Re-Build? Re-think.
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Foundations and pilings are all that remain of brick buildings and a boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J., Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012, after they were destroyed when a powerful storm that started out as Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the East Coast on Monday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)(Credit: AP)
Here’s a piece that I wrote that appeared here in Salon.com over the past weekend. (Despite the fact that Bill is visiting and making me drink way too much.)
Rebuilding is Madness
“No one could have predicted this.”
Those were the words of President Bush after Katrina, and as soon as they came out of his mouth you could almost imagine a hundred coastal scientists shaking their heads all at once, thinking, no sir, this is exactly what we predicted. So, too, New York City last week, though honestly — and I know that this isn’t what people suffering right now want to hear — a lot of the predictions painted a picture that was a lot worse. Water higher, winds wilder, buildings down.
Where I live we are used to such beatings. While I’ve lived on the Atlantic Coast for the better part of my life, it wasn’t until I moved to a barrier island off of North Carolina that I started to think hard about hurricanes. That thinking progressed, as thought often does, by way of metaphor. One day I was kayaking from the island I called home, Wrightsville Beach, over to our sister island to the south, the uninhabited Masonboro, a nature preserve which, bolstered by its backside marsh, still handled hurricanes in the old fashioned way. Pancake flat and nearly treeless, Masonboro doesn’t look particularly hardy, but its healthy marshes allow it to receive and interact with storms in ways my developed island could not: sand spilling over the island and the marsh growing, the island gradually but constantly migrating landward. It is through this sort of elemental rope-a-dope that the coastal islands have always interacted with storms, water rushing over land, sands breaking down and reforming, those sands retreating to the marsh on its backside, rebuilding in a new place, giving and taking.
My cluttered island, by contrast, looked decidedly fragile as I kayaked back toward it. In fact, paddling home, a strange metaphor came to mind. With its flat treeless land and tall buildings, the island looked like nothing so much as a dinner table full of empty plates and bottles after a party, waiting, I thought, for an angry drunk to come along and sweep it clean with his arm. Of course the hurricane is the angry drunk.
To read the rest please visit Salon here: http://www.salon.com/writer/david_gessner/
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 6
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[An ongoing story, 500 words at a time. This week’s episode written on an airplane between Buffalo, New York, and Wilmington, North Carolina. To start at the beginning, click here.]
The Weight of Light
Episode 6
“The Need Shall Not”
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“One and all,” someone said halfway around the world.
“Then with no further ado,” said Mr. Ricketts.
Signatures were appended to documents in three conference rooms. The fax machine beeped and whirred. “Did you get my gift?” One of the Shanghai set said. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday (and Sunday): Bill and Dave go Camping
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Hewlitt River Marsh (behind Dave’s house)
Sandy and Climate Change
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hurricane Sandy in the Context of Climate Change
Posted by Milkweed Editions here on 10/29/2012
A couple of years ago David Gessner traveled the Atlantic Coast and pondered the research of Orrin Pilkey, one of the country’s leading scientists studying coastal geology. What would happen if a super-charged Atlantic hurricane struck the densely populated East Coast? Worrisome trends in the environment, industry, and population distribution are at the heart of The Tarball Chronicles, the book Gessner would later write. His speculation was prescient: Embodied in Hurricane Sandy, some of his fears are coming true.
Please take a moment to read this excerpt from The Tarball Chronicles. It describes how climate change is poised to vex the people of the Eastern Seaboard for years to come—unless we act swiftly and plan strategically.
From “Atlantis”:
I am not in the business of predicting the future, but I will say this: it’s only a matter of time until what happened to New Orleans during Katrina happens to another city. Miami is an obvious candidate, but there is another, even more high-profile city that is ripe for flooding. At the end of our tour of the Outer Banks, Orrin Pilkey said something that stuck in my head:
“Let’s say the seas really rise seven feet. That’s not a prediction, mind you, but a working figure I’ve now arrived at. If I were in charge of things that is the figure I would use. It’s smart to be ready for the worst. The official prediction now is a meter but I think it’s too conservative. I would act as if the seas would rise seven feet by 2100
“If sea level rise really does get to six or seven feet we aren’t going to be worrying about a few beach houses,” he continued. “We are going to be worrying about Manhattan and Boston.” Continue reading →
The Complete Romney Set
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
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Did you miss a Mitt? For those who have been collecting their Romneys piecemeal, here is a chance to own the whole set!
And after I post this I will head to the polls for early voting. I face a tough decision: Do I vote for the guy I want to win or the guy I want to cartoon?
Here’s today’s offering:
And below please find the the Complete Romney Collection….
Bad Advice Wednesday: Stop Doing That!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I visited a physical therapist after my neck surgery, and he was a great help as I recovered from that trauma. While I was there, what the heck, I asked about a chronic, painful issue I was having with my elbow. Not from tennis, not from skiing, not from softball, not even from typing–I hadn’t been doing those things since my neck injury. No, my elbow problem–nothing to do with my spine–was the result of hitting it on the door frame as I walked into the very, very familiar bathroom at my house. It’s an old place, and that doorway is narrow, and I just judged it wrong, repeatedly judged it wrong and smacked my elbow, so often, in fact, that I’d raised a bony lump on my right wing, painful, and sticking out the way it was, even more likely to get banged. I told Dennis the P.T. about this. He didn’t even have to think, just shot back his advice: “Stop doing that!” We laughed, but he was serious, and he was right. He even had instructions: “Think about how you go through that door and go through that door a different way! Slow down, tuck your arms in. Or, Bill, just pause and think before you go in there!” And that’s what I did, stopped hitting that door frame with my elbow, and now after years of chronic pain, my elbow is fine. So that’s my advice for today, with thanks to a great professional: “Stop doing that!” Whatever it is that’s making you hurt, whatever it is that’s keeping you from doing what you want to do, whether it’s writing, reading, thinking, making, or being, whatever you’re doing that isn’t for the good? Stop! Stop right now! Stop doing that! Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Richard Gilbert
Wild Ducks: How an Essay of the Empty Nest was Hatched
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Claire Gilbert at eleven, sledding with her puppy Jack (January 1998)
The past few years, working on a memoir of my experiences farming in Appalachia, I’ve generated tons of material—twice, 500 pages—and have spun some passages into stand-alone pieces. The published ones include an essay on my hired hand who died; another about a legendary pond-builder with a tragic secret; one about the historic first meeting of my future wife and my father; yet another about my father’s return to farming in retirement and his decline and death. Continue reading →
Buckeyes
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here’s a guest post from one of our favorite writers, Joe Wilkins:
Buckeyes
On this bright-cool mid-May afternoon we are lazing on the front lawn, my three-year-old son and I. For a time we were rolling a ball back and forth, then we read through our stack of books, now we are inspecting leaves and pinecones and the brittle remnants of last fall’s winter-bitten buckeyes. Up the block the school bus settles to a stop. The yellow doors fold back, and the neighborhood children slip off and knot on the sidewalk. The bus whines to speed, and Walter rises, entranced, watching the bus glide by us and on down the hill, the husks of buckeyes forgotten at his feet. Despite the many and varied play options we’ve offered—dolls, trains, puzzles, garden tools, a kitchen set—Walter is all boy. He is unreasonably fascinated with busses, semi-trucks, and tractors. He likes to wrestle and stomp mudpuddles, chew sticks. At the park, he runs and runs the bases.
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light: Episode 5
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[Episode 5 of on ongoing story, 500 words at a time. Eventually we’ll have a category where the whole thing can be read in order, but for now, scroll down to start with Episode One and read through to this point!]
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The Weight of Light
Episode 5
“Freckles”
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Mr. Rickets office turned out to be the entire 61st floor of the Branch building on 57th street, quiet and softly lit, elegant work stations, elegantly dressed people at work, mahogany everywhere, including every scrap of trim and all the many bookshelves in the conference room, which was outfitted with a large hidden screen upon which a Cisco systems interface showed a pair of plushly similar conference rooms waiting empty, one with stainless steel trim, Ted noticed, the other black stone. Continue reading →
