Excerpt from Nightshining
BY JENNIFER KABAT
My second flood comes five years after the first. My father has been dead a year, and this deluge arrives on the wings of a storm with a woman’s name, Irene; and here a woman dies. The building she is in, a tiny rental cabin attached to a motel, is swept away. Rain falls in so many inches an hour. The governor is stranded here. He was on his way to New York City after visiting a dam twenty-five miles north on the Schoharie Creek. The rain is too much for his helicopter to fly, so he and his retinue are detoured via my village in a black SUV. The fire department performs swift boat rescues on Main Street. Main Street is a river. Main Street is normally two hundred feet from the actual river, which is called the East Branch, being the eastern finger of the Delaware River.
Firefighters tie ropes around people to carry them to freedom. Someone I know is rescued in a fishing boat. A motorboat bobs on the brown waves of Main Street. Water reaches the neck of the chainsaw bear that towers ten feet high over the grocery store’s parking lot. Someone films this bear. The bear doesn’t fall. Everything else in the water’s path does. There is a question whether the dam will hold on the New York City reservoir downstream.
Rumors swirl that the city is letting out water. There is discussion of strategic flooding, that the village downstream from the dam is being evacuated and rumors, too, that our mayor has had a heart attack. Other rumors will come, about people searching the floodwaters for prescription drugs flushed down the river from the CVS, and rumors of people stealing lumber washed away from the hardware store I visited in the first flood. Though, theft is a question at this point when the wood is miles downstream and warped by the waters. Over the next few days there are rumors, too, of arson. Someone who owns a building on Main Street is accused of burning it down after sustaining flood damage because he wants the insurance payout. These insinuations all fly across social media.
It turns out the building fire is from water-damaged wiring, but people denounce the owner and extol the poor firefighters and all the work they’ve done for days straight.
All of this is a flood.
*
The next day we—David, you and I—stand in the grocery store parking lot with the bear and with half the town too. We circle, stunned and silent mostly. A person touches someone on a shoulder; another says hey, or yeah, or well.
The sky is an impossible blue—also, impossibly, the parking lot has been lifted and shattered into slabs like icebergs on a distant shore. The CVS has collapsed. One corner of its foundation is now a brown lake. There is little left that says this was a pharmacy. There are no signs, no aisles. The shelves are pushed into the parking lot, and the lake reflects the sky and a single cloud. At the back a couple of cinder blocks dangle on wires. At the front, the doors that once opened automatically hang on hinges where the water forced them ajar. Metal shelving wraps around a pylon, and two florescent striplights swing from wires. To see the doors and shelving and lights is to see the water.
Round bales of hay encased in white plastic have landed on the deck of the diner, the Bun ‘n’ Cone. They look like giant marshmallows. Another wrapped white bale stands on Main Street. An oil tank sits on the corner by the bank.
David shoves his hands in his pockets. He wears an old pair of cutoffs and muddy boots. His hair is dirty, straggly under a Husqvarna hat because we haven’t showered, because the village is under a boil-water order, because we have been told the municipal well is in danger. Two days earlier was his birthday. We hiked to find black trumpets, prized chanterelles, up the mountain that shoulders the village. On the way we talk exuberantly and celebrate our lives here and the rains, the wet summer that has brought abundance to this hillside. Now he rolls in his lips and studies the scene.
Plate glass windows from the supermarket are blown out and into this parking lot. It is strewn with toppled shopping carts. Foliage and grass are braided into the metal. The grocery store’s wall has collapsed in one solid piece alongside a Lotto kiosk. On top are packages of paper towels—Bounty Basics and regular Bounty—as if the flood knows what we need. Two bottles of dish detergent—one shamrock green, the other a bold blue that matches the Bounty and lotto kiosk— stand upright. “Take me,” they say, “You will need me.” The lotto kiosk says: “Play me!” The letters are yellow and blue, that Bounty blue, the same shade as the shopping cart handles that are woven with weeds and grasses. From the broken windows you can see inside, and above what was the produce aisle, a sign declares: “Fresh Cut Prices!!!”
Everyone is silent. Everything glistens in the light, in this blue of disaster, and the sky is blue, and the woman has died. She dies at the Valkyrian Motel; it, too, is painted sky blue.
In the arms of the chainsaw bear, someone has put an American flag. In the parking lot I find an unscathed red, white, and blue votive candle. I lay it at the bear’s feet. All of this would normally strike me as saccharine, but right now among the slabs of asphalt the gesture feels like hope itself. David touches my arm.
This place where we have moved keeps washing away.
*
Later I go to a sandwich shop and help people throw everything out. “Everything,” the owner says. It all must go. Fancy tinned teas and cookies and biscuits from Scotland and Belgium. Even if they look fine, she insists, trash. She has cropped hair and a nasal accent from downstate, maybe the Bronx. She has fed me toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch when I need to escape my house and writing. Before most others know our names here in Margaretville, she will greet David and me on the street. She is someone who attends to all the flowers in the village, ensuring planters spill forth with blooms—brilliant reds and pinks—in our short summers, and now surrounding her are giant gray rubbish bags. Nothing in her voice gives away her emotions. We open bottles of Snapple and pour them into the gutters, the ones that drain into the river, the river to the reservoir. Meanwhile, shouldering over us—over the village—is Pakatakan Mountain whose name means “marriage of the waters.”
David is dispatched to a trailer park. Get out whatever you can, the volunteers are told. The trailer is on its side. It is full of mud. It is impossible. There is nothing. Nothing to save. His voice is quiet. He is normally quiet, but now he barely whispers.
Evacuees sleep in the fire hall. The Red Cross serves meals three times a day for volunteers and people displaced and just anyone in the town needing fellowship. The first thing that arrives after the Red Cross: clothes—bags and bags of people’s old clothes. The clothes and the refugees, the evacuees, they move to the church next to the fire hall.
All of this is a flood.
*
Outside the church I’m stationed at a plastic folding table. I cannot clean basements so I am armed with a clipboard, a list, and names of volunteers. A woman from the trailer park comes to ask for help. I can still see her hands, her knuckles, thick with arthritis and held tight. I cannot remember her facial gestures. I cannot bear to. Her house is the one David is sent to first, where nothing could be saved. Please send more people, she says. Just the photos. I just want the pictures back.
The roads remain closed. The National Guard arrives and stands on my corner. The Red Cross surveys all the homes in the village. The Red Cross lists: address, gender, age, own/or rent, and if people have power, insurance, are flooded, have mud, drinking water The cells in the spreadsheet are set up to list: Y/N. The final column is reserved for notes: Leaving area; Lost Office (trying to do anything she can); water to ceiling and mud to basement; already moving; 7th time flooded; house in foreclosure; has mold and fuel around flooded water; yellow tag. That means the build- ing is condemned. At ours there is No Answer.
*
Over the next month in our town, trash grows in one place. And, in another it is dispatched to the church basement where people from across the country have sent their used clothing. People think this generous. This is their trash. We will all have to sort through the trash. The generosity creates more work. I write for a news site of the flood dump, the mountain of debris—siding and refrigerators, sofas, tires, shipping pallets, and one intact round picnic table. It grows where the Water Discovery Center will soon be built to celebrate the achievements of the New York City watershed and its system of six reservoirs where we live. This is just a mile from Margaretville, in Arkville, whose name comes from its ability to survive floods in the nineteenth century. The news says we are resilient; the news moves on. In New York City people gather in a public–private park to protest wealth and inequality. And, the National Guard in sand-colored clothing, camouflage fatigues, remains on my corner and asks for my ID to prove we live here. I feel guilty that I cannot go to the park and guilty that I cannot clean basements.
The governor is shocked when he’s stranded here that there is no cell service, that he cannot make a call. This is how we get cell coverage, first in mobile units provided by the military, then in a tower over Arkville, where David helps empty the trailers, where the woman lives who folds her hands over and over before asking for help recovering her family photos.
Spiral out, zoom above, and here I am again, arms crossed as if they might hold back my feelings.
*
This summer a decade after that storm, I scroll through the governor’s Flickr account (Flickr itself makes me think of extinctions). The governor is also this very day I type officially no longer the governor. He is now a predator. As he resigns, he says that the lines have changed without his knowing it. “In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn.”
On my screen it is the end of August 2011, and we are inside the leather interior of his SUV. In a video someone holds a camera out the window. Water overtops the car’s hood. In one blurry image, the governor raises a hand to his mouth. Shock, I assume. Next the camera is inexplicably focused at an angle inside the vehicle. A wooden coat hanger stuck in the leather seatback pocket fills the screen.
A man’s muffled gruff voice: “It’s a long way to Manhattan.” In the video, the car drives past two volunteer firefighters in their high-vis vests. They gesture at him. It looks like they’re saying stop or turn around. I can imagine what they say, with what I know now. I am now the person in such disasters, in the high-vis jacket, a member of the fire department, telling people the road is closed and saying: “Don’t Drown, Turn Around.”
That’s the phrase I don’t know in the first flood when I exhort Free to drive through the waters.
*
As I write, in Tennessee they describe the flood as a tidal wave. Hokusai’s wave is often mistaken as a tsunami. In Tennessee a woman in the paper says the flood smells of death—and here it smells of oil, mold, and mud, and shit. A heaviness collects at the back the throat. It stings; it crawls up your sinuses.
In Germany this summer a low front stations. This type of front has a name: Weatherman’s Woe. It’s a cut-off low, meaning stalled and orphaned from the weather currents that normally move across the Northern Hemisphere from west to east. One such front in Margaretville drops sixty inches of snow in forty-eight hours. In Germany the storm turns roads into sweeping canyons. Later this summer at Summit in Greenland, not the top of a mountain but an ice-bound research station where it never rains, showers fall.
I cannot stop thinking about these facts or facts like this. I collect the stories and stuff them in a folder that has FEMA written across the top and contains my claim information.
That second flood comes the year after my father’s death. Sometime after that I quit working on a crime novel and then give up on fiction entirely, even though writing has held all my yearning. The climate, these floods, and those facts are too big to hold in a narrative. The only way to write is to move forward, a friend says. Crime novels come with a dream of forward momentum—progress, resolution, and stability restored. I need to ignore the news, but I cannot. I take screenshots of headlines and add them to the folder. They feel too big, too catastrophic to let go of, so instead the file bulges. In it, too, are the pictures of my dad. Pages spill out; Post-it notes decorate the sheets like strange petals on a flower.
I scrawl notes on index cards and tear articles from the local paper. Over time I begin to hang them on a wall behind my desk hoping to hold them together with all their discontinuous moments of shock. I lay them next to each other, not chronologically, but as if in proximity I will get some perspective. I read a line of the German historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin’s about time cutting through millennia, and how history exists in the here and now. He writes that events are not “like the beads of a rosary,” and I stare at the mass of notes.
Newsprint curls in the humidity. I tape news accounts next to quotes from scientists. They seem unconnected—or to me they are all connected, but I do not have a language to link them. How do I summarize the emotional condition of this—whatever this the current moment is? These current moments spread out over a decade.
*
That first flood, which inundates my basement, is a one-hundred-year flood, the next one that destroys my village, is five hundred years—time in Biblical numbers. Then there are floods here 380 million years ago. What is now my town sits on the floodplains of a Devonian sea. On its shores the first trees appear. Not trees at all, they’re giant ferns and fix oxygen for life on earth. Meanwhile, other kinds of life—which then are fish—collapse in the wake of those trees. It is a great extinction: 96 percent of all species die and nearly all the corals disappear.
This is all time beyond my conception. Lived time and geological time defy the time frame of a novel. As I have been in Margaretville, the two times come to seem inseparable. Those statistics for a flood’s occurrence are not about how often they come but the odds of a flood of that magnitude in any single year. Now Biblical years come every year. We are all experiencing the acceleration of catastrophic time.
*
This morning the birds fly. It’s late summer, and they have stopped singing. Rainwater glistens on leaves. They shimmer and shake with disco ball striations. Spider webs too are silvered with light. Droplets line the filaments woven in wheels and orbs.
David and I visit the fossils of the first trees. They are found after a flood in 1869 and are used to repair a wall. More are uncovered as a dam is constructed in Gilboa, a town a half hour north of me, for one of New York City’s first reservoirs, in 1920. Ninety-one years later, the governor visits this dam in Irene, just before being stranded in my town.
We park on a road that skirts the submerged village. The stumps of roots sit on a bed of gravel outside the town hall. The roots of these primeval trees are all that remain of the species. Some scientists say they look like a parasol. That sounds elegant, but they don’t actually look like much. The ones here are big—three feet or more across—and seem like something forged in an old industrial shop, maybe made of iron to run a mill or factory in the nineteenth century. The trunks and leaves have long since decomposed, and all that is left are these stumps, in this town that is gone, marking time in another age of disappearances.
*
I read about the scientist Vince Schaefer, the one who floods my town. I study his experiments with ice, how dew freezes on a web when the air is just above freezing. There’s a line in one of his reports from the 1960s about how, at 2 degrees Celsius when the relative humidity is one hundred percent, “If we examine spiders’ threads [. . .] ice particles may be seen through the multitude of dew drops. [. . .] This lead to an unforeseeable discovery: all the residues of ice particles contained a black nucleus”—the word is underlined in the report—“composed entirely of carbon black.”
The beauty of that sentence about spider webs and carbon black, one that sounds as if it’s blacker than any other, stops me. The ice is threaded through like beads on the web. From this research, he and his colleagues learn ways of extrapolating how drops freeze even above freezing, and this understanding applies to clouds, to aerosols, to the settling of layers in clouds.
I think about this as I see a milkweed pod after the rain. Water clings to the fibers, themselves like a web or cocoon. I text Iris about how just the idea of scientists studying spider webs and dew, the interconnection between them all, makes me happy.
