The difference in elevation between the flooded parking lot, across which Rufus’s truck made a spreading V-shaped wake, and the road was probably more than one meter and less than two. Less than the height of a man. And yet it was everything. The placement of the road—more generally, the engineering of the levee along which the road ran—was all quite deliberate. People above the water drove around in clean vehicles and might live their whole lives unaware that the sea, globally, was coming for them. Those who found themselves just the height of a man closer to the earth’s center found themselves inundated from time to time, according to the weather’s whims, and either had to stew in shantytowns or, like the Cajuns, become masters of an amphibious lifestyle.