Emily Brown
"The walls were covered in glitter. Jesus, plastic and frail, was hung from a brass cross that was mounted on a fake wooden alter. It sat next to a cheap tapestry of the Ten Commandments on a stage of deep pile burgundy carpet. Windows covered in transparent colored plastic ran the length of the room. If you looked through squinted eyes at the morning sun bouncing off those silver flecks, it was like you were in heaven already. You might have been able to pretend that nothing had happened, that this was still a sanctuary, a safe place, and home to a benevolent God who loved and protected his children. You could just keep on looking at that pretty sight and you might be in such a trance that you would want to step into it, into that beautiful twinkling light, into all that glory-and when you did, your toe would catch on an upturned floorboard and you would fall face down into the six inch mud."
Strident Christian fundamentalists have claimed that the horrible destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina was the result of God's anger towards New Orleans for condoning debauchery and homosexuality. Scientists explain the hurricane in terms of air and water currents, storm surges and thermodynamics. Certainly it is otherworldly: imagine fully grown palm trees so bent by the wind that their branches touch the ground, or a storm surge powerful enough to knock buildings off their foundations. Imagine how alien it feels, how disillusioning, to be betrayed by the landscape you love. We cannot help but search for an explanation, yet neither they stoic objectivism of science, nor the idea of a judgmental being in the sky offers any comfort or real perspective.
In 2001, in McDowell County, West Virginia, home of the glittering Christ Church of Mount Calvary, there was a massive flood. Eleven inches of rain fell in four hours. Rather than rising from the creek bed, as the water had done in years past, it tore through the deep valleys like a wall of water while avalanches of mud, tress, and boulders careened down the hill. It caused more than a million dollars worth of damage. The residents of this coal mining area had seen floods, but nothing like this. Many attributed it to an increase in logging and mining causing unstable ground and more erosion.
This community is located in the second poorest county in the nation, in the heart of coal country. It is a stronghold of old time Methodist faith. The people here are kind and humble and have that strong sense of community that comes with struggle. So I ask the bible-thumper why God punished them. And I ask the scientist for an explanation for all the destruction. I don't think they could answer my question in the ways they are accustomed to because in these situations, there is no black and white. There is no otherworldly force to attribute the injustice to because we have caused it. Humans are at the mercy and at the helm.
***
Natural disasters are referred to as \"acts of God,\" especially in the case of floods. Partially, this is due to myths of great floods. The fact that flood myths exist in every culture has lead biblical scholars and creation-based scientists to conclude that the flood in the Bible was an actual event. Raft tours in the Grand Canyon run by the Institute for Creation Research, a faith-based group that does not garner much respect from the scientific community, attempt to prove that earth is merely a few thousand years old and that the canyon was formed in a single flood event. Geologists do concede that there is a correlation between fossilized evidence of rising sea levels and tales of catastrophic local flooding at the end of the last glacial period, which adds to the creationists' argument. Melting after the Ice Age could have caused this, but there is a major flaw in the theory of the Great Flood: ancient civilizations flourished next to water. It was the way to travel and trade, the vein of life in a dry desert or the highway to other cultures in forests. Naturally, if a flood occurred, it would make its way into the culture of myths. These flood myths, then, document different floods at different times, rather than one Great Flood.
Typically the main characters in these flood myths are clever heroes. They use human cunning to outwit or win favor with the gods. The oldest known flood myth is that in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. In it, he finds the secret of immortality from a man, Utnapishtim, who had escaped "the great flood""by flattering Ea, the god of music and magic. In return for his worship, Ea gives him refuge on an island and grants him and his race an appreciation for the arts. In Norse mythology, Bergelmir and his wife survived a flood of a frost giant's blood by crawling into a hollow tree trunk. Hindi myth tells of Matya, a king who saved a small fish from predators. When the fish was grown, it warned him of a great flood, which the king prepared for by building a boat. These stories show a partnership between the characters and the forces that govern them; they define their own fate by any means.
Every Christian child is taught the story of Noah and the ark. In the Christian flood story, the main theme is God's judgment and ultimate power. God saw that humans had become corrupt and violent and so he told the last remaining good man, Noah, to build a great ark and put his wife, his three sons and their wives, along with "clean animals and birds by sevens, male and mate and two of each unclean animal, male and mate" into the ark. In contrast to the other myths, in the Christian version the reason that Noah is saved is because he followed the rules of some mysterious governing authority that had judged him to be worthy. Noah was the kid in school who got lots of gold stars and was the hallway monitor.
When I was growing up, sometimes my parents would hire a babysitter. It was usually Angie, the girl down the street. She had blond hair, and did cross-stitch and generally put out a pastel vibe. Her family was Baptist and I think she was a little bit worried about my sister and I. We didn't go to church very often and sometimes the neighbors would call to ask my dad to turn down the Captain Beefheart that he would play on the weekends for "morning maniac music." So Angie brought along her own tapes.
I never paid to much attention to them. "Jesus Loves Me," left me cold. Why would he love me, I didn't even know the guy. However, I do remember "The Unicorn Song" a rollicking Celtic tune that tells the story of how Noah left the unicorns behind.
And Noah looked out through the driving rain
Them unicorns were hiding, playing silly games
Kicking and splashing while the rain was falling
Oh, them silly unicorns
There was green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Noah cried, "Close the door because the rain is falling
And we just can't wait for no unicorns
As I read over the song now, I see it as a thinly veiled warning to heed the ethic of Protestant efficiency. Show up on time, get on the boat with your mate and sail away so you can start procreating. If you die in the flood it is your own damn fault. God has not got time for playing silly games. I was mad at the unicorns for not getting on the boat, mad at God for not waiting just a little bit longer. I couldn't figure out who to blame. Plus, my family was always late for everything. If I kept being late, would God forget about me too? Could I be left behind? The worst part of it was that there was no chance, none at all, that the unicorn would ever return. From then on, I didn't even include them in my imaginary play.
The story of Noah and the ark is inherent in our present day interpretations of floods. Religious leaders the world over have declared the flooding from Hurricane Katrina to be a sign. The October 2005 issue of Rolling Stone half-jokingly lists quotes from Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalist leaders who regarded the flooding as punishment. Michael Marcavage of the group Repent America, declared, " This act of God destroyed a wicked city. From Girls Gone Wild to Southern decadence, New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the celebration of sin. We believe God is in control of the weather...We're calling it an act of God." Conversely, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment released the statement, "It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American Empire." But the water didn't discriminate among religions; the divide in the people who escaped and the people left in danger was a concern of this world, not the next one. Those who escaped from the water unscathed were not necessarily the worthiest or smartest; rather, they had the most power and money. The mass that was left is not morally implicated, but economically. Listening to the Unicorn Song today, I feel a sense of indignation. How are we all supposed to get on the boat when there is such inequality?
During Hurricane Katerina and its aftermath, citizens were detained in the Convention Center and in the Superdome. Most of these people were black and most of them were poor. The upper class had fled the city in cars, boats and helicopters. The ancestors of those who built the city, of the working people who served the food, who made the music, who manned the Mardi-Gras krewes, and those who defined the culture stayed behind. Incredulously, some the nation's most prominent voices support this dichotomy. Bill O'Reilly of the Fox Network let this indictment slip, "If you don't get educated, if you don't develop a skill and force yourself to work hard, you'll most likely be poor and sooner or later you'll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help." Yet, the people who were left behind, either in their houses or in the detention centers were the backbone of the enormous tourist industry that let thousands of people live lives of leisure when they visited New Orleans. Phyllis Johnson, a black woman detained in the Superdome, was more perceptive of the social conditions that determined who would be stranded, "All you people who came down here and partied with us, who came to Bourbon Street to hangout with us, who got drunk with us, now you acting like you don't want to know us. Where you at now?"
I myself was running like a hamster on the treadmills at the school gym when I first saw the wreckage from the storm. A boat motoring through black water, level with second story windows. Stuff, all sorts of miscellaneous household items from dishwasher soap bottles to diapers washing up onto concrete beaches. Emaciated dogs howling on rooftops. Collapsed overpasses with bedding underneath. And always there, though not always shown, corpses; bulging and bloated, floating on the water or trapped beneath. The water was everywhere; still, overbearing, quiet, deadly, and so full of chemicals and fuel that you weren't allowed to smoke cigarettes beside it. It was the end of civilization; a post-apocalyptic hell.
People crowded onto rooftops, with no other option than to wait. In the September 12, 2005 edition of The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section portrayed a two family household "with one good job between them." If they could have heeded the evacuation notice, they would have. As patriarch Charles Covington stated, "I'm poor, but I'm not stupid." They tried to get out, but friends, buses, and cabs had evacuated the city. The family spent three days on the rooftop of their one story house, surviving off of Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies Treats and Slim Jims. They were rescued by a friend in a tin boat and planned to get in touch with relatives in Texas.
Most people in the Covington's situation, if they were rescued at all, were sent to the Superdome, the home of New Orleans' football team, the Saints. This makeshift residence was overcrowded, lacking adequate food, water and space. Eventually, though, the detainees were crowded onto buses and trains with the intent of delivering them to families, or at least safety. However, many residents chose to stay in the city.
Their reasons varied. Fear of looting was very prominent. TradesmenÑroofers and mechanics stayed with their equipment. If looters took their tools, they would lose the only thing they knew how to make a living from. Doctors and lawyers barricaded themselves into their two million dollar homes to protect the decor and their wine collections. Drug dealers stayed behind to protect their turf. Others stayed because the alternative was worse. Matt Taibbi writes in the Rolling Stone of the Middle Eastern shop owners who choose to sleep in an exposed second-story bedroom rather than face immigration officers. Some are deranged. Some are handicapped. But some people stayed because they could not imagine another home.
Fox News interviewed a man sitting on the porch of his well-kept house, the water coming up to the fifth step. When asked why he wouldn't get on the boat, the man replied, "Don't worry about me, I'm just fine, I'm staying here. Ain't never lived anywhere else, don't plan to. I'll stay right here." Like this man, many poor urbanites have never lived or traveled far outside their neighborhoods they grew up in. They don't want to rely on the disorganized circus of deportment, don't want to leave their families, and don't want to give up on their homes. Taibbi recorded a conversation he witnessed between black residents in a lower class section of town. They saw the advantages the disaster granted developers, the lowered property value that would lead to their neighborhoods being bought out for gentrification and tourism. A local pastor preached, "All those years when they were stealingÉall those failed schools, all those debts on the city rollsÉits all going to be washed away now. They're getting a clean slate." Or, as Republican Congressman Richard Baker quoted in the Wall Street Journal, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
The August issue of Time magazine, featured several articles about Hurricane Katrina. One article showed a two page spread of a block of mansions in the Garden District that were up to their shuttered windows in black murkey water. Behind them was a scattering of weeping willows engulfed in billowing flames. The picture had been taken at night and the effect of the flames reflected on the water was startling. The drama of the photograph gave me the same feeling of reading that great Southern tradgedy, "Gone with the Wind." Maybe because there were no people in the picture. The residents of these houses were now in hotel rooms, safe, with food, clothing and drinking water. If and when they returned they would restore those houses to their former glory. They will tell stories years from now about how the south rose again. But will they tell about the people in Ninth Ward, about the smell of decaying bodies, about days spent on the roof, about no food or water or telephone?
From a completely objective point of view, New Orleans, for all its gaiety and color is a city that never should have been built. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a colonial governor of the Louisiana Territory, founded the city on an elevated piece of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, in a section that today is known as the French Quarter.He settled it as a military center of command but recognized the importance of the sea and river port. Surely, somewhere in the minds of the French colonists was a vision of a great cosmopolitan city thriving off trade from the riverÑwhich, before rail, cars, and planes, was the main artery into the wilderness of the New World. However, even he acknowledged that the location might be problematic; he suggested dredging to deal with the silt that washed into the delta, and recognized the need for levees and canals. Bienville distinguished himself in his military and governmental operations, but at the end of his career, left the wilderness of his post to retire to the comfort of an apartment in Paris on the Rue Vivianne, along with a maid, cook, lackey and valet. Meanwhile, his French Canadia soldiers stayed behind, fighting Indians and English, illness and homesickness and eventually establishing the French Creole culture.
Bienville's intuition served the city well. Until Huricane Katrina New Orleans continued to reap huge economic benefits. The traffic from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River brought Spanish, Native American, and African cultures together, mixing in a tumult of religion, food, music, and traditons which spurred the giant tourist industry. However, the city has fought a never-ending battle against water. The majority of New Orleans lies in a shallow bowl between two bodies of water. Any water that falls in the city must be routed into a complex system of dikes, levees, pumps and barriers. Although water defines the town, it is not possible to see the actual Mississippi River from any point in the city unless you climb up the mountainous levee. The barges that travel the river are on level with the roof of the Superdome. The river and lake are held back by concrete and man's ingenuity, which have proved tragically insignificant. New Orleans has nearly the perfect site for business, but one of the worst in terms of natural forces.
Originally the city was contained on a few square miles of land, only 12 feet above sea level. Here, in the tony neighboorhoods of Garden District and Gentilly are the stately southern mansions built by the merchants that made their money from the river. They needed people to work their businesses and their houses, and those people needed places to live. To accommodate growth, the surrounding swamp was drained. In the low-lying land, some of it 2 feet below sea level, are packed the small houses that make up the poor and mostly black neighboorhoods of Jefferson Parish and the infamous 9th ward.
One of the most infamous quotes from President George Bush during the immediate aftermath was "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." We chuckle at the inability of our Chief of State to express himself with words, but under this is the harsh reality of the current administration's priorities. As of summer of 2004, engineers had known that the levees would not hold up to more than a Category 3 storm. In this era of foreign war and Republican values, the federal government denied the Army Corps of Engineer's the $26 million dollars that they had requested and instead granted them only $5.7 million. Because there was not enough money, work on the levee system stopped for the first time in 37 years. When the storm hit, more problems arose. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had recently undergone a $71 million dollar budget cut after being added to the Homeland Security Task Force. This left them unable to provide basic necessities like water, sewage control, phonelines, transportation and suitable refugee enviroments. People who had money could buy these things, or they could get out of the city in time. But most people in the hardest hit areas did not have cars and could not buy their way out.
Furthermore, throughout the years, development has weakened the fragile natural landscape. Since 1930, coastal erosion and channel dredging have destroyed a third of the marshlands along the Gulf. These fragile ecosystems also collapse when oil reserves are sucked from beneath them. This destroys the buffer zone between the shore and the sea, resulting in a battered shoreline, loss of habitat, and more powerful storm surges. A mile of march will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. In many places fifty or more miles of marsh has dissapeared. Frederick Krimgold of Virginia Tech's disaster risk reduction program condemned this practice, "We've has a tremendously irresponsible policy, destroying protective natural features while encouraging risky and precarious development." On these exposed dunes, vacation houses, hotels and casinos are builtÑand routinely destroyed. If they are knocked down by hurricanes, they are rebuilt on an even grander scale. Investors know that these ventures will draw in the tourists, and they know there will be plenty of cheap labor to staff them. The enviroment continues to be destroyed and to destroy and the business make more money.
In the aftermath of the disaster, I heard a woman call a talk radio show and wonder how the Katrina disaster would affect the price of shrimp. The Gulf of Mexico produced forty to fifty percent of the nation's domestic shrimp.. Katrina destroyed shrimping boats, and packaging plants, and consequently, jobs. A day after the storm, trucks at the Sea Pearl processing plant in Bayou LaBatre, Alabama, hauled away millions of dollars of shrimp that had turned into a stinking slimey pink mess. Along with it went the jobs of more than 70 factory workers. Independent shrimpers are no better off. Most run their boats off diesel. To catch one pound of shrimp requires two dollars worth of diesel. Shrimp only retails for one dollar a pound. But luckily for us, shrimp prices are not going to significantly increase. Imports from Asia can maintain prices and supply shrimp for all of 2005's holiday parties. In a time of globilization and streamlined production, America is no longer dependent on small operations. We no longer are dependent on a relationship with land and its products. Except for fuel prices, our budgets do not have to suffer from disaster. In fact, if one doesn't watch the news, there would be no evidence that this catastrophic event happened. This is convienent, but allows Americans to move further into denial of problems like racism, loss of culture and the growing class divide.
***
As a child, I had a very potent fear of my house being flooded. Compared to the boogeyman or monsters under the bed it was not a bad fear to have. I could rationalize the situation and gain some sort of control. I would lie in bed at night and consider my chances of survival if a deluge came in the middle of the night. Our house is built into a hillside and my bedroom is in the back, looking out into the woods. If a flood came it would come pouring down the side of the hill, the dirty brown water churning and beating the side of the house until it crashed through her window, taking the pink and white curtains with it. In my revelry I pictured my sister still asleep, floating on top of the water, out her door with a whoosh and down the long hallway to my parents room. The water would then crash into the living room, knocking lamps off the tables and scattering the discarded copies of The New Yorker and Time into the waves. It would put out the fire in the wood-burning stove and spill into the kitchen, tearing all my drawings off the refrigerator. The water would just keep coming and coming and my sister and mom and dad would all be asleep and we would just be swallowed up and drown and not even know we had died. All my stuff, all my life would be ruined and I would just float away.
So I planned for the worst. I stuffed a towel under my door, which my mother said was a fire hazard. I made her put my "good" drawings in plastic zippered bags. I also took the precaution of securing my precious things to the top rungs of my cast iron bed. Bert, my lumpy teddy bear was perched above my head, seat belted in with masking tape.
***
In 1889 a tremendous flood in Johnstown Pennsylvania bought the class issue to the forefront of the media. Johnstown was an industrial town of 30,000 people in the western Alleghenies whose main industries were steel and iron mills. Although a prosperous town, its location in a long valley subjected it to high rain and snowfall and a propensity to flood. To control for this and to further development, the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek Rivers, which surround the town, had been straightened. Furthermore, fourteen miles upstream was Lake Conemaugh, formerly the south fork tributary of the Little Conemaugh, held in place by a thirty seven year old earthen dam. The lake was 40 miles across and contained 20 million gallons of water. It was also the site of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, the vacation oasis of 65 wealthy Pittsburgh tycoons including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick and Andrew Mellon.
The businessmen created a playground for themselves, fashioned in the "Victorian Rustic" style. Their "cabins" consisted of 17 or more rooms with separate servants quarters. They took liberties with the old dam, including trimming off the top to make a road and installing a fish screen in the spillway. The dam, filled with hay, spruce boughs and dirt, was not constructed well to begin with in 1889 it was thirty-six years old. The adjustments were shoddily engineered, but the Club members didn't pay much mind. They spent their days hunting, fishing, sailing and having shooting contests. Meanwhile, wagons from Pittsburgh carrying ice, wine, and guests to the Club wore down the road while branches, leaves, and other debris clogged the fish screen.
On Friday, May 31st, a spring holiday weekend at the club was dampened by a day of torrential rain. The members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club stood on the banks of the lake watching the water rise at the rate of six inches an hour. Downriver, the straightened streams had already begun to spill over their banks and flood lower parts of Johnstown. Although flooding had always been a risk, in the past few years railroads and steel mills filling in large section of stream had exacerbated it. Around noon, the water began flowing over the crest of the dam. A messenger rode two miles to the village of South Fork with a warning. A telegraph was sent to Johnstown, but it was not heeded. The residents of Johnstown had grown inured to warnings that the damn would break.
This disregard to the warning is problematic. Even if false warnings had come before, why would people stay put in the face of danger? During this era of progression and growth, the residents surely put great trust in man's innovations to control nature. Furthermore, the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club had made their money from building material like steel, iron, oil and timber. Everything about them projected an image of stability and having only the best. In a sense, the residents of Johnstown trusted that the members of the Club would not be irresponsible in their stewardship of the land.
At 3:10 pm the dam broke. Water poured into the valley and climbed up the sides of the mountains, tearing out trees and churning up dirt. The river that came crashing into the valley was 500 feet wide and 20 feet deep. It swept along the path once taken by the river, roaring and tumbling over itself, destroying small satellite settlements as it barreled toward Johnstown. At 4:07 the wall of water descended on the town; Dale Jackson of Smithsonian described, "The grinding onslaught bowled over most buildings in the northern half of the city. Wood-frame houses splintered, imposing brick buildings simply disintegrated." Many residents had retreated to the second stories of their houses to wait out the initial flood. Anna A. Bridges, who was seven in 1889 recalled, "We watched from our third-floor windows as the raging waters roared all around us. I still vividly recall seeing doomed victims rush past, clinging to roof sections, barrels and other debris, only to be swept under and drowned." As the lake waters began pouring in, residents climbed up into their attics and from there to the rooftops. Some escaped but many did not. The rushing water was slowed at the 50-foot-wide Pennsylvania Railroad Bridge on the west end of Johnstown, the debris it carried forming a giant dam of what one historian described as "all the filth of seven towns, all the animals, and almost all of the men and women that lived in them. Altogether, 99 entire families were killed, and the final death toll was 2,200.
Although lawsuits were brought against the club, the courts unanimously declared it an "Act of God" which meant there was no human fault and therefore no retribution paid to the victims. Members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club distanced themselves from the tragedy although they did donate several thousand dollars and a train car of blankets. Andrew Carnegie built the town a new library. Upon a visit, he was granted a hero's welcome. However, the apparent class divides and the irresponsibility of the Club members inflamed the media and the country. A reporter summed up the feeling of the nation when writing, "We think we know what struck us, and it was not the hand of Providence. Our misery is the work of man." A poetic verse that appeared in many newspapers echoed this statement," All the horrors that hell could wish? Such was the price that was paid for fish."
***
When I was very young, about seven years old, my mother worked in the local bookstore. On days that she couldn't find a babysitter, I'd come to work with her. I loved the place. It stands right in the middle of our small downtown in one of the oldest brick buildings. Mike, the owner, a tall man with wide eyes whose grey hair and scruffy beard seem to float around his head, he is the third generation of his family to run "The Bookstore." You'd think they would have the business side down by now, but no, the place is a mess, the drawers inside the antique counter are overflowing with children's drawings, incense, spare change, stamps, rubber bands, broken calculators and I Ching readings. This is the nucleus of the store, and the merchandise section follows suit. Books are everywhere. This is a store where the typical shopping experience is reversed; you don't find books, the books you want find you.
In front of the counter, there is a hole in the worn, unvarnished wooden floorboards where a knot has fallen out. A source of never-ending fascination. Looking through that hole I was transported from the cozy dusty world of books to the dank basement where sunlight streamed through the one street level window. Shapes seemed to move the longer I stared. Jungle cats prowled around amid pirate chests full of gold and rubies and mad scientists, stewed potions and created monsters. I was transfixed, held captive to that world until one of the old retired men sauntered in to pick up their newspaper.
One day, I decided that I had to get into that basement. My mom would have none of it. She was doing her best to take inventory of the travel books and told me to go look at the children's section and pick something out for my sister and me. "I just saw another "Frog and Toad" book today," she suggested. Frog and Toad is a lame series about tolerance, illustrated in creepy greens and browns. My mom didn't understand how much I wanted to see the mysterious basement, or maybe she was a true believer in children's literature and its abilities to teach moral lessons. I preferred my Dad's reading of Treasure Island complete with pirate accent and sword fighting demonstration. I went back to the hole. There had to be treasure down there, or the bones of dead pirates, at least.
As I lay sprawled in the aisle, the front door opened and Mike walked in.
"Careful, don't fall in," he cautioned, in all seriousness.
I looked at him, wide-eyed, "what's down there?"
"No telling whatÉI haven't been down there since the Great Flood of Ô85"
"The Great Flood of 85?"
This only increased my curiosity, but I have since learned that the Great Flood of '85 was not as grand as I imagined. The Buckhannon River overflowed its banks, and several businesses on Main Street were flooded. No one died, and today there is no evidence of it.
"I had all my merchandise for book fairs stored down there. One night it started raining and it rained all day and all the next night. The basement filled up with water. I couldn't save any of it, I couldn't even leave my house!"
"No way," I said.
"I'll show you"
I was thrilled! I hopped alongside Mike as his long legs lead the way from the front to the backdoor of the store. It opened onto the back steps that took us down to the gravel driveway. Mike unlocked the old wooden garage door. "I haven't been down here for years, I don't know what it will look like."
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Heavy and overwhelming, the smell of rotten books, glue, and mold was slightly reminiscent of our compost heap. It was the upstairs disorganization taken to the chaotic extreme. The pale light of a cloudy May day fell on a melting pile of cardboard. Book fairs were primarily held at elementary schools, a fact evidenced by the bookmarks, marbles and children's books scattered around the room. Copies of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Blueberries for Sal, and Where's Waldo were covered in mud, their pages wrinkled disintegrating. The walls were ringed with layers of dirt, like when I got out of the bathtub on summer days. As I stood there looking at all that wet paper the romance of the basement faded. It no longer held the ghosts of pirates; only the reality of destruction that a flood can cause. I realized that not everything was part of a story, that sometimes, it was real and you couldn't make it a happy ending, or even exciting.
Maybe that reality and the fear that accompanied it was the beginning of the cynicism I felt towards religion. Or maybe I just didn't like authority, didn't like feeling overpowered. In middle school, this translated into contempt for the ideas I had grown up with. Desperate to break convention, I got a radical haircut and bought a pair of Doc Marten's, but my parents happy to accommodate. So when I friend invited me along to her Methodist Church youth group, my reasons for accepting were not totally altruistic. However, it turned out to be much more than a way to identify myself outside of my parents. I learned a lot about my spiritual self and I met some of my best friends. In eighth grade, I was confirmed in the First United Methodist Church.
In ninth grade and every year after that, I joined the church mission team to travel to McDowell County. One year, we spent a week in a shotgun shack. It was two stories, with two rooms on each floor, stacked righ on top of each other and filled with seventeen highschool kids and five adult leaders. It's called a shotgun shack because you can shoot a shotgun straight through the backdoor and into the the front door, if you ever needed to defend your house. I stayed in a room upstairs and every morning, I would look out the window into a wall of green decidous trees. No sky, just green and under that, mountain, and under that, coal.
The shotgun shack was built by the Gary Coal Company sometime in the early 1900's. It is surrounded by a few other identical houses in the small settlement of Gary #9, so named because it is the ninth mine shaft opened by the company. There are ten other Garys. The Gary #9 mine shaft is closed now, as are most of the other underground mining operations in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennesee. They have been replaced by mountain top removal mining, a process that dynamites the tops of mountains off in order to dredge up the high quality coal inside them. The result is lots of good coal and a mesa topped with soft new grass and seeding hay. It destroys the traditional ecosystem of trees, streams, and soil. It tears the soul out of the Mountain State.
That year, our mission team was the busiest we had ever been. It was 2001 and we had come to help the town of Iager (pronounced Ya-ger) recover from the floods. Two hundred and fifty miles back, when we boarded vans in Buckhannon, I hadn't realized the damage was so severe. But when we pulled into town and saw a pile of flood-wreckage that was half a block long and six feet tall it began to sink in. Later that week, we helped clean out one house whose sliding glass backdoor faced the hillside. Rocks, sludge and other debris had piled up behind the house, decimating the wooden deck. It was impossible to open the door because a tree had lodged itself up against the window, and a big crack ran through the glass, as if nature was forcing its way into the house.
Residents attributed this change to an increase in surface mining, both strip and mountain top removal. When mining companies "reclaim," (read, "cover their asses") they purport to restore a natural contour and enviroment to the land. These reclaimation sites are shoddily constructed and tend to break down easily unleashing coal, sludge and dangerous chemicals into the watershed. This was evidenced by the type of debris that residents found in there yards. One woman showed pictures of a thick black coal sludge covering her whole yard, saying, "There's enough coal here to heat the whole hollow for a year." With no trees to stop it, a result of excessive timbering of hardwoods, the mud barreled into the flow, uprooting trees and cars and filling houses with silt. A surveyor who worked in the area had this to say, "We're surveying these watersheds where there are disturbances such as mountaintop remouval, valley fills, steep slope loggin, old gob piles, old strip mines. When you are closer to these disturbances the flooding is much, much more severe and I think that is just about unquestioned."
Christ Church of Mount Calvary in Ritter Hollow, West Virginia is nestled in a deep valley. Indeed, in McDowell County, nearly all the buildings congregate in valleys. The southern Appalachian Mountains dominate the landscape. Trailers cling to the sides of hills in like scenes from a white trash tall tale. The narrow boxes of rusty siding and plywood are level to the ground at the front door, but the slope is so steep that the back end hangs 30 or 40 feet off the ground, supported by elaborate contraptions of two by fours and concrete blocks. From the backs of these residences-cum-observation towers, you can see the whole valley. On one side of the winding road is the school, on the other are a few large brick houses. Coal companies built both structures.
Under that glittering ceiling, the aisle of Christ's Church of Mount Calvary was buckled and cracked. Pews had crashed into the walls and each other. Under them lay the dark black mud that had filled the entire basement and broke through the wooden planks as if they were a handful of Popsicle sticks. This was our last project of the week, but the most daunting one. Down in the dank air, with friends I usually saw in their Sunday best, we fell into the rhythm of labor, filling buckets full of sludge with long handled shovels. Although we worked for two days, we only made a small dent. After a week of dealing with the black sludge and water damage in this community, I was stunned by the aftermath of this flood. How could tiny drops of rain become a force this formidable?
To find the answer we must consider not only the natural fact of weather, but also the influence of human interaction. In all the floods I have examined, it seems that when the affluent few use land irresponsibly it is the unfortunate masses that suffer. Victims of floods are caught in a system similar to environmental racism, the term for why black neighborhoods are often more polluted than their white counterparts. In both situations, people have no power against how their land is being used. People who are victims of floods are affected by environmental classism.
No one chooses to be born in an environmentally unstable place like the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans, small coal mining towns in West Virginia or under an unstable dam. Yet people live in these places, these places are homes. In August of 2005 I read a letter to the editor of the Meadville Tribune. A man expressed his lack of sympathy for the residents of New Orleans, "I live in Meadville and I know it will snow every winter. It's a hardship, but I am prepared for it. The people who live on the Gulf Coast choose to make their homes in a place they know will be hit by hurricanes, so I don't see why they are so surprised. Why should I pay more taxes to help them? They don't buy snow shovels for me." I was shocked at this callous attitude. People cannot simply choose where to live, it is determined by family history, economic status, and culture.
This earth we live on is not always a hospitable place. We sometimes forget that forces of nature are not completely conquered, that humans are frail, dependent on houses, clothes, and heat to keep us alive. We pull together to protect against the elements. This is the function of families, religions, and governments. In John Locke's social contract, we give up our freedom to the government in exchange for protection. The protection grants us the natural rights of life, liberty and estate. I take advantage of this contract when I step outside on a snowy day and am able to walk on plowed sidewalks; city maintenance workers ensure my liberty to go where I please. The law protects my life, and my ability to own property. But I would add one more right to this list; respect. It is this right that is most threatened by the environmental classism that becomes evident in the face of disaster.
Respect should be toward both people and land. It is lost when either is compromised. There is no respect in corralling people into a crowded giant dome, and there is no respect in stripping mountains of their height. There is no respect in being irresponsible in land use or in protection of citizens. Floods are caused by rain, but the implications of this simple fact are complex and tragic. Illusions of responsibility and respect are washed away, and we are left wondering who to blame. Yet, in the face of this stark tragedy, we can see problems more clearly and perhaps work towards resolution as we clean up the mess.
Emily Brown is a senior at Allegheny College.