record store. The street that transformed our formerly working-class family—my grandfather sold seltzer door-to-door—into one with the opportunities privilege provides. The street that paid for my college education.
On the screen, that street is gone.
Then Ben switches to a rendering that shows the maximum two degrees Celsius of warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends to avert catastrophe. The intersection of Massachusetts Avenue with Huntington Avenue—the very spot where Ben Strauss is standing—is still buried under a layer of blue.
In the ethereal hyperlight of the conference center I see that no matter what we do, many of the landmarks we have long navigated by are going to disappear. It is not a question of if but when.
During that fall I begin to suffer from an acute form of anxiety. Nameless storms so large they leave my house lightless and full of water spin into my dreams. My faith in natural processes, in the intricate systems of reciprocity that I was raised to believe keep nature from tilting out of balance, is lost. Gnawing uncertainty takes its place. I wonder if there is a threshold between immersing myself in my subject matter and drowning in it, and whether I have crossed that line. At night unprecedented storm surges rearrange the furniture and my family lineage. The commonly held notion that what has happened will happen again, that there are no new stories, this idea becomes fat with water, fully saturated, then it too slips beneath the sea’s dark surface.
Whenever I can, I pull away from my computer screen and ride back out to Jacob’s Point. There I wander in a landscape we do not yet have a name for, a marsh inundated by too much of the very thing that shaped it. I have read about the disappearance of tree frogs in Panama, the droughts scraping across Kenya, the heat waves killing thousands in Paris and Andhra Pradesh and Chicago and Dhaka and São Paulo. I have written about communities affected by sea level rise. But my life has seemed so removed, so buffered from those events.
At Jacob’s Point I am finally glimpsing the hem of the specter’s dressing gown. The tupelos, the dead tupelos that line the edge of this disappearing marshland, are my Delphi, my portal, my proof, the stone I pick up and drop in my pocket to remember. I see them and know that the erosion of species, of land, and, if we are not careful, of the very words we use to name the plants and animals that are disappearing is not a political lever or a fever dream. I see them and remember that those who live on the margins of our society are the most vulnerable, and that the story of species vanishing is repeating itself in nearly every borderland.
In a hundred years none of these trees will be here. No object thick with pitch to make the mind recollect. And if we do not call them by their names we will lose not only the trees themselves but also all trace of their having ever been. Looking at the bare tupelos at the farthest edge of Jacob’s Point, 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.
