our communities.” He pauses, unsure of how to go on. Teresa fills the silence by offering me an Arizona iced tea.
It seems to me that what Chris can’t quite put his finger on is that the dolphin is just a symbol. For me the symbol is environmental; I can point to it and say, This is evidence that the ecosystem is in flux. But for Chris the dolphin represents the slow disappearance of his neighbors. Over the past forty years nearly 90 percent of the islanders have moved inland. When the people who long called this place home left, they took a little piece of Chris’s own idea of home with them.
The dolphin heads back down the channel. It likely encountered some piece of riverine infrastructure, a floating barge, levee, or floodgate. All of which were put in place to protect Houma, the parish seat, from the storms that seem to come at a rate of once or twice a year now.
The dolphin swims past the homes with their roofs blown off. Past the molding mattresses, and the trailers with their piping ripped out. Past the gas pipeline that broke during Gustav and was never repaired, leaving the residents without heat in the winter. Past the empty firehouse. The hundreds of dead cypresses and oaks. And the fishing camps destroyed by Rita. Past Theo’s parents’ old home, and Lora Ann’s old home, and Albert’s old home, and all of the other residences that have been abandoned because rebuilding is tiresome and expensive. So tiresome and so expensive that for some, leaving Jean Charles became the best option in a set of only bad options.
I have started to think that those who lived on the island and fled are some of the first climate refugees. By 2050 there will be two hundred million people like them worldwide, two million of whom will be from right here in Louisiana. And then there is Chris, who stays.
“Mind you,” Chris says as if he were reading my thoughts, “there is no real difference between those who go and those who stay. After a while people left because of the challenges of living here.” His eyes are bright and damp and his skin slick. “When a hurricane hits, you have no bed, no sofa, no lights, no icebox, no gas, no running water, sometimes no roof for a month or more. You sleep on the floor, if you have that to go back to, and you start to rebuild. Or you leave.”
“I see,” I say, looking up at the floor of his house, which hovers overhead.
Teresa takes this as her cue, hugs Chris, and heads back to her minivan.
“It’s not that those who left wanted to go. But each person has a decision that only they can make. And if you are one of those who left, there is still a big part of you that wants to be here,” Chris says.
I think for a moment about my apartment in Brooklyn with its view of the S train that I will likely never see again. Then I think of the man I left inside it, whose presence has defined much of my life for the last three years.
Chris watches my features turning inward in the waning light, but is, I think, too polite to pry. Sensing the importance of making myself vulnerable too, I offer the information up, try to turn the interview into an exchange of ideas between equals. When I tell Chris about my flight, about my personal life imploding, his warmth deepens. “Child,” he says, “you have to do what is in your heart, even when it’s hard. But if he’s taking energy from you, then you know what you need to—” Chris looks out toward the open water, his voice trailing off.
In that moment I cease to be the reporter from far away and instead become a mirror in which he can test out and analyze the causes and consequences of leaving someone or something you love. As I watch a series of unknowable thoughts rearrange his owl-like face, I realize that my attachment to my former fiancé, to my apartment, and to the vision of the future I have spent the last couple of years conjuring is much less fierce than Chris’s to this island. This shrinking strip of land that, for fifty years, he has rarely left. If it was hard for me to choose to give up a life I had imagined and invested in, what, I wonder, would it take for Chris to let go of the only place he has ever really known?
Chris invites me to visit the next day, and I accept. I walk back down the Island Road, and every hundred yards or so, I pass a huge cypress or oak stripped bare, its leafless branches reaching like electricity in search of a point of contact. The cause of the trees’ untimely demise isn’t in the air, but deep in the ground where the roots wander, where the salt water has started to work its way in. Just south of the Island Road, half the trees have fallen into the widening channel. Those that are still standing are just barely so. Everything, it seems, leans toward the salt water that wasn’t always here.
On my way back down Highway 665, I stop to buy some groceries at the Pointe-aux-Chenes Supermarket, a low-slung building with a long white veranda and a limited selection of shrink-wrapped vegetables in Styrofoam packaging. Inside, a woman speaks with the cashier about the squashed snake she almost stepped on in the parking lot. I check on the snake—a garter—and notice a bumper sticker on her rusting Camry’s trunk. The state of Louisiana is bright yellow, and inside it are the words “Shaped like a BOOT because we kick ASS.”
The irony is that Louisiana isn’t shaped like a boot anymore. Back at my rental house in Montegut, I pull up an aerial picture of the state on Google Earth. Today the wetlands that once made up the boot’s sole are all tattered and frayed. They look more like mesh than rubber. And in fifty years they are likely to be gone entirely. According to the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000, an area roughly equal in size to Delaware. And it is likely to lose another 1,750 square miles by 2064, an area larger than my soon-to-be-adopted home state of Rhode Island.
That’s because the southern edge of Louisiana is eroding at a rate among the fastest on the planet, and sea level rise and the oil industry aren’t the only things to blame. The Mississippi River is directly responsible for building up the coast of the Bayou State. For much of the past ten thousand years, it deposited silt from the far reaches of the continent here, where it emptied into the sea. The world’s fourth-longest river drained a vast watershed stretching from Wyoming to Pennsylvania, from the border of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In wet years a section of the river that might typically be one mile across can swell to as many as fifty (as has happened all along the river’s lower reaches in present-day Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana), picking up additional soil and sediment and carrying it south.
Pre-Columbian Native American societies understood that a healthy river goes through cycles of flood and drought, and they shaped their civilizations around the Mississippi’s ebb and flow. Their villages were sited not on the banks but nearby, and most weren’t permanent settlements but camps that could be relocated if the waters rose. In 1543, however, the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto was stopped in his march westward across present-day Tennessee by a swollen Mississippi. His chronicler, Garcilaso de la Vega, mentions the encounter in his book The Florida of the Inca; it was the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that the Mississippi’s regular high waters and sediment-delivering surges were described as a deterrent to human progress. The second recorded instance of the river’s “wrath” came in 1734, when it flooded a fledgling New Orleans. Then in 1927 the river inundated an area the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined for several months, destroying new towns that had sprung up all along its banks. It wasn’t until the Mississippi got in the way of the colonial project that its predictably fickle flow was deemed a problem.
In an effort to “manage” the mighty river, the Army Corps of Engineers put in one dam, then two, then three, then nineteen. Today there are twenty-nine dams and locks on the upper Mississippi, and the lower Mississippi is lined with levees and floodwalls. Instead of preserving the low-lying land at the Mississippi’s mouth, these river controls have contributed to its destruction by impounding land-replenishing sediment behind man-made barriers upstream. Thanks in part to these interventions, the Isle
