Ed. note: This piece was posted on Eliza’s blog on August 9.
The former facilities manager of my small Vermont bank had a bad 2023. When I met him, he had only just been promoted to this position, which was a job he did not seem to enjoy or even do well. He was an excellent handyman. He was not at all suited to managing other handy-people, nor coping with all the complaints from not-at-all-handy bank people. But it was an available job. Which is what most of us do for wages these days.
A couple months later he was up to his armpits in managing. One bank branch with a completely flooded basement and five more feet of water on the ground floor. One branch with a parking lot that was experimenting with being an oxbow lake. One branch that had something like ten tons of paper records soaked and then molding in the three feet of standing water in its basement. (Why do we have basements anyway…) This was in addition to one branch that had only just opened its doors (and then was flooded) and one that was in the middle of a complicated move. And all these branches are spread out all over northern Vermont, connected by tenuous roads and separated by mountains and newly unbridged rivers.
Like all of us in central Vermont, he also had personal hardship with these disasters. He had begun to buy rental properties, thinking that he would turn them into affordable housing and eventually have an income stream that would allow him to quit the day-job. Then came July and all the buildings were flooded. Since he did the thing properly and bought these properties under a business name, he didn’t qualify for FEMA. Nor did he have sufficient flood insurance because the block he was buying is half a mile from the river, not at all in a flood zone. He didn’t think he needed flood insurance. (In fact, given my experience with commercial loans, it’s likely his lender told him specifically that he did not…) So he was forced to sell because he did not have the money to pay the mortgage, the sunk renovation costs, and the new rehab.
Similarly, his wife’s business, a gym that catered to older folks, was hurt by the flood. Already limping along after COVID gutted those sorts of businesses, the flood damaged floors and machines. She reopened in the fall, but there just wasn’t positive cash flow and she closed again early this year, this time for good.
I am fairly certain they did not sleep between July and November. And then in a December storm, another branch flooded. I think that was when he decided he’d had it.
When the last branch with flood repairs finally reopened in April, after nearly nine months of construction contracting work that he never wanted, that he daily resented, that he never felt equal to, he announced that he was done with the job. Done with managing. Done with Vermont. He wanted a place for his kids to call home without an ever-present fear of losing that home. He wanted his wife to be able to open another business, perhaps find a business partner other than himself (he did not seem terribly fond of running a gym, though he did teach classes). And he wanted opportunities for himself. He didn’t want to be trapped into accepting a lifetime of working an available job. He wanted to do something that he was trained to do, that he was good at, that he might even enjoy as far as jobs go.
At the end of May, they moved to South Carolina… which is now under three feet of water.
Here in Vermont on Thursday evening, municipalities are handing out sandbags and urging people in flood zones to evacuate early. People who live above the flood zone are being advised to stay home. There is a flood watch in effect until Saturday morning. We already have a storm cell over the state, and it is not Debby. Whatever the hurricane remnants bring, it will be on top of about 24 hours of moderate but steady precipitation. The ground is already saturated, and rivers are still just under flood stage. The tropical storm is expected to be over New England, nearly centered on my town (again…), early tomorrow evening. The flood watch associated with the storm — in addition to whatever is over us now — says to expect 2.5 inches of rain in a few hours tomorrow night. There is an inevitability about tomorrow that almost feels like a dream. This can’t be happening. How can this be happening?!? And yet undoubtedly it will happen…
This is what biophysical collapse looks like. It’s not a wall of ice chasing the protagonists all over the eastern seaboard. It’s not The Road or Mad Max, though there will be places that look like that. There already are. (I might say that there always have been.) But in real collapse there is not predictable Hollywood diegesis leading up through clockwork plotting to a satisfying resolution — neither utopian, nor dystopian. There won’t be a sudden climax with everything lying in a denouement of rubble after a few hours of chaos. There will be no denouement. Nor are there heroes to carry us through the darkness, nor even any roles that lend themselves to heroics. In fact, there is nothing whatsoever to be done about it, and there never will be. It will never be done no matter what is done… there will never be an ending… and we’ve already passed the beginning.
This breakdown of our planetary systems doesn’t look like the stories we tell of collapse. It doesn’t sound like collapse. (Though it does smell like collapse…) It is too diffuse and scattered to be reduced to a nice, neat narrative. Collapse is not neat. It is not one thing and done. It is not sudden and demarcated and explicable. Rather, it is steady rain for no particular meteorological reason, storms marching in the wake of storms piling on top of storms, relentless erosion of everything — especially the spirit. It is extremes of all sorts stacked one on top of the other until we are inured to new records. It is escalating levels of disaster and continually compounding destruction. It is loss after loss after loss until we can’t remember what we started out with. It is debilitating and disorienting, with never a moment to stand on steady ground. When each day delivers new dangers and damages, there is no recovery, no release, no rest. We are forced to plod along coping with whatever the day brings, knowing some won’t make it to sunset. And more than anything, we are tired. We want it to end. And there won’t be an ending.
Biophysical collapse does not happen on human scales in time or space. We can’t see it. We can’t measure it. We can’t comprehend it in all its monstrous, tentacled multifariousness. We small humans can’t make sense of what is happening. It is too big, too varied, too everything. It’s like trying to map a 4th dimensional giant. We see a finger here, an eyeball there, a bit of the torso protruding from the ground beneath our feet. We can’t hope to assemble our scattered perceptions into something whole and comprehensible. We’re standing in it and it is interpenetrating us, but it is bigger than us in every aspect. There is no other horizon. It has no ending that we will ever see, though we will never stop looking for the world that we unmade in but a few generations.
We will shift around, trying to find relief from the thousand cuts — and the occasional gash. We will flail around, trying to make something stick, to find some solidity in this protean world. We will flee Vermont to rush into the eye of a hurricane. We will gather our loved ones and what we can salvage from the wreckage and move to higher ground only to watch it slump into the river. We will sift through the ashes in the wake of each fire hoping to find some justification, some reason, something to blame, some explicit cause and effect. Because we want each disaster to be a definable event, not the amorphous ground state of being. Most of all we want it to be finite. We want to be able to get away, and we will travel for lifetimes before we fully understand that there is no away, that there has never been an away, that this fundamental lack of away is exactly why we are in this predicament.
These stories that I tell here… these are collapse. The stories of increasingly unmanageable weather are collapse. The stories of ubiquitous economic hardship are collapse. The stories of extinction and gaping lacunae in a formerly vibrant and full world are collapse. True, we humans have always had our fascination with end times and falls from grace. We have reams of those sorts of stories. But notice that those sorts of stories have a plot and a completion, usually within a manageable time-line. A logical flow of beginning, middle, and — trumpet fanfare — end. Our end-times stories are also characteristically anthropocentric. But eschatology is not collapse. The end is just a fairy story. Stories of true collapse have no center and they do not end. Stories of collapse are bewildering. We can’t make sense of them because we can’t sense collapse. Because it is not about us. It is around us.
I am not sure how my friend in South Carolina is doing today. In a new home, he probably doesn’t have a community to turn to in extremity. He may not have food or water. He undoubtedly does not have power. He thought he was escaping this story. Because we tell ourselves that this story has edges, that there is a Hollywood ending somewhere out there. We just have to throw enough solar panels and electric cars at the problem and it will be solved. (Or… insert your politically preferred panacea.) He thought he was in a story that had “and they lived happily ever after” out there somewhere. Or that he could forge that fairy tale ending by main force, pulling up roots from this gelatinous land and marching toward something that seemed solid. Because those are the stories we tell about collapse, and our stories are all we know to be true.
But we don’t tell it like it is. If we did, maybe he’d be here still. Maybe I’d be in New Mexico. Or maybe we’d both do exactly as we have done, simply to try to do something to salve this constant strain. We two, we are not yet beaten enough to stand still and let collapse roll over us. We’re still running for higher ground. Though I think we both understand now that there isn’t any such place. Or time. Still, we keep going nonetheless.
And that is the other side of the hidden story, the story we don’t tell, that there is still reason to go on. It is not in pursuit of resolution, much less glory. It is going because going is what you do. It is carrying on because the alternative is unthinkable, because there is still life in all this mess. And where there is life there is hope.
Tonight, I am listening to the rain. I still find that a soothing sound. This evening there was a rainbow on my drive home from work. I still find that a wondrous sight. These are the reasons, these and all the other daily small delights that still find their way to each of us in the midst of all extremities. There is no happily ever after, but there is joy, fierce joy, in being alive each moment. And this too is not in the stories we tell ourselves. Because rainbows are free. But also because we do not make rainbows. We are not the authors of our own happy rainbows. We are part of a world that makes rainbows, and we are dependent upon that world for our happiness. This is not a heroic tale. There are no handsome protagonists bringing salvation at the end of the flood. There are only fleeting rainbows. And the miraculous thing is that this is enough.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
