Aftermath
By: Christopher Schaberg
Tags: Environment, Hurricane Ida, Ecology, New Orleans, Climate Change

The day after Ida

Reentering a storm-torn world

Against all odds, everyone woke up at around their standard times. The hurricane had passed. The sunrise was brilliant, the air crisp and unusually fresh smelling. (Usually it smells faintly like oil—or worse.)

Luckily we still had water pressure, and our gas line was functioning. So we got up and made a somewhat ordinary breakfast: a big skillet of hash browns (we had potatoes to use up) and scrambled eggs. I had ground coffee beans the day prior, and pulled out our old Moka espresso machine to make thick rich coffee. Everyone fed, I ventured outside to assess the block and take stock of the damage.

Live oak limbs and leaves covered the street in front of house, mixed together with debris from hurled dumpsters. A nearby auto shop must have blown open, because I noticed the remnants of various tire-repair accouterments scattered around.

I dragged our garbage can and our next door neighbors’ out to the curb and started loading them up with the detritus. So much biomass—greenery usually living over and above us, now dying on the ground. Pounds and pounds and pounds of these intricately twisting branchlets and twigs. I was struck by how brittle the live oak branches were, as I scooped them up and smashed them down in the garbage cans—how could these trees be so strong, too? These trees in front of our house have survived hurricanes for over a hundred years, mostly intact. Brittle but strong: there’s a lesson here.

At one point in the morning a team of regional transit authority workers came out to clear the road. There was one particularly big branch (the size of a Jeep) in the middle of the road that needed moving, and I helped a worker drag it to the curb. I asked if he was ok, everything safe, and he said he lived in Lafitte and hadn’t been home yet—that’s where the waters were bound to be the highest. He looked worried, if also resigned. I wished him luck and he thanked me and we both moved on.

Our willow’s entire shape shifted several feet to the west—a visibly noticeable difference. Its roots had been pulled up out from under the surface of the ground, but they were still holding on tight. The tree would live, just in an altered state, post-storm. The rest of our backyard was windswept and disfigured, but otherwise ok. Three unripened Meyer lemons were scattered on the ground, but most of them remained on the little tree (this was our first crop of them).

Now sweating, I went back into the house. It was warming up inside. My two older children were making comic books—a past-time they’d gotten into last summer, when we had no internet up in Michigan—and our youngest daughter Vera was busy playing with Duplos. From time to time Vera would ask to talk to her grandparents on FaceTime, and we had to complicatedly explain the predicament at hand.

One of the unexpected pleasures of the day after the storm was the inoperability of our phones. No signal for most of the day…no way to use them, beyond as simple clocks. Instead, I lay on the couch and finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, which I’d been reading slowly since July. When was the last time I read a novel for a couple hours straight, not once looking at my phone? It was otherworldly, in multiple senses. (Slight digression here: Red Mars, what an incredible novel! The literal world-building, the characters, the emplotment, the rendering of topography, the management of time and tension! BUT: Not the best book to be reading in anticipation of a major hurricane, or just after. One can only handle so much apocalypse and survival in a given time.)

Out in our backyard a little later, I looked up and saw terns wheeling in the sky, appearing ecstatic—though I’m quite sure that my impression was really just an anthropomorphic projection. Dragon flies, too, were zigging and zagging around; clearly they were energized and alive today, with or without me interpreting them as such.

Midmorning I took Vera for a walk around the block, noting the ravaged fences, terracotta roof tiles strewn about, plywood fragments, and one stretch of sidewalk festooned with bloated diapers from the nearby daycare whose trashcans had tipped and cascaded onto the street.

An odd thing about this whole experience was realizing the scalar discrepancies involved. From the outside, from the reports trickling in—whatever they were—it probably sounded and looked like an absolute horror show. And yes, it was a huge hurricane that had barreled over the coast. But on the ground, it takes place at all these smaller scales: your house (even particular walls of your house, or parts of your yard); the block, pods of filth and verdant ejecta; the adjoining roads; the neighborhood; the region…it’s all impossible to map or track, from a single perspective. You have to juggle multiple vantage points at once, and somehow toggle mentally between them constantly, when you’re living through it.

As if to prove this in another way, later in the day when we got a faint signal to our phones, an email from our kids’ school blipped through: “We just received notification that a student tested positive for COVID-19. If your child attended school on Thursday, August 26 OR Friday, August 27, your child is a close contact of this student.”

Oh, right! A pandemic has been going on, while we’ve been preparing and living through a hurricane. No in-person school for our kids for a couple weeks—as if there would be classes, all the public schools having closed “indefinitely,” as we learned from another email update. In any case, it was an unsettling reminder of the other global emergency happening at this moment. What to do, now?!? Can we even leave town, knowing we might infect people along the way? Fortunately we had bought rapid tests from Walgreens some days before the storm, and we used them now to test. No positive results; so we could maybe evacuate in good conscience.

After cleaning up and emptying our fridge and freezer (so much good food!), checking the block a few more times, we left town in halting traffic, bound for…who knows? And who knows for how long. I wrote the bulk of these notes in a fleabag motel outside of Memphis, jotting them down on my phone as my family fell asleep in the luxuriant waft of a whining wall-unit air conditioning system. We’ll go on from here, watching the Entergy outage map, staying in touch with our neighbors…all checking in periodically on the block, on the city, on the state of things.

But what is this state of things, where we might have another storm next week—even a bigger storm? And the week after that, too? And next year? While matters of infrastructure improvements—not to mention actual, radical changes with respect to our entanglement with the ecosystem—seem removed and abstract to the point of being futile? It’s dizzying to reconcile the ways we’re stuck in the present—this static state called Progress—with the encroaching realities of this planet, realities that are so much bigger than us, even if we’ve influenced them disproportionately.

My friend Tim Morton emailed me a touching story today about their 12-year-old son, and the ways that Generation Z (and the next generation) are really the recipients of all this trouble — but also how they hold the potential for real change. This was a welcome note, as it grounded me in this groundless moment. It reminded me of what I’ll go back for, what I do. My Ecological Thought seminar this semester suddenly seems all the more relevant, even if (or because!) we’re in abeyance for the time being.

So once the power is restored we’ll head back to New Orleans, to resettle in trepidation. To live in this state of growing uncertainty concerning the future, and what to make of it.