The Daily: 14 July 2023

Having water destroy much of the state you live in —taking not the biblical 40 days to wreak havoc, but something like 8 hours — makes one rather conscious of adaptions that might be made to one’s living arrangements. It’s not good enough to clean up the mess and put it all back how it was before the storm, because that may — undoubtedly will — just be destroyed again. Because this storm will happen again. The floods that destroyed Vermont did not come from a freak weather system. This storm was associated with nothing unusual nor even extreme. Nothing like a nor-easter or a hurricane. The storm was just the normally expected result of the now normally high levels of energy — heat — that we’ve tossed up into the atmosphere. This was an average summer rainstorm. Biblical destruction is average now. Epic flooding will happen again. It may happen tomorrow. I am writing on Thursday; Friday’s forecast is for an inch of rain; the flood warnings have turned red again.

I don’t know that Montpelier will be drowned under eight feet of water again, nor that more town centers like Ludlow will be, for all intents and purposes, wiped off the map. But the rivers are still high, and there are several dams that are still just under breaching levels. So the warnings are not an overabundance of caution. Just average caution. It’s just practicality to not put the sandbags away just yet. So I’m looking at what needs to happen to avoid having to do this again tomorrow and tomorrow and the next week and the next…

I have not been happy with my garage since I bought this house and discovered that I also owned the more than quarter acre of disheveled property across the street, including a very poorly sited garage. It sits at the base of a long road with a steep incline. It is also lower than the street. Water runs right down the hill, down the short compacted earth driveway, and under the garage doors — no matter what I do short of sand-bagging. Which makes the garage sort of hard to use… Furthermore, it has one tiny drain in the center of the concrete floor connected to a narrow pipe that runs nearly horizontal for about a dozen feet to a grate on one side of the building. When the weather starts vacillating between winter and spring, this laughable drainage system clogs up with ice, and any meltwater or winter rain pools in the garage, often freezing and making a decidedly gross ice rink that lasts until the concrete pad warms to above freezing in April or May. In the summer, the pipe fills up with fine, sludgy sediment and only very strong currents — like a 5″ lake of water draining out of the garage — can clear it out.

I would have taken the building down the first time it flooded except, for one thing, my town has a no street parking rule in place November through April (for snow plowing) and there is no other off-street parking possible on this property. But there is another problem. I live on the side of a mountain, and more than three quarters of the garage is hanging over a sharp ledge. So it is built on a massive concrete and granite block pad, a foundation that is over fifteen feet tall at the back of the building. Removing all that solid concrete and granite block is beyond prohibitively expensive; it may be impossible. I wouldn’t be surprised if it survived a nuclear detonation. So that, at least, is going nowhere. I could take the garage walls off and make it a car port that sheds the water, but I also need a place to plug in my car. So there needs to be some fancy weatherizing of the electrical circuits, probably much like a public charging station. This all seems expensive and not at all what I want to be spending money on. Nor does it feel like anything more than a Band-Aid on the situation, one that might cause more mess than it will resolve.

I could dig out the dirt between the road and the garage and fill it with something more permeable like a couple feet or so of gravel. This would probably stop the flow of water at the road’s edge. My concern with that is that the gravel might just slump around the exposed northeast side of the garage. There is already a gully on that corner. I think the driveway is currently only held in place because of the high clay content in our dirt and because there are copious weed roots matting the whole thing together. Still, maybe I could leave a good section of weed-fused clay and rubble as a dam on the exposed side of the building and trap most of the water in a thick layer of gravel in front of the garage. That might, in times of high rainfall or in melt season, make a pond in front of the garage, but if the gravel is deep enough it might contain all the water until it can filter off through the soil. But this sounds like it might be channeling road run-off into the loose soil under my veg garden on the southwest side of the garage. Which is… not advisable. So, underneath all the gravel, I’d probably need to tile or otherwise direct the flow of water toward the northeast. Which is actually uphill… Again, this sounds very expensive. And probably not a long-term remediation.

So thus far I have done nothing about this problem except mumbling imprecations against it and all the idiocy that went into its making.

This is one of several intractable and expensive problems on this property. I would call them dilemmas. There isn’t one neat solution. For some things, there isn’t any resolution at all. It is how the property exists in this world at this time. I can do nothing about the high slope that underlies many of my issues. I can do very little to eliminate the clay in the soil and really don’t want to do that because it’s gluing what little soil there is to the side of this mountain. I can’t fix the garage drainage without taking the garage apart. There are no solutions here, so these are not problems to be fixed, but dilemmas to be mediated. I have to adapt.

My home is a microcosmic sample of a great deal of what we face in this world. For example, there is no solution to the alteration of the atmosphere. The carbon is already there and will remain there for centuries. This carbon will cause the atmosphere to get warmer. The only thin hope of avoiding runaway heating is that it is likely that increased evaporation will increase cloud cover and block some of the sun’s rays. But this is a very thin hope. Because, of course, increased evaporation means less freshwater in the places that are the most heat-stressed. Because increased cloud cover will interfere with plant growth, making this a very hungry planet, but also a planet that has little capacity to hold freshwater or shade the land. Because increased cloud cover in a warm atmosphere will cause more energetic storms that will destroy many things on land and probably further alter air and ocean circulation patterns. Because increased cloud cover means decreased evaporation, leading to a violent roller coaster of feedback cycling between hot and not as hot conditions. And because increased cloud cover is itself a temporary effect that does nothing to remove the carbon. This is a dilemma. Not a fixable problem. And we have to adapt. We have to adapt ourselves to the dilemma; the dilemma is the constant.

As you can probably see from the inclusion of plant growth and increasing aridity in heat-stressed areas in my list of cause and effect in increased evaporation, this dilemma is inextricably bound to many other dilemmas. The changes we are now living through are a web of dilemmas. This is a hyper-dilemma. There are no solutions to any strands of this web even if we could isolate one strand from all the others, which… we can’t. We can only adapt to the changes. And we adapt by changing ourselves, not the dilemma.

This is how life works. If we were as smart as we think we are, we’d know that. We’d know that all organisms on this planet, all being states under our sun, are interdependent. All of this is all part of one organism, Earth. There is no isolating one part. There is no closed system within this system. We can’t take this bit here and break it open without causing disruption everywhere else. Yet, we’ve treated our society, our culture, our species as a closed system. We name ourselves masters of our independent lives, even as we constantly, of necessity, take from the rest of the organism and break connections and beings willy nilly… which means will-he, nil-he, by the way… because, at some level, we know our will is causing annihilation.

In any case, we are within this system, a cause and an effect, and we have to adapt ourselves to the larger system — or go extinct. Which is also how life works.

As we were driving to see what had happened to my son’s town, he said ‘Water is scary’. And it is. Tons of concrete were ripped to shreds as if some enormous clawed thing had raked up the roadway in petulant anger. Hillside cliffs anchored by trees for hundreds of growing seasons sloughed off the mountain like so much dry sand. There is a place along the road to my son’s town where someone, perhaps unwisely, put up a manufactured home. Until Monday it was surrounded by all the draff of family life in our culture — a large trampoline, a picnic table with chairs and umbrella, a small wooden swing set and climbing tower with a plastic yellow slide, a blue above-ground pool, various large and brightly painted toys, a meticulously mown croquet lawn. On Tuesday there was no evidence that a home had ever been there. Nothing but a stream of random small bits of flotsam heading north, marking the path of the floodwaters. Water is scary. But maybe the more salient lesson is ‘water always wins’.

Or maybe that’s not quite it either. This isn’t a case of winning and losing. There is no contest of wills between human and water. There is just being. Water will be water no matter what. Will has nothing to do with it. We have nothing to do with it. Water will carry off whatever gets in between it and downhill. That is the way of water. That is its being state. Water flows down. Full stop. We can’t change that. We might be able to slow the flow for a time, but even the mightiest pile of concrete set to dam a river is always being undermined by water’s physical need to flow down. Water uphill has quite a bit of flexibility and energy to throw against an obstacle. Eventually, it will topple the obstacle. So, the lesson is to not become an obstacle — and not rely on obstacles to keep yourself safe.

The lesson is to adapt to water, to adapt like water. Flow around and under and eventually through an obstacle. In our responses to change, we aren’t being like water. We are trying to be the obstacles. And we are failing.

In my home, I need to work with this property. I need to look at what is, not what I want there to be. When I do that, I start to feel like water. I start to see ways of flowing around and under and through to meet my needs. Perhaps the uphill side of the driveway could be blocked off by a mound of rock, clay and plants. Perhaps there could be entry from downhill, beyond where the hillside road intersects the road in front of the garage. Perhaps the parking area would be outside the building, parallel to it and the road, on the other side of the protective mound. Perhaps the garage might be put to some other use and the doors that let water in could be remade into a wall that keeps it out. These are all ideas that work with water. Water really doesn’t want to be trapped in my garage. It wants to flow down the easiest path. So maybe I make it easier for water to flow down the road instead of into my driveway.

There is another lesson in water. No individual drop of rain can bring down a hillside. Water is a community. It is an organism. It is most powerful and energetic when it is a mass of millions of droplets all flowing down. Perhaps, in aggregate, there are even more things that can be done to adapt to my garage dilemma. There is a storm drain a few meters up the street from my garage, but it is rather stupidly placed near the top of the slope of the road it is supposed to drain, nowhere near the confluence of water that flows down the intersecting road. Water flows away from this drain in all directions. Perhaps the town could put a larger storm drain where the water from one road meets the water from the other — approximately right in front of the northeast side of my driveway. Which may be a mound that would slow the flow enough for the water to fall happily into the drain. The easiest path of all.

This isn’t a permanent solution. The only permanent solution is to rip up the road that channels the water into a fast-flowing mass aimed directly at my garage. Or I suppose I could abandon the garage space entirely and let fast-flowing water wear down the massive pile of concrete and granite that undergirds the garage. It might make a pretty waterfall for a time… But this would only pass the damages to those downstream. And downstream from my garage is the center of my town. A ravine opening up in the hillside where my garage sits would rip out the heart of the town, as water courses down the mountainside to join the river that flows through our town. Ultimately, this will happen if a steep, impermeable road is left in place on the hillside, and maybe we need to adapt ourselves to that inevitability. But maybe we can also slow the changes by cooperating with water.

As I said, my property is a microcosm, a miniature web of dilemmas within the enormous hyper-dilemma. There are more obstacles to meeting my needs, not all of them related to water and gravity. But these obstacles are all related to the planetary changes humans have set in motion by refusing to live in cooperation and community within the planet. Not all humans… in fact, only a very few, very recent humans. This is not evidence of the power and mastery of these few humans, but rather the power and interconnectedness of the web of Earth-being. With all those powerful bonds, it does not take much to disturb biophysical balance.

We know this about balance generally. A feather can tip the scales. A raindrop can open a tiny crack in the ground that eventually creates a canyon. One ruptured atom can blow up a city. It doesn’t take much to initiate change. In the case of these few humans, all it took was arrogant disregard. Which led to blindness and stupidity. Which led to thousands of idiotic acts, both small and large, but all consequential within the wider web. Which led to an avalanche of change, none of which we caused, none of which we can control, but all of which is the result of our arrogant disregard.

It doesn’t take much to upset balance and flow. It doesn’t take much to initiate change. This is actually my hope. A small thing can set off change — both destructive and beneficial. The trick is knowing the connections in the web, seeing effects before becoming cause, nudging change to a new state of balance for the entire organism, being like water and finding that easy path downhill. Yet while the path is easy, finding it is a challenge, one that is impossible to reconcile with a belief in human exceptionality. Whatever change is initiated, it will not only affect humans. It’s more than asking how this act will affect me or my town or my region. It’s asking how me and my town and my region can best fit into the whole world. I don’t see this happening much… but it can.

Good change is possible. It is possible to adapt in ways that restore balance. Other parts of the system that is the Earth are already flowing down to a new level state. We need to join in that flow, see where it is headed, figure out ways to nudge change in ways that lead to the best levels, the most benefit, the least waste. We have to accept that we are part of the flow, not the masters. We have to accept that there are no masters, only the interconnected flow. And we are not doing that yet. But it is possible. It is possible to adapt within the organism to the benefit of the whole organism.

Maybe that new balance doesn’t include much of our culture. Maybe it doesn’t even include humans. The changes we’ve set in motion are not leading to a healthy place for an organism that can’t make its own food, can’t tolerate many extremes, and can’t function without the support of many other beings, many of whom are threatened by the changes we’ve set in motion. But I think we can avoid those dire consequences. I think we will. I think that humanity itself is out of balance and already falling from the precipice of elite arrogance. I think most humans are already flowing down, away from the things that are most destructive. I think the Earth is forcing that flow, none too gently removing all the underpinnings of this wasteful system. I think we will reach a new level not unlike the state of being that has defined the majority of humans in time and place. And so perhaps the best adaptations are refusing to prop up the failing state and flowing to where we are most content as human beings.

And yes, I believe we are most content without this mess of a system. I believe we are most content when we have what our bodies need — community, shelter, beauty, rest, good food, and good health. When we make that — and only that — we fit our species back within the world. When we fit our species back within the world, we stop upsetting the balance and initiating new changes. When we fit our species back in the world, we find that the world is full of exactly what we need, what we want, what makes us content. Abundantly so! And while some will lose what they think they want, so many more will gain that I think this change is inevitable. I think we’re already on the path. I think we’re already falling headlong back to our level of contentment, back into the waiting arms of the Earth.

Water is scary. But water always flows toward a level balance. When we stop being arrogant obstacles, we can learn a lot from water.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023