Audubon Park, where we were headed, works as a swale. In any flood, it fills briefly, the oaks’ roots covered with water. I knew we wouldn’t be able to cross it, but still, I drove forward. I suppose I wanted my daughter to see what I had countless times: the park turned into a temporary sea.
“Wow,” my daughter said.
“Your first flood!” I yelled over the sound of the thunder. “You’re a real New Orleanian now!”
Only as I said it did I understand why I had decided to take us out into the water. I needed my daughter to see this flooding close up, to understand what it meant to live in this city that lives with water.
Here, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, explosions of rain accompany and relieve the summer heat. Street flooding is, if not welcome, at least expected. Wandering around the house that morning, I texted friends about the days when we had been let out of school to push our teachers’ cars to higher ground. I also called my father to remember the night we’d spent helping neighbors who had kayaked from Broadmoor dock. There was a holiday feeling to the day — a sense of tradition.
Later that afternoon, though, as I watched the flood slowly sink on the street outside of my window, a friend called to tell me that the Mississippi was projected to rise to 20 feet on Saturday, when Barry would push a surge up into the mouth of the already swollen river. At 20 feet — the highest level recorded by river gauges since 1927 — some levees would be overtopped, and there was a chance, slim but real, that they would be undermined and break, allowing the river to enter the city, as the lake had rushed in through breaches in our levees in 2005. Hurricane Katrina passed through me like a ghost. I went ice cold.
Our family home was built before the modern levee system was put in place following the Mississippi flood of 1927. It is built on the river’s “natural levee” — a strip of high ground built by river sediment during floods — and raised on four-foot piers. Consequently, when the levees failed during Katrina, the floodwaters missed the floor joists by inches. Since the levees were built, however, the houses of New Orleans have been built closer to the ground, and that ground has sunk below the sea.
This city and its water have a paradoxical relationship. Draining the water that floods the city causes the land the city sits on to subside — to shrink and sink — making it more prone to flooding. The levees that have allowed the city to grow, despite its proximity to water, also help bring water ever closer, as the sediment that would normally be deposited by Mississippi floods is carried right out to sea. The city’s very existence depends on its sitting at the juncture of the river and the gulf, but, inevitably, it will be destroyed by one of them — or both.
To fully understand the problem of our levees — synecdoche for the failure of our species’ attempts to control nature for our benefit — read John M. Barry’s “Rising Tide,” “Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast” by Elizabeth Kolbert, or “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee. What I have time to tell you here is this: By leveeing the Mississippi, we have encouraged the permanent habitation of places that are not permanently habitable.
On Thursday, I sat at the base of the river levee, toggling on my phone between dog-friendly hotels and the river forecast. I kept seeing a 20-foot wall of water breaching the high grassy mound in front of me, washing away houses, filling the bowl of the city like a cup. On the radio, the governor told us that his office was “leaning forward” in preparation for the storm, then tried to reassure us the levees would hold. In New Orleans, we know what such assurances are worth.
I let the dog out of the car and climbed the levee behind her, looking out across the west bank toward where the Huey P. Long Bridge crosses the river at a farther bend. Ship traffic was light, and the water rose high among the trees on the batture, where we like to walk when the river is low. A blue heron stalked the flooded grass until the dog blundered down the slope and flushed it into a tree.
The river forecast had been downgraded to 19 feet by the time we got in the car Friday morning, though Lake Pontchartrain, high with diverted river water, splashed at the belly of the Interstate 10 bridge. It was a calmer lake than the one my family had crossed, evacuating for Katrina. That day, waterspouts had threatened the stalled traffic; now, there were only white caps. The traffic moved swiftly. Not many of us were leaving, but those who did evacuated for the same reason: Though the chance of disaster was low, the disaster we risked was catastrophic. One friend told me, “We didn’t even flood Wednesday, but I don’t ever want to be one of those people sitting on their roof on the news.”
Noticing the dead cypresses lining the highway, my daughter worried about forest fires, another product of climate change she’s heard about. Trying to distract her — and to prevent myself from explaining the salt death of the marsh — I pointed out a raptor’s nest in the crook of a lone tree and the dozen snowy egrets that lined the banks of a channel.
Squalls fell like curtains as we traveled up Interstate 55. We remained inside the storm for 200 miles, only crossing through the outer band of rain as we ascended the hills into Vicksburg, Miss. Beyond it, summer was waiting. Fluffy cumulus rose in a hot-blue sky.
We had gained a hundred feet of elevation by the time we reached Louisiana’s Poverty Point, a UNESCO world heritage site we’d decided to visit to make the most of our evacuation. There, between 1768 and 1300 B.C., an ancient culture built monumental earthworks on the river’s flood plain. We walked a trail along semicircular mounds where hunter-gathers came together for ceremonies and festivals 3,000 years ago. Between the ridges, in swampy “borrows,” fish and turtles swam when the river was in flood, providing food. Though we know very little about the culture, this suggested to me a way of living with the river that was more adaptive than ours, one not dependent on controlling what cannot be controlled.
As my husband and I forged through squadrons of dragonflies, my daughter lagged. But finally, beyond a copse of trees, she stopped, awestruck. On the ridges’ western side, a mound rose 70 feet into the sky, taking the shape of a bird in flight.
As we walked the hot boardwalk to its top, my daughter and I talked about what a bird might have meant to the people who had built this place. We talked about the herons and egrets we’d seen in the past few days. We talked about migration and flight, about the idea of rising above inevitable water. We talked about the kind of determination it would have taken, 3,000 years ago, to shape millions of baskets of earth into a mound many times the height of our levees. I thought of the determination it will take today to adapt to rising water and stronger storms.
That night, before going to bed in our hotel in Jackson, Miss., I checked the river forecast one last time: It had been adjusted down to the safe level of 17 feet. The next day, I’d watch storm surge come ashore across Louisiana and the rivers swell north of Lake Pontchartrain, while New Orleans escaped unscathed. Still, I expect the terror I felt Wednesday will return each time high river encounters strong storm, until the water does again what we once saw it do. But, at the top of that mound of earth, looking out over the tops of the trees beyond the influence of Barry, we all felt calmer, sure that soon we’d be back home.