Termination Shock

They sat there on the gallery and chatted for about half an hour. It wasn’t a life-changing conversation for either of them, just a pleasant enough diversion. Willem dutifully told his cover story: going to check on Dad in the wake of the near miss by the hurricane, wanted to see the sights relevant to climate change. Margaret brought him up to speed. “We have something y’all don’t,” she said, where “we” meant the Mississippi Delta and “y’all” meant the Netherlands. “The river is an unstoppable land-building machine, if we just let it do its work. We can’t switch it off, just point it in different directions. When y’all want to build land, y’all have to lug the sand to where it’s needed, and lay it down. Pros and cons: you get nothing for free—”

“But we get it exactly where we want it,” Willem said.

“With us, it’s like—have you ever seen what happens when a firefighter loses his grip on a fire hose?”

“No,” Willem said, “but I can imagine.”

“It’s a chaotic behavior. The hose can’t be shut off. It thrashes around like an angry snake. That’s the Mississippi downstream of New Orleans. For a long time we just tried to keep it channeled between levees. We had to keep building those higher. You’ll see. It couldn’t break out, so its outlet stretched farther and farther into the Gulf as it kept laying down sediment. Meanwhile the Gulf went on rising, sneaking around to attack the Delta on its flanks. Created a huge system of saltwater marshes and a whole economy to go with it—oysters, shrimp, saltwater fish. But something had to change. So we created the two big diversions. That’s what you’ll want to see. Here, I brought you a present.”

Margaret reached into her bag, favoring Willem with a mysterious smile, and pulled out a wad of bright fabric. She shook it out and held it up to reveal a reflective fluorescent green safety vest of the type worn by road crews. “Don’t worry, it’s been washed.” She gave it a toss. It wafted across the table and he snatched it out of the air.

“Who or what is ERDD?” he asked, reading letters stenciled across the back.

“Ecological Restoration of Delta Distributaries,” she said. “The name of a crowdfunded project I worked on for a while. Now defunct. Doesn’t matter. South of here, no one can read.” (This was dry humor.) “You wear one of these, you can walk just about anywhere down where you’re going and people will think you’re doing something official.”

“And I have the vehicle to go with it,” Willem said. “A generic white pickup.”

“Oh, you can get in anywhere with that and a reflective vest!”

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome. So. What you want to see is the two big diversions. We blew holes in the levee. One on the left bank at Wills Point, just about thirty miles down from here, the other in the right bank another, oh, five miles farther along. Fresh water’s pouring through, dumping silt where it hits the Gulf, and the silt’s making new land—taking back some of what the Gulf stole from us. But the water isn’t clean—remember where it all came from.” Here Margaret swept her arm around in an arc directed generally northward, as if to encompass the whole watershed of the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system, all the way to Canada. “And because it’s fresh, it kills the saltwater ecosystem. All those homeless people you saw on your way in? Many of them were working oystermen ten years ago.”

Willem glanced toward the adjoining high-rise district, sprouting from a low clutter of RVs and tents. “You’re right,” he said, “that is not a choice we have to make. Oh, fisheries are always problematic in all countries. But when we build coastal defenses, as a rule, we are creating jobs. Not obliterating valuable sources of employment.”

“How’s that going, anyway?” she asked. “How much higher can you pile those things?” She was just being folksy, of course. She had a Ph.D. in this stuff. Willem smiled, to let her know he got the joke.

“As high as we want,” he answered. “But it’s not the average sea level that keeps us up at night. It’s the storm surge that overtops a dike somewhere, blows a hole in the perimeter, lets the Atlantic through faster than we can pump it out.”

She nodded. “Nineteen fifty-three.” Then: “What’s funny?”

“Not two hours ago, my father was lecturing me about 1953. You, he, and I are probably the only three people in Louisiana who understand the reference.”

“He lived through it?”

“He keeps an axe in his attic.”

“Everyone does,” Margaret said.

Willem drove south, cutting off a long eastward hairpin of the Mississippi and rejoining it several miles south of the city. According to the map, the road ran along the river. But even though it was only a few meters distant, he could not see it, but only an earthen levee that ramped up from the road’s sodden, puddle-strewn shoulder to two or three times a man’s height.