Midnight Encounters

I was standing leaning against my car enjoying the night view of the stars overhead, while a cool winter Florida breeze blew through the mangroves, over the salt ponds and over  my bare skin. I wasn't quite sure if I was cold yet but I knew it was too soon to rein Rusty in as he snuffled through hurricane debris and sniffed the mangroves and chased his tail. Three o'clock in the morning on an apparently empty back road in the Lower Keys means you don't expect anyone to be around to run into your dog. Except that as I stood there looking at the stars and listening to the leaves rattle I heard a weird puffing sound accompanied by a  flat series of thumps.  What could that be? I asked myself as it got louder and closer in the pitch dark...

The reason I found myself on the road at that dark lonely hour was that I have been forced to do lots of overtime shifts this holiday season. I come home in the early hours to the usual rapturous welcome from my small brown dog, wide awake after several quiet hours of refreshing sleep alone at home and now ready to go for a walk. My old Labrador pictured above liked her twelve hours and Cheyenne was not much given to middle of the night walks but young Rusty is always ready. My current stretch of overtime shifts ending at 2 am is a tonic for him. So when I pull up under the house on the Vespa a small shadow detaches itself and we pile into the car and off we go. I enjoy star gazing at night and Rusty runs up and down some deserted piece of road which I have chosen with an eye to finding as little light pollution as possible, thus far from human habitation.

The back country of the Keys is pretty unvarying, a mixture of shrubs and salt water ponds bisected by a few roads, miles of darkness at night and distant lights scattered here and there, the only sound the wind and sometimes a delivery truck grinding down the Overseas Highway which is never more than a few miles away. In these flat lands sound carries on the southeast wind. So the other night  I drove out into the wilderness followed to my surprise by another car. Even more surprising was when a spot light came on and illuminated my car, and the inquiry as to whether I was OK? Actually I was not drunk, I wasn't speeding and I was simply walking my dog in the middle of the night. Odd but not illegal. Take care he said as he sped off to fight crime elsewhere in the county. 

Unlike about everyone I know I have no opinion on the second amendment, neither for nor against. As far as I am concerned feel free to own as may guns as you like though I choose not to so do. I prefer to go about my business not in fear of my neighbors and the idea of shooting someone is beyond my ability to imagine. I prefer to live by my wits. Equally  Rusty is a gentle dog though he does carry war wounds from his time on the streets of Homestead. He is missing a  tooth and he has a permanent scratch in his fur on his head. When I rescued him he had a terrible fear of large dogs and he always slept with one eye open. He'd have carried a  gun if he could, I have no doubt as he was a nervous wreck. He was irresistible in the ad for his adoption:

These days young Bobo has turned into Rusty a confident and outgoing dog who loves long walks and is much more self assured than you might expect from his miserable early life before thisisthedog plucked him off the streets of Homestead. Early on he developed a bond with me that he showed off one day when I was working outwith my trainer Sean. I had tied him outside the gym on his leash while I got on with sweating. Sean brought out some straps and was illustrating an exercise that involved me pulling against him  using heavy rubber straps. Rusty was having none of  it and he chewed through his leash and in an instant was at my side to protect me. Sean was impressed by his willingness to defend me and I was quite surprised, but he's done the same sort of thing when my wife is home alone with utility people and the like. He always puts himself between them and keeps an eye on her.

So there I was in the dark unarmed and without my bodyguard listening to the sound of some approaching thing, a bear perhaps or a zombie or some other being that threatened to harm me approaching with rasping breath and heavy footfalls. The stars were extraordinary especially as the moon has been in its new phase this past week and the sky has been a canopy of twinkling lights. I'm not an astronomer but I can see the Great Bear and thus find the North Star and off to the west I am pretty sure the line of Orion's Belt is lurking. One night recently I thought I saw the International Space Station flying across the sky, a fast moving unblinking spot of light, distinct from twinkling aircraft and stationary stars. All that stuff going on overhead and  hardly any light at ground level.

Finally in the cone of my flashlight I saw a man speed walking up the road. I apologized for blinding him and he apologized for not carrying a  light and he was gone past me back into the darkness the other side of me. He was an African American in a light colored shirt speed walking as though on an exercise program. He was gone before I had time to wish him a pleasant evening or morning. Weird, I thought, what an odd time of night to be getting exercise. Mind you I was out walking my dog...after a  fashion. Actually Rusty was off walking himself checking smelly hurricane damage. 

 

After about forty minutes the no-see-ums had woken up and were giving my ankles hell. I am told gin is an excellent way to discourage the little bastards from attacking but I had no gin and I was ready for bed. Rusty apparently was not. I whistled and he ignored me.  Except I suddenly heard the huffing and puffing again, as though summoned by my call. The exerciser was back! Sure enough in the cone of my flashlight there appeared the fast walker and I had time to see he was a young-ish black man, sweating, but this time he was followed by two yellow eyes.
"Hullo" I said. "I see you found my dog..."
"Your dog? he replied puzzled, "I don't like dogs." Good I thought, so much the better I'll have no fear of you kidnapping him then. I assured him Rusty was there right behind him and indeed my little protector was silently stalking the perceived threat. I opened the rear  car door and Rusty came up close still watching the walker before he jumped obediently into the car. It was oddly reassuring in the middle of the dark empty road to have my bodyguard there alongside me. 

The negative stereotypes of young African Americans are legion, and frankly I find them embarrassing. I suppose I should have been afraid of the young man but he was panting heavily from his forced march and I felt bad for him when he explained he wasn't actually exercising but he was out looking.
"Can you give me a ride home?" he asked panting. I laughed "Of course I can, but you have ride with my dog..." I put Rusty on the back seat and the panting man and I shook hands and exchanged names as you do. I asked what on earth he was doing out here in the wilderness without even a flashlight. He said he was looking for his girlfriend.
"I thought she might be up the road" he said. "At the boat ramp. But she wasn't." We sat in silence as I watched the road and Rusty sat up watching my passenger. My passenger looked out the side window which he'd opened no doubt to dissipate the smell of dog.

It was awkward of course but with all my time in a 911 center I know where people go when they walk off in a  huff and in a town like Key West filled with lonely people and hotel rooms revenge sex is a big part of the domestic calls we get. Out here in the middle of more or less nowhere I wondered what on earth my passenger thought was going on. He was sweating heavily and tired, partly I suspect from emotion. Wherever she was he had no clue but we both knew to suspect the worst. I was glad when I arrived at his front door and dropped him off. Good luck I said sharing his pain for one short moment.

When I told the story to my colleagues at work they looked at me as though I was crazy. I talked to a guy in the middle of the night and gave him a ride!  Never in life - they looked appalled. Actually the guy was perfectly pleasant and very worried and I was glad to help him out. But on the back seat I had my furry brown bodyguard so I think I was neither brave nor crazy to pick up a hitch hiker. Of more interest to me is what innocent explanation the missing girlfriend might have come up with to explain her disappearance. I bet it was an excellent version of events and I shall never know what it was. Maybe if Rusty and I go back some night she will walk by and tell us the other half of the story. Maybe.

Sailing Dilemmas

Originally I posted this story in 2008. A bit of time has passed since then.

Tale Of Two Heads

Emma and I, Punta Jutia, Cuba, February 2000

Modern day sailors have a saying that sums up what can be a lonely hobby and an alienating way of life:

You can't get a woman to lie down in a boat she can't stand up in.

Which pretty much sums up the dilemma of about 95 percent of men who dream of taking off on a boat. I have sailed a fair bit in my life and I have always pretty much lived on the boats in which I sailed. I was helped in this by virtue of the fact I lived in California, although Santa Cruz is far from tropical and winters were cold damp months with little prospect of raising sails on Monterey Bay until spring. I decided early on I needed a small boat that I could handle alone as I had discovered that a larger boat with a bigger cabin was an absolute bear to deal with on the large swells and strong winds of the Pacific Ocean. I dreamed of tropical breezes and warm waters and had I known of him I might have become a Buffett Parrothead in those early years. I yearned for a change in latitude. I bought a boat like this, a twenty foot long Flicka by Pacific Seacraft, a boat so cultish it has a website of its own whence I took this picture lacking one of my own boat close to hand:

It was small, salty sailboat, a tried and tested cruiser on long ocean passages. From the same friends of Flicka website I found this picture that summarizes superbly the tight but very agreeable living conditions found on this micro cruiser:

This picture looks, if I remember right, to be an original advertisement from the factory in Santa Ana California,also found on the Friends of Flicka website (Google Flicka 20 for a fabulous resource for these amazing boats). The settee up front that turns into a bed, a compact kitchen to the left, a table that folded out to eat off and a couch to the right with a reading lamp. All that and a single cylinder diesel engine was my home for a dozen years. The door to the right closed off the head, the marine toilet that is the other important feature in any boat that hopes to be a home to a woman. Even if the cabin is less than ten feet (3 meters) long. With full headroom.

Turtle Bay, Baja California, Mexico, October 1998. Baja Ha Ha Rally.

Eventually I could stand it no longer and I got a friend to trailer my boat, in effect my entire life, to Texas and I took off around the Gulf Coast bound for the tropical islands. I got as far as Tampa where I stopped to take up a very flattering job offer. I met a woman and she could stand up in my cabin, so we took off together and sailed for the Bahamas. Wonderful stuff no doubt, very romantic, but I was ill equipped mentally to travel alone, never mind in company in that tiny cabin, and our personalities didn't mesh very well. They didn't mesh at all after a few weeks, and by the time we had reached the cruising hub of Georgetown I was ready to put her on a plane home.East Hollandaise Cays, San Blas Islands, Panama, November 1999.

The Flicka was a very modern boat in some respects and the toilet was one of those features. In nautical lore a toilet is known as the "head" in American sailing, or the "heads" in Britain. This is because in the good old days of Nelson's Navy, sailors held onto the cattheads and swung their bottoms out over the void to take a crap. Modern sailors prefer the comfort of an indoor apparatus, and in order to encourage women (again!) pleasure boats carry around a throne one third the size of a land bound commode. The toilet is fed by a complexity of plumbing that boggles the mind. That's because we can't dump our waste just anywhere anymore and we have to flush with saltwater usually and carry the contents around in a tank until it can be emptied out at sea or into a marina's dump station. Yes, imagine that. All those pretty boats you see at anchor are hauling around gallons of fermenting sewage in their bowels. Nice huh?

A neighbor heading north. Cabo Gracias a Dios, Western Caribbean, January 2000.

It happened one night at anchor I wanted to pump out the bilges at the bottom of the boat. Which is the place where water, seeping in through the propeller shaft, accumulates harmlessly until it gets too full and has to be removed. I opened the locker and started pumping. "I don't see anything," my pretty young girlfriend announced as she stood at the stern (the back of the boat) watching the sun set over the Exuma Islands. I pumped harder. "It must be coming out," I grunted. "I can feel the pump pushing the water out." She continued to deny it and I continued to lambast her in my mind as a dolt. I pumped some more. It did occur to me suddenly that the water level in the bilge wasn't going down but was in fact rising. Impossible! But then with a whiff of my nose I realised what had happened.Pretending to be a mechanic. Inside Belize's Barrier Reef. January 2000.

I always carried numerous spare parts to fix the toilet, which though convoluted, was fairly simple to keep operating provided the right spares were to hand. And spares for frou frou marine heads are not to be found in Third World economies where buckets do just as well. I had replaced the diaphragm in the pump earlier in the day as it had developed a leak and it no longer had the suction to clear the bilge. What I had forgotten to do was switch the pump back into it's overboard mode and with a few firm strokes I had emptied most of our holding tank into the unconfined space in the bottom of our little floating home. The stench was appalling. My soon-to-be-ex girlfriend was not happy. Though I dread needles I am quite at my ease dealing with sewage and it took a while but eventually the bilge was clear and the antiseptic whiff of chlorine assailed our nostrils as we lay in bed wondering why I was such a dork. Our relationship never recovered and at every future gaffe I made, and there were plenty, the night I poured our shit into the bottom of the boat was a night to remember. It happened 20 years ago and I have yet to forget. It was a learning experience but I am afraid I cannot say no one  was hurt on that learning curve. That it was my fault doesn't make it any the better.

Playa Culebra, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, January 1999.

After that I returned to Florida, hung out in Key West, lost the woman to another man and eventually put the boat up on the hard and went back to California. I also lost the urge to travel by boat at least temporarily, and a little voice in the back of my head was insistently telling me to go back to Santa Cruz where happiness lay. I was miserable in Fort Myers with she of the recent cruise, so I loaded up my Yamaha 650, said good bye to the Flicka, now an albatross of unhappy memories and went west. I was 34 years old.Figuring out the laundry with Emma looking on. Puerto Corinto, Nicaragua. December 1998.

I met a woman and we got married and I settled down in suburban married bliss. For about five minutes. After we were comfortable in our homes and in our jobs with a convertible in the garage and a Honda Goldwing alongside (not my kind of bike I discovered) and with two stray dogs happy to have found stability, I got the urge to sail away. This time my wife dived in with me and we bought a bigger boat, a thirty four foot (11 meter) catamaran with all mod cons- standing head room, queen sized bed, diesel engine, refrigerator, and a toilet, this time with indoor shower.Miki G, our Gemini 105 catamaran on the beach for maintenance. Costa Rica, January 1999.

"I called the boss and told him I needed a six month sabbatical," my wife said in one of the only momentous decisions we've ever taken without one consulting the other. "I guess we're taking off for Panama this fall." And so we did, with every kind of trepidation and bad memory loaded in my mind we sailed to San Diego in August 1998 and launched ourselves with a hundred other sailors south to Mexico. With two large dogs on board.Eugene Debs enduring another passage on Miki G. He loved arriving. I still miss him daily.

We loaded the boat with food and spare parts and I made sure to carry at least three sets of spare valves, springs and seals for the sole toilet as my wife, despite her many qualities, doesn't like to pee in the bushes. Ever. We sailed,we walked the dogs in the most unlikely places.We ate odd food and introduced a whole continent of unsuspecting peasants to the notion that dogs can be members of families too, just like children. Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman had the time of their lives. They heated sailing especially as we had no dog toilets on board and despite our best encouragement they would never go on deck. But they loved arriving in new places and chasing new and unusual forms of wildlife. It was an idyll afloat for nearly two years.

Joseph Conrad Country. Bahia Honda in the roadless west coast of Panama. December 1999.

We had mad adventures, sailing and motoring from Mexico, which was relatively affluent to the poorer and smaller countries to the south.The further we went the fewer boats we saw. Many turned off to cross the Pacific, an option we could not follow with Debs and Emma on board, but we were keen to see more of Latin America. And we did, in and out of deserted beaches, islands and solitary peninsulas. We carried food and water and books and took time to stop and smell the seaweed. The dogs got more attention than they could ever have expected in their former distressed lives and we learned to seek out and find dog food everywhere we went.Welcome to El Salvador. Far nicer than US officials. La Union, Gulf of Fonseca. 1999.

And then the head broke. And I couldn't fix it! There we were in paradise with a toilet that wouldn't flush. All the chirping cicadas and croaking bullfrogs in the Eden surrounding us couldn't disguise the fact that we were royally screwed. I disassembled the pump and put it back together. I read the instructions again and again. I reset the torque, I fiddled with the spring, and I cleaned the ball a second and a third time. I greased everything with waterproof silicone grease. It pumped smoothly and powerfully but no water flushed into the bowl.A beautiful day turned within hours into a ghastly storm. And Punta Gorda, Belize, has no harbor. We sailed for our lives back to Guatemala. January 2000.

I felt three inches tall. Here I was the great provider unable to assure a free flow of fresh water into the bowl. Civilization was lost and the airport at Liberia had flights to the US. I struggled some more and the pump pumped but no water came in. I sent my wife into the water with a screwdriver and she started poking the hole from the outside to dislodge any marine growth that might be blocking the pipe. "All clear" she mumbled through the fiberglass hull as I sweated and pumped in the hell hole inside.Ferries serving small villages between Colombia and Panama. January 2000.

I sat back completely defeated. My wife got back in the boat, quietly waiting while I wondered what the hell to do. So I did the only thing I could do. I pulled the effing pump apart one more time.I expected nothing but sometimes stupidity repeats itself and I had to get the thrice damned thing working. Instead I found something.Gas station, pull up in your dinghy. Rio Diablo, San Blas Islands, Panama. December 1999.

"Dammit!" I said, or something stronger. "Why the hell did you put a tampon in the toilet?" I couldn't believe my eyes there was a little gray wad wedged in the corner of the pump inlet pipe, blocking the water flow. We never ever put anything into the toilet that we hadn't eaten first, for years, an inflexible rule on our boat to avoid just these scenes. "I didn't!" she protested and I started to think terrible thoughts about women and their protestations of innocence. Someone had to be blamed for this nightmare that had reduced me to quivering incoherence.Technical sailing in the Panama Canal. September 1999. Three months before the handover.

I pulled the little tampon out of the pump and discovered that indeed it was a fish, a very dead fish. "See!" my wife laughed at me cheerfully as I ruefully reassembled the pump for the sixteenth time and found myself immensely cheered to see fresh clean salt water swirling once again around the porcelain bowl. My momentary loss of faith in myself, in my wife, in modern marine plumbing was banished. We had civilization back.Thanksgiving 1999. On a deserted San Blas island, and food flown in from Panama City!

The only thing I can figure is the fish must have taken to hiding in the inlet pipe and got sucked up when I pumped the pump blocking the flow of water. So when I sent my wife to poke the inlet with the screwdriver she covered his emergency exit and on my final effort to suck in water I sucked him into the pump to his death. Frankly he deserved it as his antics had made me damn near crazy.

From the road. Contadora Islands, Panama. Thank you Anna and Ian of Joss (now Gecko). 

And thus it was we sailed on to new adventures, exploring deserted island etc.. etc... with a fully functioning toilet. The beauty of it was that though I got short tempered and irritated beyond belief, and I spread the irritable metaphoric shit around by myself, my sailing companion on this occasion, thought the whole exercise was a tremendous joke and a great opportunity to go for a swim. So I guess I have got some things right in my old age. Like the company I keep when I am around marine toilets. I managed on the second occasion to find a woman that still loved me when I was an idiot.End of one adventure, beginning of another. Miki G at Key West, February 2000.

Imagine that, this woman sailed with me for two years and has since endured countless road trips and adventures in dozens of uncomfortable places and she still likes living with me. It takes a marine toilet I guess to test a woman's mettle, as much as the head room on a boat.

Christmas

A few images of Christmas past from around Key West:

Looking at lights with Cheyenne in 2012:

Christmas Eve

Sunrise over the Old Bahia Honda Bridge:

I find myself holding down the fort at work with several people on leave, sick or retired. Thus I find myself unable to leave town so my wife has gone to see friends across the country leaving Rusty and I to loot the fridge and spend the hours not working as best we can together.We will manage:

The Christmas party of note this year was given by my wife's adult education students who laid on a spread of epic proportions. We had Venezuelan arepas and Hungarian pancakes, Vietnamese chicken so hot it burned and Cuban yuca and shredded pork, accompanied by rice from Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam and Colombia, each different. My wife contributed Jewish kugel from her mother's recipe. We had Nicaraguan natilla, a  rice pudding custard for dessert along with flan and some jam roll ups which were too good to put down. 

I find myself rotating between sleep and work these days facing the prospect of no days off before early January and as there is now some flu type bug floating around I wonder how many of us will fall sick too. I took a long summer break so I find it fitting I am sticking around to work nights when others value this time to be away. I am also enjoying this interlude of life under siege, measuring up to the challenge powering along with caffeine, waiting for things to get back to normal in the New Year.

New Year's Eve will be the culmination with the usual dropping events at midnight and one hopes crowds under control and a spirit of relief that the year 2017, one for the record books in so many difficult ways, is over. Soon Rusty and I mark two years together and despite all difficulties he is in the driveway at dawn waiting to greet me when I get home. His joy never grows old.

Happy Christmas.

Mangroves

It occurred to me recently that I have been walking my various dogs in mangroves for years. This year Hurricane Irma brought home how resilient these wiry little bushes are. They grow in mud, on rocks, out of seawater and they bud green leaves and 140 mph winds mean nothing to them. 

 Nowadays behind the wall of green isolated houses on stilts can be seen here and there, looking like islands, but actually planted on roads through the scrub land that I am pleased to describes as "woods" for want of a better term.

This stuff is absolute  hell to walk through as there is often a layer of seawater underneath the canopy, and the roots  are twisted like the most inextricable maze you have ever seen and putting a foot down is impossible. Rusty has little difficulty though. I walk the trail and he keeps up sniffing this way and that.

I follow tracks and trails where I find them, and you can see why waterproof mud proof footwear is a good idea. Sometimes its puddled rainwater and sometimes the water is the effect of high tides. But the land here is so flat that water spreads everywhere and easily too.

One thing about these mangrove swamps is that there is not much variation and the views stretch only as far as your eyes are above the leaves. There are no valleys or hills, no tall copses or burbling streams. The view is uniform.

For me the mangroves are a quiet retreat. I almost never see anyone out here though sometimes a cyclist follows a trail and I have met people camping and even some people romping four wheel drive vehicles on the trails. Rusty and I take only pictures and leave only footprints in these places. 

Like so much of Florida the back country here is rather delicate and understated and for those seeking granite cliffs and cathedrals of trees this stuff is pretty barren. In some ways it resembles heather on a hillside or a green desert, a place where the wind whistles past your ears filling the silence with silent noise. 

 Florida's beauty I have always said is subtle.

 Unless you are a dog and can enjoy the chance to come and go as you please through the mangroves.

 I have a thoughtful dog. He puts me to shame sometimes as I imagine him thinking back to the gruesome start he had in life. Not many humans would be as cheerful and compliant and easy going as Rusty after his troubled start.

Eye On Miami Rising Waters

I read the Miami blog Eye On Miami and it is in my blog list  so no surprise I was intrigued by this story, an analysis of a piece written for the Guardian newspaper pondering a rather damp future for South Florida. It's hard to imagine a  future Miami reduced to survival status similar in many respects to the ongoing  apocalypse that is Puerto Rico, but here is some food for thought if you can stomach it. I am planning not to be in South Florida certainly and most likely not on the planet at all by the time this lot comes to pass, but those of you with offspring who want them to have a future might want to force yourselves to contemplate who you' rather believe: politicians or scientists? 

  

Monday, December 18, 2017

Miami, climate change, and Jeff Goodell in the UK Guardian ... by gimleteye

Jeff Goodell's closing lines: "As our world floods, it is likely to cause immense suffering and devastation. It is also likely to bring people together and inspire creativity and camaraderie in ways that no one can foresee. Either way, the water is coming."

Goodell's optimism that climate change is "likely to bring people together" and to "inspire creativity and camaraderie in ways that no one can foresee" is deeply wrong, and citizens, taxpayers and voters need to pay attention.

The rise of the radical right in American politics -- fueled by the fossil fuel supply chain and including large corporate power arrayed around the US Chamber of Commerce and industry trade associations -- is already a response to global warming.

I've written this before: there are few deniers of climate change in corporate America, although the only ones speaking out about it now are those with profits directly in the path of climate change impacts: the insurance and re-insurance industries.

The latest evidence of Trump administration officials editing and censoring the use of particular words, like "science-based" or "climate change", is just a reflection of how deeply determined corporate America is to lock down prerogatives and benefits and wealth before global warming breaches public welfare, health and safety.

It is a mass stampede of the wealthiest corners of commerce and industry, and a Republican Party leadership willing to cover for it with disinformation and a message machine created by Rupert Murdoch and executed through the Fox News network all the way through to the fringe crazies like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.

This is the world we live in. Today, Trump is giving an "important" national security speech and is dropping climate change as a national security threat. So why would things somehow improve -- as Goodell seems to suggest -- when climate change impacts really hit in decades to come?

Is it within the capacity of voters to change course? Is it possible for voters to acknowledge the dimwits they elected to public office will not protect them or their families and that we need to empower a new generation of leaders who will decisively deal with the emerging threats to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Goodell is right in his assessment that there is enough sea level rise cooked into atmospheric changes we caused to linger for thousands of years. That is not an excuse for voters to applaud and approve elected officials making the world a much more dangerous place.

Our generations will be judged very harshly for holding the keys to reversal of climate change but did too little or nothing. I hope I'm still alive when that tide begins to change.

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From the Guardian Newspaper:

The year is 2037. This is what happens when the hurricane hits Miami
The climate is warming and the water is rising. In his new book, Jeff Goodell argues that sea-level rise will reshape our world in ways we can only begin to imagine
Sunday 17 December 2017
UK Guardian

After the hurricane hit Miami in 2037, a foot of sand covered the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage came not from the hurricane’s 175-mile-an-hour winds, but from the twenty-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city.


In South Beach, historic Art Deco buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A seventeen-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay.

Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than three hundred people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; thirteen people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread—falsely, it turned out—that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant twenty-four miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and had sent a radioactive cloud floating over the city.


The president, of course, said that Miami would be back, that Americans did not give up, that the city would be rebuilt better and stronger than it had been before. But it was clear to those not fooling themselves that this storm was the beginning of the end of Miami as a booming twenty-first-century city.

All big hurricanes are disastrous. But this one was unexpectedly bad. With sea levels more than a foot higher than they’d been at the dawn of the century, much of South Florida was wet and vulnerable even before the storm hit.

Because of the higher water, the storm surge pushed deeper into the region than anyone had imagined it could, flowing up drainage canals and flooding homes and strip malls several miles from the coast. Despite newly elevated runways, Miami International Airport was shut down for ten days. Salt water shorted out underground electrical wiring, leaving parts of Miami-Dade County dark for weeks.

Municipal drinking-water wells were contaminated with salt water. In soggy neighborhoods, mosquitoes carrying Zika and dengue fever viruses hatched (injecting male mosquitoes with the Wolbachia bacteria, which public health officials had once hoped would inhibit the mosquitoes’ ability to transmit the viruses, had failed when the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry the diseases developed immunity to the bacteria).

In Homestead, a low-lying working-class city in southern Miami-Dade County which had been flattened by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, thousands of abandoned homes were bulldozed because they were deemed a public health hazard. In Miami Shores, developers approached city officials with proposals to buy out entire blocks of waterlogged apartments, then dredge the streets and turn them into canals lined with houseboats. But financing for these projects always fell through.

Before the storm hit, damage from rising seas had already pushed city and county budgets to the brink. State and federal money was scarce too, in part because Miami was seen by many Americans as a rich, self-indulgent city that had ignored decades of warnings about building too close to the water. Attempts had been made to armor the shore with seawalls and elevate buildings, but only a small percentage of the richest property owners took protective action. The beaches were mostly gone too.

The Feds decided they couldn’t afford to spend $100 million every few years to pump in fresh sand, and without replenishment, the ever-higher tides carried the beaches away.

By the late 2020s, the only beaches that remained were privately maintained oases of sand in front of expensive hotels. The hurricane took care of those, leaving the hotels and condo towers perched on limestone crags. Tourists disappeared.

After the hurricane, the city became a mecca for slumlords, spiritual healers, and lawyers. In the parts of the county that were still inhabitable, only the wealthiest could afford to insure their homes. Mortgages were nearly impossible to get, mostly because banks didn’t believe the homes would be there in thirty years.

Still, the waters kept rising, nearly a foot each decade. Each big storm devoured more of the coastline, pushing the water deeper and deeper into the city. The skyscrapers that had gone up during the boom years were gradually abandoned and used as staging grounds for drug runners and exotic-animal traffickers. Crocodiles nested in the ruins of the Frost Museum of Science. Still, the waters kept rising.

By the end of the twenty-first century, Miami became something else entirely: a popular diving spot where people could swim among sharks and barnacled SUVs and explore the wreckage of a great American city.

That is, of course, merely one possible vision of the future. There are brighter ways to imagine it—and darker ways. But I am a journalist, not a Hollywood screenwriter. In this book, I want to tell a true story about the future we are creating for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. It begins with this: the climate is warming, the world’s great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.

My own interest in this story began with an actual hurricane. Shortly after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, I visited the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the neighborhoods that had been hardest hit by flooding from the storm.

Even if we ban coal, gas, and oil tomorrow, we’re not going to be able to turn down the earth’s thermostat immediately

The water had receded by the time I arrived, but the neighborhood already smelled of mold and rot. The power was out, the shops were closed. I saw broken trees, abandoned cars, debris scattered everywhere, people hauling ruined furniture out of basement apartments. Dark waterlines were visible on many shop windows and doors. The surge in the East River had been more than nine feet high, overwhelming the seawall and inundating the low-lying parts of Lower Manhattan. As I walked around, watching people slowly put their lives back together, I wondered what would have happened if, instead of flooding the city and then receding in a few hours, the Atlantic Ocean had come in and stayed in.

I have been writing about climate change for more than a decade, but seeing the flooding on the Lower East Side made it visceral for me (I hadn’t visited New Orleans until several years after Katrina hit—the TV images of the flooding there, catastrophic as they were, did not affect me as strongly as my walk through the Lower East Side). A year or so before Sandy hit, I had interviewed NASA scientist James Hansen, the godfather of climate change science, who told me that if nothing was done to slow the burning of fossil fuels, sea levels could be as much as ten feet higher by the end of the century. At the time, I didn’t grasp the full implications of this. After Sandy, I did.

Soon after my visit to Lower Manhattan, I found myself in Miami, learning about the porous limestone foundation the city is built on and the flatness of the topography. During high tide, I waded knee-deep through dark ocean water in several Miami Beach neighborhoods; I saw high water backing up into working-class neighborhoods far to the west, near the border of the Everglades. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that I was standing in a modern-day Atlantis-in-the-making. It became clear to me just how poorly our world is prepared to deal with the rising waters. Unlike, say, a global pandemic, sea-level rise is not a direct threat to human survival. Early humans had no problem adapting to rising seas—they just moved to higher ground. But in the modern world, that’s not so easy. There’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the Fossil Fuel Age—the housing developments on the coasts, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the airports—that makes us most vulnerable.

Rising and falling seas represent one of the ancient rhythms of the earth, the background track that has played during the entire four-billion-year life of the planet. Scientists have understood this for a long time. Even in relatively recent history, sea levels have fluctuated wildly, driven by wobbles in the Earth’s orbit that change the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, during the last interglacial period, when the temperature of the Earth was very much like it is today, sea levels were twenty to thirty feet higher. Then, twenty thousand years ago, during the peak of the last ice age, sea levels were four hundred feet lower.

What’s different today is that humans are interfering with this natural rhythm by heating up the planet and melting the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Until just a few decades ago, most scientists believed these ice sheets were so big and so indomitable that not even seven billion humans with all their fossil-fuel-burning toys could have much impact on them in the short term. Now they know better.

In the twentieth century, the oceans rose about six inches. But that was before the heat from burning fossil fuels had much impact on Greenland and Antarctica (about half of the recorded sea-level rise in the twentieth century came from the expansion of the warming oceans). Today, seas are rising at more than twice the rate they did in the last century. As warming of the Earth increases and the ice sheets begin to feel the heat, the rate of sea-level rise is likely to increase rapidly.

A 2017 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States’ top climate science agency, says global sea-level rise could range from about one foot on the low end to more than eight feet by 2100. Depending on how much we heat up the planet, it will continue rising for centuries after that.

But if you live on the coast, what matters more than the height the seas rise to is the rate at which they rise. If the water rises slowly, it’s not such a big deal. People will have time to elevate roads and buildings and build seawalls. Or move away. It is likely to be disruptive but manageable. Unfortunately, Mother Nature is not always so docile. In the past, the seas have risen in dramatic pulses that coincide with the sudden collapse of ice sheets. After the end of the last ice age, there is evidence that the water rose about thirteen feet in a single century. If that were to occur again, it would be a catastrophe for coastal cities around the world, causing hundreds of millions of people to flee from the coastlines and submerging trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate and infrastructure.

The best way to save coastal cities is to quit burning fossil fuels (if you’re still questioning the link between human activity and climate change, you’re reading the wrong book). But even if we ban coal, gas, and oil tomorrow, we’re not going to be able to turn down the Earth’s thermostat immediately. A good fraction of the CO2 emitted today will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years. That means that even if we did reduce CO2 tomorrow, we can’t shut off the warming from the CO2 we’ve already dumped into the air. “The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge,” scientist David Archer writes. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”

For sea-level rise, the slow response of the Earth’s climate system has enormous long-term implications. Even if we replaced every SUV on the planet with a skateboard and every coal plant with a solar panel and could magically reduce global carbon pollution to zero by tomorrow, because of the heat that has already built up in the atmosphere and the oceans, the seas would not stop rising—at least until the Earth cooled off, which could take centuries.

An aerial shot of Miami Beach and Fisher Island.
An aerial shot of Miami Beach and Fisher Island. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
However, if we don’t end the fossil fuel party, we’re headed for more than eight degrees Fahrenheit of warming—and with that, all bets are off. We could get four feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century—or we could get thirteen feet. The long-term consequences are even more alarming. If we burn all the known reserves of coal, oil, and gas on the planet, seas will likely rise by more than two hundred feet in the coming centuries, submerging virtually every major coastal city in the world.

The tricky thing about dealing with sea-level rise is that it’s impossible to witness by just hanging out at the beach for a few weeks. Even in the worst-case scenarios, the changes will occur over years and decades and centuries, not seconds and minutes and hours. It’s exactly the kind of threat that we humans are genetically ill equipped to deal with. We have evolved to defend ourselves from a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth, but we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time.

One architect I met while researching this book joked that with enough money, you can engineer your way out of anything. I suppose it’s true. If you had enough money, you could raise or rebuild every street and building in Miami by ten feet and the city would be in pretty good shape for the next century or so. But we do not live in a world where money is no object, and one of the hard truths about sea-level rise is that rich cities and nations can afford to build seawalls, upgrade sewage systems, and elevate critical infrastructure.

Poor cities and nations cannot. But even for rich countries, the economic losses will be high. One recent study estimated that with six feet of sea-level rise, nearly $1 trillion worth of real estate in the United States will be underwater, including one in eight homes in Florida. If no significant action is taken, global damages from sea-level rise could reach $100 trillion a year by 2100.

But it is not just money that will be lost. Also gone will be the beach where you first kissed your boyfriend; the mangrove forests in Bangladesh where Bengal tigers thrive; the crocodile nests in Florida Bay; Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley; St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice; Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina; America’s biggest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia; NASA’s Kennedy Space Center; graves on the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania; the slums of Jakarta, Indonesia; entire nations like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; and, in the not-so-distant future, Mar-a-Lago, the summer White House of President Donald Trump. Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

The real x factor here is not the vagaries of climate science, but the complexity of human psychology. At what point will we take dramatic action to cut CO2 pollution? Will we spend billions on adaptive infrastructure to prepare cities for rising waters—or will we do nothing until it is too late? Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?

No one knows how our economic and political system will deal with these challenges. The simple truth is, human beings have become a geological force on the planet, with the power to reshape the boundaries of the world in ways we didn’t intend and don’t entirely understand. Every day, little by little, the water is rising, washing away beaches, eroding coastlines, pushing into homes and shops and places of worship.

As our world floods, it is likely to cause immense suffering and devastation. It is also likely to bring people together and inspire creativity and camaraderie in ways that no one can foresee. Either way, the water is coming. As Hal Wanless, a geologist at the University of Miami, told me in his deep Old Testament voice as we drove toward the beach one day, “If you’re not building a boat, then you don’t understand what’s happening here.”

The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell is out now in the US and will be published by Black Inc in the UK in February (£17.99)