Welcome to The Cahokian...
A thousand years ago Cahokia — across the Mississippi from what is now St. Louis — was one of the biggest cities in the world. Now it's an empty green spot next to the highway. I'm a middle-aged gay man living in New York City, center of the world, future footnote on somebody's future map. Welcome to the new world.
Those interested in helping victims of the Frankenstorm "Sandy" in New York City should visit the following sites:
• on Facebook, comrades of the Occupy movement have established "Occupy Sandy Relief NYC" as a clearinghouse. They've established food kitchens in the flooded neighborhoods of Red Hook and Rockaway.
• working with Occupy folks and established community organizations, recovers.org has established three relevant pages for hard-hit neighborhoods, which include portals for donations. The Lower East Side Recovers Red Hook Recovers Astoria Recovers
My neighborhood lucked out this time. Lots of wind but only minor tree damage. We've had electricity the whole time. But many of my friends in Manhattan have been flooded out or stranded without power or heat.
Rick Perry said it, but this is pretty much the platform of the entire Republican party:
"America has proven but untapped supplies of natural gas, oil and coal. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal with 25 percent of the world’s supply. Our country contains up to 134 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas....But President Obama and his over-reaching Environmental Protection Agency won’t allow American businesses and American labor to draw on even a fraction of this domestic energy from reserves on government-owned lands....
We will open several American oil and gas fields for exploration that are currently off limits because of political considerations. The current administration has restricted exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and the mid-Atlantic....I will work to open up Alaska’s abundant resources to oil and gas exploration, including the ANWR Coastal Plain and the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska. In this one instance, we will need congressional authorization. But it is worth it when you consider we will create 120,000 jobs. We will initiate off-shore exploration in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the northern and western coasts of Alaska. This will create 55,000 jobs. We will resume pre-Obama levels of exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and create another 230,000 jobs. I will support the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to take Canadian Crude to coastal refineries, which would create 20,000 direct jobs for American workers....And right here in Pennsylvania, and across the state line in West Virginia and Ohio, we will tap the full potential of the Marcellus Shale and create another 250,000 jobs by getting the EPA out of the way...." —Texas governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry announcing his "energy" plan yesterday in Pittsburgh. Below, what Texas looks like today.
Yes, they actually think the Environmental Protection Agency is a chief cause of the economic crisis.
Above is the scene up in Margaretville, New York, on Sunday in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. This was shot from the second floor of a commercial property owned by dear friends of mine. The building in the background is apparently now close to collapse...it housed a number of shops, a pub, and several floors of apartments. Margaretville is hundreds of miles away from me: I'm five long blocks from New York Harbor, and Margaretville is nestled safely up in the Catskill Mountains.
After the freak earthquake earlier in the week, we dutifully prepared to face nature's wrath this weekend. I stocked up on supplies, filled pots with water, shut windows and stayed indoors. Cut off from my boyfriend and others by the shutdown of the city's transit system, I waited out the storm. I listened to the mayor on the radio every once in a while sternly telling people to prepare for the worst.
In the middle of Saturday night I woke up and peered out the front door to a bizarrely apocalyptic sight: in the heavy rain water was flowing over the front sidewalk in a sheet as the trees shook and rustled in the furious wind. But shortly after I woke up in the morning the sun came out, the rain gone, the air calm. While the wind returned in the afternoon, there was no residual flood, and no trees had crashed onto our house. The feral cats out back didn't even seem to be wet.
The storm crashed into shore not far from here, and yet everything in the city had a pro forma feel to it. It took a day for the subway to be switched back on. I saw a neighbor airing out a wet basement. A friend photographed a tree that had split in two. But it was anticlimactic, a lot of wind and rain but it sure didn't feel like what we thought a hurricane would feel like. But in upstate New York, and neighboring Vermont, catastrophe.
Check out the Watershed Post website: amidst the heartbreaking photos is a live blog and a spreadsheet being used to locate survivors stranded by the wild uproar of the mountain rivers and streams. It's all broken roads and bridges and collapsed homes amidst brown water. I go up there once or twice a year to share the green tranquility of my friends' vacation homes: I recognize these familiar sights in disbelief. And the Metro North train line to my godfather's house in the Catskill foothills may be out for months, the trainbed washed completely away in many places.
The authorities had tried to protect something, whether the city or even merely their own reputations. We prepared for the worst, but the worst went elsewhere. We fool ourselves when we think someone other than Nature Herself is in control: by Her merest whim we survive. She moves on without looking back. Until next time.
My computer is not in my air-conditioned room: Concerned about spontaneous combustion as the temperature inside at 10:30 pm reads 95 degrees fahrenheit, I'm going to go cool off and finish the third book of "The Game of Thrones" instead of write profound things about the debt game in Washington or the implementation of the DADT repeal or any number of things.
When I was a child living in Chicago in the 1960s, there were a string of terrible tornado seasons. While the twisters didn't come for us in the city, we felt the same weather systems. The sky turned green and the air pressure did strange things; the air one minute thick and damp and heavy turned wild and windy the next. Neighboring Will County was struck hard. For years afterward, every time my parents would take me on a car trip out of town, I was seized by terror that we would pass through Will County and be attacked by tornadoes. My mother later recounted to me that if they saw a "Will County" sign they would try distracting me so I wouldn't notice it and freak out.
This year the U.S. has been struck by waves of killer tornadoes: a few weeks ago in the South, yesterday in Missouri and today in Oklahoma. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands of people have been injured or lost their homes and belongings to the wind. In times like these it doesn't really seem useful to wonder — or possible to know — if these storms are just something nature is doing right now or if they're related to climate change (bizarrely we even had a small tornado here in Brooklyn a couple years ago and this is surely not tornado alley). But if I still remember the fear of being even a few dozen miles from tornadoes, I can't imagine how frightening it must be to live near where they're causing such suffering right now.
I know at least two of my regular readers live in prairie states right under those winds. Be safe, my prayers are with you. I sure hope you have basements!
I heard this song on Harry Shearer's radio program Le Show on NPR last week and promptly bought it on Amazon. I found this youtube clip, sadly without real video. It's "Water" by Judith Owen, who apparently is Mrs. Harry Shearer. He used the song to punctuate a melancholic report about the state of New Orleans -- where they maintain a home -- five years after Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic failure of the levees. "The water will rise up in our lives."
It's an exquisite song, with piano and strings and Ms. Owen's haunting voice. Funny to listen to this on a day when Hurricane Earl passed us by here in New York City with just a wash of tropic humidity and a few drops of rain.
Joe Zawinul, long-time leader of the fusion group Weather Report, died this morning. Along with a changing cast of characters--Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Alejandro Acuna, Ndugu, Alphonso Johnson, Manolo Badrena, and others--Zawinul and Weather Report played fusion in the post-Miles days when jazz was full of competing but living crosscurrents. Weather Report brought multiculturism--Zawinul was Austrian and his bandmates spanned many countries--to fusion giving a human and rhythmic edge to a music often too bogged down in music virtuosity and electronic technology. Before Weather Report he played keyboards with Cannonball Adderley, working with ground-breaking arranger David Axelrod in the 1960s. Although Zawinul wasn't my favorite of the Weather Report soloists, and his "third-stream" influences weren't to my taste, he was one of those musicians who managed to push jazz through as a popular music without sacrificing itself to smooth jazz pablum. While Weather Report may have spawned some yawny world and smooth jazz traditions, it was still first on the block.
