home having been submerged in a flood the National Weather Service called the result of a “thousand-year rain.”
After that I drove up to Alexandria—a little town between Shreveport, LA and the end of time—for a job interview.* I noticed the carpet in my motel was wet, and ruined furniture was piled high in front of every house I passed.
As it turns out, they had had a thousand year flood of their own.
Then I made it back to New Orleans just in time to watch the pumps break and the waters rise, weeks before Harvey even had a name—because somehow 12 years after the worst natural disaster in modern American history the city I love still doesn’t have its shit together.
I’m no climatologist, but I’m pretty sure you can’t call them 1,000 year floods when they happen every single year multiple times a year.
I don’t know if climate change is a real thing, but I’m pretty sure if it is then this is exactly what it would look, sound, and feel like.
The only thought I have left is: if you can’t build a giant wall to keep the Mexicans out, how are you going to stop 100,000 well-educated English speaking refugees from putting you out of work? Don’t mistake my twang, I also have a very expensive and thus far mostly useless degree.
Maybe y’all should allocate more funding.
I got that job by the way.
*The Huffington Post pays me entirely in expired Democratic voter registration cards.