Flood Recovery Mode

The day I started writing this, I kept thinking to myself, “Holy smokes, I am sore.” But I haven’t been on an awesome climbing trip for a while. I haven’t even been on an awesome regular weekday trip to climb, myself, to my climbing gym, that I am a member of for far too long. I sit in the gym lobby and work a couple of nights a week, waiting for Anson to finish climbing. The schedule is just too stacked with other priorities right now for me to get the exercise I need, although I am trying to remedy that.

(And in fact, since it has taken me a couple of weeks to even finish writing this post, I did finally make it in for a nice evening session for the first time in [gulp] six months or more last week.)

Anyway, instead I was first sore because Jas and I helped my folks with some flood recovery chores, which included lifting furniture and bringing a refrigerator up a small set of steps. And then there was another week, too, where the lactic acid in the muscles was from helping get the oven up the same set of steps for them.

It is crazy how flood recovery forces contemplation. I mean you would expect it to bring the kind of contemplation of stuff that you normally associate with Marie Kondo.

Does this bring me joy? If not, I guess I don’t need to recover it.

And I guess you would expect it to bring contemplation of climate change, since every recovery decision you make is haunted by the specter of the next climate event.

Can I rebuild this in a way that is more flood tolerant? Should I use carpet here?”

I feel haunted by the specter of so many things right now. The other weekend, on the way back home, Jas and I listened to some episodes from Kai Ryssdal’s new season of the How We Survive podcast. It is absolutely surreal to me that we’re staring down the barrel of a second Trump presidential term, in a country where the Department of Defense, like the entire scientific community, agrees that human-caused climate change is a real threat that must be met head on and dealt with. Guys, the listening stations are sinking into the no-longer-permafrost. What is it going to take to make us wake up and change?

I was on the road last week, giving a couple of talks at my agency’s district offices. And I have been on the road every weekend between my house in Tallahassee in my parents’ place trying to help with flood recovery. I have burned a lot of gas. I’m still not sure I am saving the right things.

My parents are retired. They were both public school teachers and I like to think that for a lot of students, they were the kind of teachers that their students will remember. The marine science program that my mom used to head up got kids out on the local river and into the Gulf and introduced them to the kinds of things that hopefully they still care about. My dad taught hunter safety and archery in a community where a great many families hunt.

There was a big trailer parked outside their home for much of the last few months. One day, as I was leaving, I noticed that among the water damaged things were the cross stitched birth announcement my mom had made when I was born. It was a Beatrix Potter theme: My name and length and weight at birth, surrounded by Peter Rabbit and his family, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle and Tom Kitten. Beside it was my mom’s framed Master’s Degree diploma. Both things were wet enough that they will never be the same. I felt like I should try to save both things. Like I should pry the diploma out and see if I could dry it. Some of the embroidery floss in my birth announcement was apparently not color fixed to be washed in water. But, I thought, if the color ran, maybe it will wash out if I try to wash it. It was easy to pry the cross stitch out of the frame and toss it in the back of my car while resting in between tasks. I haven’t tried to fix the staining and color running yet, and I still feel like I made the wrong choice in leaving her diploma on the pile to be hauled away. I should have tried to save it, too.

How is it that there is still enough tension between birth announcements and graduate diplomas, as my daughters prepare for college that I have extra-tasty-crispy guilt over this choice of mine? How is it that almost certainly more real life friends of mine will see the Ballerina Farms latest homemaking posts on IG than will see anything that I write? This 2024 life is crazy. Helping mom and dad with the literal home-making of reinstalling appliances while the culture wars still rage about what the ideal of homemaking should be.

I hate what the flooding from hurricane Helene is doing to the community that I grew up in. In the country, it always seems like the ideological camps are more circled up than they are in suburban spaces like Tallahassee where people mix more as a matter of course. I hate that one of my aunts asked me whether my parents were going to build back after this flood. I hate that there is a subset of people online who blithely generalize that everyone who lives on the coast of Florida is just getting what was obviously coming to them. Don’t they see? Don’t they see that people who were flooded in Helene lived miles inland or feet higher than people who have been flooded in recent history. It has never been 100% vacation rental properties impacted in these recent disaster storms. And did y’all want the entirety of the coast of Florida to be short term rentals? It is already trending that way. A lot of investors are picking up properties that once were homes in the wake of this disaster and renovating them. It is easier to manage some properties as short term rentals that provide an income stream than it is to keep living in them. But what do we want our communities to be?

I was glad that there was never much question of my folks staying in their home, because that place has been an absolute anchor for me. A reminder of who I am and why I do what I do. But I know that even my intrepid mother looked at some properties in other states. There are plenty of reasons to consider it, even if, ultimately, the call of home is stronger.

I have a dream of moving back home at some point in the future, after the girls finish high school, but I have an addition to that dream now- I want to look at how much it would cost to put a tiny house on very sturdy stilts close to mom and dad. Building anything that will really last post-2024 is going to be a lot more expensive than it would have been before this watershed year. But we were always racking up these carbon emission debts. It’s going to take me a minute to re-calibrate to the realization that we are already living the climate disaster. But I am getting there. I wonder whether most of us will get there before it is truly too late.