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 wind, backlit in the bruised light. As I walk past he hollers, “Get off this island!” Behind me a minivan crawls by, and the driver cackles from her window. “You leave!” she heaves in response. I am relieved that neither is speaking to me. The wheels of her Toyota Previa crunch across broken bits of blacktop as she pulls into the driveway next to one of those deflated swimming pools that look like big blue doughnuts. Now, I decide, is as good a time as any to start endearing myself to the people who still live out here. I turn and head toward the house, cantilevered up over the surrounding remnants of marsh. Much to my surprise the seated man says, “You must be Elizabeth.”
“Well, then, let me guess. You’re Chris Brunet,” I reply as I step onto the poured concrete slab that serves as his porch. He is the only islander who returned the calls I made in the weeks leading up to my trip. We had hatched a plan to have lunch on Friday, before I got it in my mind to walk out to the island a day ahead of schedule.
“I wasn’t expecting you out here until tomorrow.” Chris braces his arm against the seat of an adjacent wheelchair, throws his weight forward, and twists into place. He was born with cerebral palsy but it hasn’t slowed him down much. We shake.
“I must be pretty lucky to run into you,” I say. “I haven’t seen anyone else on the island all afternoon.”
“I don’t tend to go far,” Chris replies. A horsefly circles his head like a ball on a string. “And you just missed Theo, down the way. I saw him drive past in his pickup a bit ago.” He must have been the man who offered me a ride.
The woman in the van is Chris’s sister Teresa. She shakes my hand and walks over to the refrigerator, where she unloads an armful of soda pop, sweetened tea, and bottled water.
“I’m starting to get a feel for the place. It’s awfully pretty,” I say.
“Even prettier at sunrise and sunset,” Chris adds, pushing up the sleeves of his cotton baseball jersey. “You can’t say nothing about this here island until you see both. When it lights up the sky—putting the clouds in different colors—well, I don’t know how much you’d pay to see that on a vacation somewhere.” He picks up a yellow vinyl chair and rolls over to offer me a seat.
Chris’s nephew Howard—whom Chris took in a few years back, along with Howard’s sister, Juliette—is fishing in the channel behind the house. In 1951 the first oil rig was installed nearby, and with the rig came “channelization,” the digging of access routes through the marsh. The oil companies were supposed to “rock” each channel—to backfill it—when the rigs left, reducing the movement of water through the fragile marshland that surrounds and supports the bayous. “But they didn’t do that, they didn’t maintain the bayou like they said they would, and now the gulf is at our back door,” I was told in town. Every year, thanks to erosion, the channels grow wider, eating into the land that once comprised Jean Charles.
Just then, a dolphin swims up the man-made waterway, past the spot where Howard is casting his line. For a second I find its undulating fin thrilling.
“Forty years ago you would have never seen that animal all the way up here,” Chris says. “But the land is opening up all around us. The cuts they made in the marsh speed up the process. What was once sweet water is now salt, so these dolphins, they come in.” The entire time that humans have inhabited these bayous, it would have been unimaginable to find a big marine mammal so far “inland.” Then again, this island isn’t inland anymore.
While the dolphin is not direct evidence of sea level rise, its sudden appearance does point to a dramatic shift over time. It is a shift that Chris, who has lived here his entire life, can perceive and that I, as a visitor, cannot. My initial thrill settles into some other emotion. I think if I look at that dolphin long enough, fix my gaze on its body nosing north, I will once again be able to see—as I did with Faharul’s limp mustard plants—what is largely invisible to anyone who moves as often as I do: the hallucinogenic transformation of our coastline, the salt water kneading in—into the aquifer and root systems, into our backyards and basements and wildlife refuges and former freshwater creeks—a change so large it unsettles our very ideas of who we are and how we relate to the land we have long lived atop.
“Is there some single thing that you saw that made it clear to you that the environment was changing, and not just in a normal way?” I ask Chris. “Like that dolphin. When did you see your first one?”
“I don’t know, maybe fifteen years ago,” he says, scratching his graying goatee. “But you have to know that the thing that makes this saltwater intrusion so damaging now
