Where to.
He insisted I go down to Miami, a city that I had never been to before, to stay with a friend of his named Robert, whom Chris had known since they were children, growing up on the Upper East Side. “Robert is a sweetheart,” he explained, and he’s also rich, and “with a guest house. He’s out of town, I think. I’m sure he’d let you stay at his place. It’s right on South Beach.”
Robert, who never wrote to me directly, said yes without question. Chris purchased me a weekend ticket to Florida.
Miami, like much of South Florida, was built on porous limestone consisting of two distinct layers called “facies,” per the United States Geologic Survey: an upper oolitic facie that is “moderately indurated, sandy … with scattered concentrations of fossils” and a lower bryozoan facie that is “white to orangish gray, poorly to well indurated, sandy, fossiliferous.”
The rock’s Swiss cheese-like in form, encrusted with shells and punctured through with holes of varying sizes that make the entire area, anything built on the limestone (so, all of Miami), particularly susceptible to flooding from the Bay of Biscayne, the Atlantic, any nearby body of water for that matter, and which render any known efforts to stem the floods—sea walls, levies, pumps—mostly useless. Local politicians and scientists stand in public dismay, shortchanged by the state and federal governments: what to do about the half-trillion dollars sitting on a sponge? By the early 2010s, the state began to build a $206 million, wholly inadequate pump system to protect the city from the rising sea. As it stands now, the system can’t withstand the projected rise for the region. Not even close.
Since the mid-nineties, the sea level has increased nearly four inches. By the end of the century, the oceans are predicted to rise nearly eight feet globally, meaning a slightly higher level for south Florida due to its unusual closeness to the North Atlantic Current, which pushes more water up against the state than the rest of the East Coast. Sometimes there’s also what’s called a king tide, an abnormally high tide when the Moon is at perigee with the Earth and the gravitational force it exerts on the planet (and so the tides) is strongest. Hot, salty Florida water, muddied and green, gushes up over land to flood the city. This happens often, and more and more often.
In late fall 2012, I didn’t know the full extent of Miami’s predicament, or if I knew it I wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening in Florida because I’d never been to the state before, and, in any case, Florida was Florida, a rolling social calamity ensured by legislated idiocies, with a keen preference for spectacles of racist absurdity and violence. That was the news. I decided to spend my first long weekend there in the temperature-controlled water of Robert’s pool or at the beach, refusing to think about Sandy, or the fact that I was vacationing in the heart of the heart of hurricane country.
The plane touched down at Miami International in early evening, just as the sky’s sunset amber cracked and flooded with veins of deeper shades of purple. Taxiing to the arrival gate, I watched dusk give way to a dense blue speckled with tropical starlight. I collected my things at baggage claim and exited into the warm evening outside arrivals, where I hailed a cab to Robert’s on South Beach. Once inside his many-windowed home, I dropped my things in the guest room and promptly collapsed on the bed.
I dreamt of crossing the Williamsburg Bridge in a cab under a cloud of thousands of seagulls, all of them squawking out the hungry misery of bird-life, a misery that formed a language I couldn’t understand but must have derived from some ur-tongue I had once belonged to. They flocked to the cab as we crossed the bridge. The cab driver slowed down, terrified that they might peck through his windshield. “Keep going,” I shouted, as birds gathered on the hood of the car, their beady, dark eyes boring into me through the windows. One large bird opened its mouth, wider and wider—
I startled awake. These were the dreams I couldn’t shake. Half past midnight, I got into my swim trunks and jumped into Robert’s pool, which was enclosed in a tall privacy fence of hedgerows. A fat lizard posed on a small white stone bench near the deep end, where the concrete met a narrow strip of grass before the bushes loomed up, and it eyed me with mild concern when I swam over to get a better look at it. I splashed water its way but it didn’t move. “OK,” I said aloud. It turned at the sound of my voice, cocked its head, and fled into the grass. I hadn’t wanted it to go. What I needed was a drink.
I found Robert’s stash of booze under the silverware drawer—vodka, tequila, and a new bottle of rye whiskey. I opened the whiskey, made a mental note to replace it before I left (did not, in the end), and poured myself a glass. The oven clock blinked two a.m. I went back out and stood by the pool, stretched in the fresh air while holding the glass extended over my head. Overhead, larger and larger bands of heavy clouds, under-lit by the city lights across the bay, began to roll across South Beach, promising rain.
Is this the future.
In the present there was not only the question of the porous limestone, but also of “beach nourishment,” another way of asking what to do about erosion. Ocean currents had begun to slough off South Beach much quicker than the city or the Army Corps of Engineers had anticipated and the sediment normally deposited by rivers as they meet salt water had been cut off by harbors and dams, meaning that the seafloor sand deposits that the state usually harvests for its beaches were becoming scant. With dwindling reserves, the city was eventually forced to admit that it didn’t know what to do about its beaches, didn’t have a plan, and had resolved to import from elsewhere since the narrow continental shelf around Miami had been nearly exhausted.
“Would it still be Miami Beach with foreign sand?” the Christian Science Monitor asked in 2007. In the next decade the question no longer mattered: only that sand had to get there, from some more stable elsewhere, since it wouldn’t be Florida. In 2009, the Miami-Dade County Department of Environmental Resources Management released a report on the state of Miami Beach’s coastline that called for a renewed focus on beach nourishment, not only for purposes of tourism, but for hurricane safety, too. All but one “borrowing site” for sand had been permanently depleted, they wrote, and “new sources need to be identified” or the beach would revert to the pitiful, slender state it had reached before the first major nourishment that began in 1975 and ended in 1981.
But the beach had not always been there. The land on which Miami and Miami Beach now sit first appeared more than a hundred thousand years ago, shortly after the warmer, interglacial Eemian period ended and the oceans drained as the ice caps boomed again.
If I were to have taken a walk on South Beach during the Eemian—which many scientists don’t see as the best model for thinking about the immediate future of the climate (say, the next ten thousand years) despite its warmer temperatures and its popularity as an example among the commentariat, but humor me—there would be nowhere to walk, of course, so instead if I were to have sailed about the ocean where Miami is now, I would have found only choppy, warm waters, a big stretch of open ocean that’d go on for about six hundred miles—to what’s now Macon, Georgia. The tropics were wetter and warmer than they are now and, below your boat, the waters would have teemed with strange Paleolithic sea life, giant squid, and swarms of unrecognizable fish.
Even if it won’t quite look like that, Miami’s future will be something close to it: its slim sliver of land will vanish into the waves, returning to the seafloor from which it emerged when the water last crept up into the ice caps.
A lizard in the late evening.
I wasn’t sure why I’d come all the way down to Florida to think less about a hurricane, except that it was paid for by my boss, which was good enough for me. I wasn’t sure why I needed to get away since I had gone unharmed by Sandy’s ugly path while so many hadn’t. Outside of the city, in Miami and elsewhere, no one seemed to care much about what happened to New York and New Jersey. It was not clear if the government would provide the necessary funds to
