Flooding

For the past five years I’ve spent a month each summer teaching out of town. It gives me a chance to work with my favorite group of students while also giving me a chance to spend some time in a place I once lived and loved. This year was the first time climate change played a role. It’s now done so three times in about a month.

For the better part of a week earlier this summer, Canadian wildfires affected the air quality here in western New York. One day the sky was an odd orange. It was harder to breathe, and easier to cough. There were also unseasonably hot days. Rochester used to be able to go an entire summer without hitting 90 degrees; this summer there were more hot days than usual.

My car hasn’t had air conditioning in years. In the past that could be uncomfortable in July; with warmer, more intense heat, it’d be impossible. I bit a bullet I’d sworn not to and spent more money than my car is worth on fixing the radiator and the air conditioning. The car would never survive the trip without the former, and I wouldn’t without the latter; my prior solution of rolling the windows down and letting the hot air in was a no-go with Canadian wildfire air.

The trip down took longer than I liked, but the A/C make it comfortable. About a week after arriving, there was an unusually intense rainfall overnight. The basement of the house I stay in started taking on water. The homeowner hoped the estimate to repair the damage would be a couple hundred bucks. It was nearly $3000. He has flood insurance and home insurance. Neither one covers the damage. Turns out there’s a trick to how the water enters the home, specifically, and how far it carries property. If we ever decide to while away the last days of civilization punishing the worst of us, let there be a long stretch of guillotines devoted to the insurance industry and its profiteers.

The word “flood” shares an etymology with “flow.” Saturate, soak, suck: they’re all from the same gene pool. “Infuse,” which can mean to fill or pervade, includes a medical definition having to do with allowing a liquid to fill a vein. That dividing line interests me. When talking about the same effect – a volume of liquid filling a vacuum – the word used has to do with the presumed etymology of the effect itself. If the liquid filling the space is sought after or the residue of design, it can be infused or soaked; if it was not the result of human direction, then it’s a flood, a torrent, a deluge.

If we’re the cause of our own demise, does that change the nature of what floods are? If they wash away a virus that’s spread destruction with a pace and width literally unprecedented in the history of the planet. Maybe Earth isn’t flooding. Maybe it’s infusing. What, though?   

A new semester is only a week away. For a while I’ve been trying to find a copy of a story I used to teach, with no luck. “The Ice Cream Vendor” is a short story by Leena Krohn, a great Finnish writer. I have it in two different books and usually type out any story I teach into a Google doc so I always have a digital copy. But it turns out I never typed out “The Ice Cream Vendor,” and that after a very brief spell where all my books were finally in one place, there came a breakup, then a quick move-out, and now some books are with me while others are in a storage unit and some I have no idea. The two with Krohn’s story fell in the “no idea” grouping.

A week ago there was unusually intense rainfall overnight. I suppose it’s becoming more usual. The basement of the house I live in ended up with one to two feet of water. Appliances flooded and stopped working; some have kicked back on, some haven’t. There was no A/C in the house for a few days; there’s still no hot water a week after this started. There was sewage mixed in with the water, so a lot of what was damaged is ruined. 

I’ve spent most of my adult life fitting most of that life into one room, often living in studios or small apartments where my bedroom, living room, office, gym and dining room were the same space. That’s been the case in the year-plus since my engagement ended: take all those rooms I just listed, add an upright piano to the mix and that’s my space. Recently I decided I don’t want to have most of my life and activities confined to such a small space. I moved a few things – just some books and comic books, as a trial run – out of the breezeway and into the basement. That little Jamestown colony of mine? All of it was destroyed in the flooding.

As I went through what I’d lost, I finally found the book I’d been looking for, the one with Krohn’s “Ice Cream Vendor.” It’d been ruined in the flooding. But I’d forgotten the book’s title, as well as – somehow – the fact that there is an entire internet of things where I can order a new one. The story is a strange one: a young girl visits the beach with her mother, one an exceptionally hot day. When the child walks up to an ice cream vendor, he says strange things to her – about the day, the weather, the world at-large etc. Ominous things. The mother returns to the vendor with the child, but is not exactly reassured after her own exchange with him. The story ends with a bizarre, unforgettable image and an unresolved ending.

For years I used this story to teach analysis writing. My heart sunk every time a student wrote a paper about “The Ice Cream Vendor” that used it as a metaphor for climate change. That was too easy, I thought; low-hanging rhetorical fruit. Of course you can compare a story about an exceptionally hot day at the beach to global warming, but why settle? Why not think more? Demand more of yourself?

It struck me then that I was doing the same thing English does with flooding and intent: defining the quality of an action based on its apparent design. But what I was really saturated with, overfull of, was my own (in)action as a teacher. If I don’t want to read essays connecting Krohn’s work to climate change, all I have to do is tell the students they can’t do that. If I want more from them, all I have to do is ask. If I help them shape what they give me before it gets to me, what in the past may have overrun me instead flowed through and filled me with more of what I’m looking for. By losing what I did in the flood damage, I gained awareness I might otherwise have missed.