As the Waters Rise

I think about floods probably more than I should. I didn’t used to, but I do these days.

I spent about five years living on a land project in Western North Carolina, built in a tiny valley along a low and lazy creek. Most days, the creek’s bed rose a good six feet or so from the six inches of water that ran through it. By most every map, we weren’t a flood zone at all. By some, we were a one-hundred year flood plain, which meant that the water should break the bank and flood the fields every hundred years or so.

The thing about climate change is that nothing works the way that it’s supposed to, and the floods got worse and worse, higher and higher, more and more frequent. We’d bring inspectors out to look at our creek beds, and for the most part, they’d shake their heads—nothing works like it’s supposed to, anymore, and the solutions that we could have relied on in the 20th century weren’t going to work for us in the 21st.

Anticipating the once-a-century floods (or even small yearly floods), people built their cabins and put their trailers up on platforms and stilts, but every few months the water would move another step closer to people’s floors.

I wish I could tell you that I built high on the hill at the back of the property because I was a good prepper, that I’d anticipated this problem and taken steps to protect myself and my home. That would be a lie, though. I built where I built because I’m a strange introvert and I wanted a cabin in the woods where I couldn’t see any other houses. Which meant carrying every piece of my cabin up the hill by hand. So it goes.

I think about floods because I’ve spent too much time in them already, wading through waters that I shouldn’t to move equipment out from under the barn.

We’re at an impasse in American society right now, about a lot of things, but disaster preparedness is one of them. For individuals, or even small communities, I can offer ideas like: “build on the hill, not in the valley,” or “make sure your house has adequate drainage.” I could tell you to keep an axe in your attic, like people do down along the gulf coast, so that if you’re ever ...