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 planetary phenomenon written into the limp spines of Faharul’s mustard plants. Inscribed into the skeletal tupelos at the farthest edge of Jacob’s Point.
There is a word coastal landscape architects use to describe a tree that has died due to saline inundation: rampike. According to Random House Dictionary, the word especially refers to those trees with bleached skeletons or splintered trunks, those undone by natural forces. The word itself is resurrected from an older and slightly more arcane English. A glossary from 1881 spells it raunpick, and gives the definition as “bare of bark or flesh, looking as if pecked by ravens.” Bare indeed—how exposed and plain, the gesture these trees make alongside our transforming shore.
My first summer in Rhode Island, I return to the marsh often. One morning someone else is there. When he and I cross paths I ask, as nonchalantly as possible, if he knows why these tupelos are all dead. I am trying to find out whether he can see what I can, that the precious balance between salt water and fresh that once defined this tidal wetland has been upset.
“No,” the man says, binoculars jangling around his neck. “I’m sorry.”
I’ll be the first to admit that before I started coming to Jacob’s Point I couldn’t tell the difference between black tupelo and black locust, between needlerush and cordgrass. I would learn their names only after I realized the ways in which their letters on my lips might point toward (or away from) incredible loss. Then I became fascinated. Because unlike Descartes, I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part; I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care. If, as Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in her essay on the power of identifying all living beings with personal pronouns, “naming is the beginning of justice,” then saying tupelo takes me one step closer to recognizing these trees as kin and endowing their flesh with the same inalienable rights we humans hold.
Sometime during the last half century, these tupelos’ taproots started to suck up more salt water than they had in the past. They were stunned and stunted. Then they stopped growing. The sea kept working its way into the aquifer, storms got stronger and dumped more standing water into marshes, and tupelos all along the East Coast died. Now they no longer bathe the edges of Jacob’s Point in shade. The green coins of their leaves are gone, and a recent bird census carried out in Rhode Island’s East Bay suggests that the bank swallows are going too.
I tell the stranger all of this. The sentences unspooling fast like the outgoing tide while he shifts from foot to foot, anxious to break away. He has, he tells me, never heard of the tupelo tree. Instead of the luscious rasp of growth on growth and the electric trill of a songbird in flight, out here, at the farthest end of Jacob’s Point, we are surrounded by the ticking sound of unprecedented heat. Above us the tupelos’ empty, oracular branches groan.
The oldest living black tupelo in the United States sprouted 650 years ago. That means its first buds burst while the plague was killing off approximately one-third of Europe. Now it is the tupelo’s turn to succumb in great numbers. And the red knot’s. And the whooping crane’s. And the salt marsh sparrow’s. Of the fourteen hundred endangered or threatened species in the United States, over half are wetland dependent.
Five times in the history of the earth nearly all life has winked out, the planet undergoing a series of changes so massive that the overwhelming majority of living species died. These great extinctions are so exceptional they even have a catchy name: the Big Five. Today seven out of ten scientists believe that we are in the middle of the sixth. But there is one thing that distinguishes those past die-offs from the one we are currently constructing: never before have humans been there to tell the tale. The language we use to narrate our experience in the world can awaken in us the knowledge that transformation is both necessary and ongoing. When we say the word tupelo we begin to see that both the trees themselves and the very particular ecology they once depended upon are, at least where they are rooted, gone.
Sometimes a key arrives before the lock. Now I am thinking, sometimes the password arrives before the impasse. These words, when spoken or written down, might grant us entry into a previously unimaginable awareness—that the coast, and all the living beings on it, are changing radically.
One day I decide to visit the Audubon Environmental Education Center at Jacob’s Point. It is noon and I am red faced, my shins sliced by bull and catbrier, from spending my morning batting around the dead tupelo. The blue-haired volunteer behind the desk looks at me as though I am mad for having been in the marshes instead of in the air-conditioning, looking at dioramas of the marshes. “Can you tell me about Jacob’s Point and those trees at the far end that are dying?” I ask. She suggests I walk through the interpretive exhibit. She even waives the five-dollar fee.
I snake through five rooms where the rhythmic lick of water melting into mudflats sounds from a pair of Sony speakers. The mallards don’t move because they have been stuffed with wool. The box turtles swim tight circles in a tiny tank at the back of a room without windows. I emerge from a papier-mâché cave (a cave in a marsh?) and repeat my question. This time she refers me to Cameron McCormick, the groundskeeper and the person most likely to know what is actually happening at Jacob’s Point.
Cameron doesn’t have voice mail, so I leave a message with the center’s secretary. Two days later he calls me, and we meet at the path down to the marsh the following morning. His eyes are wild and
