Nightshining

Chapter 1

You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catksills as I tell this story. Farm fields quilt the valley below. Looking down it, other bluffs like this, long and flat, frame the view. I imagine the mountains all filled in and the land a thousand feet higher in the air, as if we are all floating, levitating together.

The sun has burned off the fog, and the sky is a cerulean so bright language fails it. Two hawks screech past, floating on thermals. Light catches in Iris’s hair. Her mass of curls and corkscrews is illuminated like a halo. It is a few days after the solstice, and we wear cut-offs and masks because it is June 2020. Hers is emblazoned BLM. Mine bears the Maltese cross of my volunteer fire department. The hike to this plateau is teeming with children—so many it feels dystopian, like the world is ending, and maybe it is. It is also a pandemic, where we have been told to be scared of each other and are unsure how to be together, even out- side. Sharing space feels transgressive and transcendent. Behind us people have strung hammocks between the few trees at the summit, and country music plays. The kids climb past in their shorts and high-top sneakers, flip-flops and T-shirts emblazoned with sports teams and school names, owls, unicorns, and dinosaurs.

On the trail, I love most the one little girl in an impractical lace sundress and sandals. I love, too, this Whitmanesque sense of nature, us all together, asses and elbows, bodies sharing breath and space; that in this catastrophe we have taken en masse to the outdoors. This is not some Thoreau or Emersonlike bracing experience of the individual in the wilderness, the self against the world. I ask the girl if she likes hiking. She buries her head in her father’s legs.

And, I see myself in a Snoopy sweatshirt in the photo my father takes when I am six: blond hair gold in the light and a view of Vermont several thousand feet below. He has carried me up these heights as I complain, and I stand with him on the granite ledge. Before me is some kind of a bird, a brown hen, I now know is a grouse. He takes a picture of me, and in it I shrug. Maybe at the bird and this view, as if they are nothing, or his work in delivering me to the summit, nothing.

Now Iris waves at a field a thousand feet below. Silver flares of light reflect off cars as they park. She asks if that’s a U-pick farm, and I say yes, I did pick strawberries there a few days ago with my husband David. The woman who weighed our baskets told us it’s the busiest start ever. People are worried about food and supply chains. The farm just opened for the season, and already the fields are nearly picked clean.

At our feet names are carved into a long, flat boulder, so big and broad it’s called the dance floor. It is sedimentary stone from a sea nearly 400 million years old, and in a time frame closer to ours it was covered in moss. Sometime a century ago, people rolled the moss up like a giant carpet and started inscribing their names into stone. “LEO” is rounded as if carved in Arial. “Frank and Lydia” came in 1985. An arrow points to Frank’s name and the date. In what seems to me an act of hubris, “JA & GB” only put “86” after their initials. Is it 1886 or 1986? Or, don’t they think it will one day be 2086? Maybe JA and GB just give up. Or, perhaps that year 2086 is unreachable, impossible, and we will never make it that far.

The biggest carving reads “DOW VROMAN,” and this hill is called Vroman’s Nose, not for the person whose name is incised in grand serifs but his forebear who steals the land from the Mohawks who’ve lived here for millennia. I tell Iris that the farm below sits on the grounds of a Mohawk village. Onistagrawa. I sound out the word with the long “youh” of the first syllable and “nee-sta-grawa” as I’ve been taught to say it. At its margin is a river that’s called a creek, the Schoharie Creek spelled Skóhare in Mohawk. The creek runs north and gives its name to this county and region.

Onistagrawa means the place where the corn grows by the hill, and the people whose land this is do not name themselves Mohawk. Here they are the Skóhare, part of the Kanien’kehá:ka, the people of the flint place. Their lands extend almost all the way to the Hudson River and north through the Adirondacks into Canada. At the foot of this bluff, the Skóhare Mohawks take in refugees from white colonization, Mohicans and Munsee Lenape and others, all together, even I will learn soon, white refugees from British tyranny and greed.

On the way up, boulders are scarred with striations, glacial chatter it’s called, as if we can hear the ice. And, I want the names at our feet to talk, everyone here speak- ing, jostling together outside—this communion of us in nature. I picture the public, a collective body even cuts across time and is impossible to pin down outside the frail two letters, U and S, of the first-person plural. I want all of it—all of us—plus the girl in her impractical dress, the people in hammocks, and the clouds. They are lazy in the sky, a blue I learn that if not for vapor, for aerosols, would be black. Those aerosols are in the news, too, now, as our breath is an aerosol that carries a virus.

Iris gestures to a wobbly 1929 in the rock. Was it be- fore or after the crash? she wonders. The jump down is precipitous. The twang of guitar catches in the air. I imagine us all waltzing together on this dance floor. I rock the baby and have come here for a dead man. He draped the landscape in smoke. He brings floods and clouds and studies forest fires. I have been tracking him now a half dozen years, and he loved this mountain. I have come to love him too, even though a technology he develops destroys my village in a flood in 1950. It is the floods that carry me here.

This summer (and every summer is now this summer) will bring the worst fire season in the West and brushfires in my town. Greenland’s ice sheet will melt beyond repair. People die in deluges around the world, and for this moment we stand here together—you and Iris and her baby and me, and the man I’ve come searching for. Vince—his name is Vincent Schaefer—and I learn of him after my second flood.

Chapter 2

The first flood comes my first year in Margaretville, New York, a tiny village in the Western Catskills where at that point, the population is around 594. It is early morning, and a friend tries to rouse me.

He pounds on my bedroom door.

I’ve moved from London to a Victorian house with ginger- bread, it’s called, for the fancy details outside, like a house in a fairytale. It also has a turret, and right now my hus- band David is away for work and I am asleep in the turret like Rapunzel, like some princess, like, wake up now, Jennifer, like hearing voices call, Jen, Jen, in my dreams.

Only I am drugged. Sleeping pills. Zolpidem tartrate.

And, this turret is not a turret at all, just a bulge inside the house. From the street, yes, it has that Rapunzel-let-down- your-hair look, even three inset windows. Inside, however, the walls simply curve around and are just big enough to fit the headboard of a queen-sized bed in this Queen Anne Victorian home, and me, on Ambien.

I’ve taken it to drown out the banging of rocks in the stream outside. The boulders in the century-old walls lining the banks pummel each other with the force of water lifting and dropping each rock as the creek rises. They strike with heavy thuds, a resounding bass that crashes through the house, through the bed, through my shoulders and neck.

Jen, Jennifer! Wake up. I smell gas.

The word gas is repeated more than once.

The stream is called Bull Run, and in all my years here I never learn why it has that name. My guess is that this now, today, is the reason. It is running like a bull, and I will come to know that the straighter the stream, the faster it runs. To straighten it is to try to get it to obey the laws of our world—rationality and order (or what seems like order)—and to abide by where we put our roads and houses. Walling it in only makes the water race faster, higher, with more danger in moments like this, in a wet summer when it has been raining all day and all night and into this moment now with this banging about the gas.

My friend, Free, his name is, he’s staying with us while David is back in the UK. Free is 6’5”, maybe taller, with the broad torso of one who lifts weights and wears muscle shirts to accentuate said weightlifting. He is also gentle and shy, too shy to barge into my bedroom even in a disaster. His Long Island accent presses down on the “g” of gas, and that gas he repeats is an immediate danger. I am finally awake, and he is amazed that I did not smell anything be- cause I can smell cigarettes from a hundred yards off—not to mention drier sheets and perfume. I’m allergic to them all, as well as mold, mildew, and car exhaust. That sleeping pill, however, has pushed everything aside and left just fog, clouds, and blur.

Downstairs. Somehow I am in the basement in a T-shirt. It is not just gas leaking but water. It is a flood. A 2000-gallon heating oil tank is stuck under the bridge a dozen feet from my kitchen door, and water, brown, red, and muddy, laps at the basement door. I have yet to have coffee, but a precise awareness dawns. My house is about to be inundated. I grab everything I can off the floor. A cooler, dirty laundry, a bag of birdseed. I shove them all on the washer. The water seeps in through angled metal doors in the ground that make me think of the storm cellar where Dorothy hides in the Wizard of Oz. An inch rises, then another. Water creeps closer. It pools in the middle where the floor slopes imperceptibly. I run back upstairs to the window to see what is happening outside. Water overtakes our yard and the neighbors’. My mouth tastes of copper—pennies and panic. Free runs after me. We peer out the window. The heating oil tank slips loose. Free and I cheer. I don’t know yet that it has floated off a concrete pad where it stood be- hind a house, up this stream called Bull Run.

We celebrate our luck of disaster averted; only a small bit of water, easy to dry, less than an inch really. We will be fine. A year ago when David and I were buying the house, moving here to escape London’s pollution that was making me sick, we asked the realtor about the foundation’s ability to survive floods. We ask specifically of a historic flood that came a decade before. The real estate agent promises the building was unscathed. Back then the house was fine, and now we are fine, and it is fine. I call David and tell him we are fine. There is a flood but we are fine.

Until we are not fine.

The oil tank gets moored under the next bridge thirty feet down.

This tank, big and hulking, is wedged under that bridge. Water backs up farther, closer, higher and nearer to my door. The bridge collapses. I cannot see this collapse. A hole has opened in the roadway big enough to swallow a car, and the tank is trapped. Together with the bridge’s de- bris, they create a dam. What I see is water. Waves rush toward my house and down again, like the ocean, like a red sea on the lawn, crashing and breaking. The swells pound up toward us and back into the neighbor’s yard. The water blows out their windows.

By the time you read this, people in cities have witnessed such waters, but then, in every city where I’ve lived: New York, London, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, water is tamed, contained. In London it’s hidden in a culvert under my road, the River Effra. You won’t even know it exists. It is just the name of a street, and if you search for in- formation, legend has it that King Canute sailed up it and the first Queen Elizabeth down, one escaping Danish invaders, the other the Virgin Queen, to see Walter Raleigh, her maybe lover.

That previous summer when we are buying the house, the realtor comments on the babbling brook, with its lulling dulcet sounds.

We move to this house with the gingerbread to be on the East Coast, closer to my elderly parents and away from London’s pollution. I am sensitive not just to perfume and drier sheets but also smoke—car exhaust and cigarettes, bonfires, and diesel fumes; plus forest fires, mold and mil- dew—a litany of dangers carried in the air, invisible to the eye. In the UK I long tried to pretend they are not a problem, so here I think I am safe. I have to be.

Waves three feet high crest at the basement door. I watch from the stairs as the room fills slowly. Mud, sludge, and stream rise, and we are lucky. We live near the headwaters, meaning the water has yet to collect many pollutants, just the tank and its oil. And, this, too, is fortuitous, someone will say.

There is a red switch at the top of the stairs for the boiler, and I don’t know I am supposed to turn it off, to protect it from the flood. The water stops less than an inch from the boiler’s mechanisms. And that, too, is lucky.

Less lucky: outside there is a crash and thud. The stream wall tumbles into the current. I watch from a win- dow at the back of the house with the best view. It’s not enough though really to see. I run outside. Torrents swallow the dirt. Wall dissolves into mud. I realize I shouldn’t stand here. The ground is unstable, subsiding. The stream is a foot from our foundation.

We are fine, but we are not so lucky.

Volunteer firefighters—men in high-vis florescent vests, the color of blue-collar work and road construction—close the street. Traffic is diverted. The tank fished from the stream. The water goes down—except in my basement where five inches remain, more in the middle with the sloping floor.

Zoom out and to see me from above; I am brittle and taut. My cheek throbs, a muscle spasms. I am on the phone with a hardware store. How do I know what I need from the store? The answer comes in a flash. A prism of light, the prism of thought, everything fragmented, urgent and pulsing because not to manage this is too frightening.

My voice sharp with panic, I say, yes, a dehumidifier and pump and Shop-Vac—wet vac. Yes.

I read out a credit card number. I hang up the phone. It is an actual telephone, a landline that hangs on the wall of the kitchen.

I exhort Free to drive me in his pickup to the hardware store seven miles away.

He says kindly, gently, that the roads are closed.

I beg. I promise: Your truck it will be fine. It’s higher; it’s high enough. We will go the back route. It’s higher too, I say, and not flooded. How do I know this? (I do not).

There are lines people say about driving in a flood, about crossing flooded roadways, facts about how easy it is— just a few inches of water—to sweep you away. You can see the phrases flashed on signs over the interstate in an emergency. Weather forecasters repeat these sayings on the news when a flood is expected. I do not know those lines, not yet.

On the drive back, we get turned around at a roadblock where the bridge into town is closed. I tell Free another route back over a mountain, ten miles out of our way. We descend a dirt road. A diamond-shaped sign is posted at a stream crossing. The diamond declares: Flood Zone. We cross that zone. I have no idea how dangerous it is. If Free knows, he does not say.

But we are fine.

My arms are still tight at my chest. I hold myself together, as if to loosen my grasp would be likewise to float away. In my cutoffs and now dirty T-shirt I am in the basement and up the stairs, all the journeys up the stairs, using the Shop- Vac to empty the water outside in the gutter. That gutter empties into the stream and the stream into a river and the river into a reservoir two miles away. That reservoir, the Pepacton, runs straight to New York City, to its taps and faucets; I live in the New York City watershed, from which the city gets all its water.

Standing on the grass watching the muddy waters recede, a small crowd gathers, neighbors I don’t yet know. There’s a humid blue sky, coruscating light, violent and angry. One man wears coveralls, nods, takes a drag of a cigarette.

Someone mentions the fire department will pump out the basement, but I do not believe I can ask or even know how to ask for this help. I assume this service is for older

people, those in frail and poor health, those in greater need. Like the demographics of most of rural America, the village is full of the older and frailer, with greater needs. So I empty this vacuum full of red silt on the green lawn and am left with two inches of mud that dries, caked to the basement floor like clay. No one says that it will be impossible to get up.

The man in the coveralls says, “Spray the walls with bleach to stop the mold.”

I nod, as if I know to do this already. I cannot admit to myself even how little I know.

I, too, will spray with bleach. I must buy bleach.

There is terror I cannot admit, because we have moved here to flee the allergies, the things carried in the air—mold and its spores—and now the water will bring them into our house. We have had to begin our lives over again in the village, only to find the house itself can poison me.

We are declared a federal disaster area.

Someone says to make a FEMA claim. “For that stream wall of yours, so close to your foundation and all.” I don’t know how this someone knows.

I make calls. I speak to someone named Jennifer, ID no. 48508. Next an inspector will telephone. They promise to send a package of materials. The governor sends a trifold mailer to postal customer. On the cover in twenty-four–point type: DISASTER ASSISTANCE IS AVAILABLE.

“My fellow New Yorkers,” the governor writes. Inset next to this is a portrait of this governor, a nondescript white man in black and white, with a side part and a sheen on his face from the camera’s flash. “The devastating floods that recently hit New York State have clearly been a disaster of major proportions.”

The phone rep Jennifer tells me because we live in a federal disaster zone, we can also qualify for IRS tax relief. We need to call the IRS for the publication about disaster tax relief. That number is 1 800 829 3676. Request publication no. 2194.

The FEMA claim form:

Cause of damages: Flood. Hail/Rain/Wind Driven

Rain.

13a. Was your home damaged by the disaster? 13b. Personal property damaged?

13c. Was the access to your home restricted?

14. Are any of your essential utilities currently not

working as a result of the disaster?

16. Do you own or lease a working farm or ranch that was affected by the disaster (Does not include farm home)

17. Do you own a business or rental property that was affected by the disaster (Not farm damage) 18. Has anyone in your family lost work or become unemployed due to the disaster (Including self-employed)

The questions go on to ask about medical expenses and funeral expenses and if these expenses are insured and the amount of the loss.

On the back is a PAPERWORK BURDEN DISCLO- SURE NOTICE.

The public reporting burden for the application form taken by phone or in person averages 21 minutes per response. [. . .] Send comments regarding the accuracy of the burden estimate to: _____.

His name is Randy. He carries a metal clipboard. His hair is clipped, tone brisk, a lanyard with a government ID around his neck. This is the closest I’ve come to federal officialdom except paying taxes and voting. A tight crease runs down the front of his khakis. He is in my basement with the dried mud. He has arrived from another disaster, diverted here, he explains. He has been based in P.A., he says using the initials, and now this. “Pretty place you got. Cute town.” The basement air catches; the dust from the dried mud clings to our throats.

I point to the dehumidifiers. He says, I see. I show him the sump pump and mud.

He takes photos with a digital camera that has a government barcode stuck to it.

We walk behind the house. It is a relief to be outside. I show him where the wall was, where the water is, where the foundation is, where rock and roots cling to the soil, as if trying to fight gravity. He nods. He says he will calculate the benefits. He says they usually make a decision in a couple weeks, but we’re backed up—another flood, maybe a tornado. I can’t remember. In his sentences, he switches pronouns between they and we. In this mix of syntax and distance, with his “they” and “we,” might be a promise to hold all of us. Or, maybe that “we” just contains him and his colleagues.

He does not say that they will only approve costs in- side the house, in a structure. They will only cover the de- humidifier, just one—not two. He does not explain that the government has a schedule that averages out the price for such things across the country. He does not say they will not pay for the stream wall. It is not a structure, and not even a structure protecting our structure matters. He hands me a sheaf of papers.

After the inspector leaves I look at his materials. There is a photocopied brochure about the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). On the cover: Hokusai’s wave. In the orig- inal print from the 1820s, three tiny boats bend in the water’s peaks and troughs as if we are at sea, and the waves have teeth so they look more dangerous. Now the first page of each new chapter of this brochure features this wave. The government’s version is cropped to a square. There are no more fishing boats, though just this single totalizing black wave.

Introduction to the NFIP

This introduction is inundated with initials. SFHA, FIRM, LOMA, ORMS. Another pamphlet lists: IHP IAW I ARC IANS IDEA IDNS IDUPA IID IINSIVNE, and IVNR. All of those are reasons to be turned down for assistance. We are turned down with an IID, meaning “in- sufficient damage.” When we are turned down, no mention is made of the stream wall.

A question in the Hokusai manual defines community. A community is not about affinity but officialdom. And, this community has the ability to police—that is, to adopt and enforce rules around flooding. “A community must come together,” it says.

I like this foregrounding of community, of us com- ing together and sharing responsibility instead of its fall- ing simply to the individual. I believe in “the public.” It’s a phrase my father used often, part of his vocabulary to talk about the greater good and shared resources, the collective and the communal—of us. All the things to which he de- voted his life.

The brochure explains, too, that aid is only available to communities that agree, and because my community also has agreed to flood regulations, I am thus entitled to assistance.

I do not realize, though, that to accept this check the government sends for $179.00 and does not match any of the amounts we paid, we will forever need to carry flood insurance, which each year costs into the thousands of dollars. I did not read that part of the Hokusai brochure.

This day as I write, eight people or more are missing in New York City. Over the next days the numbers will climb. You will know; you will have seen floods in Germany and Tennessee this summer. Flash floods. What is a flood if it

does not come in a flash?

That community in Tennessee is not a community accord- ing to the NFIP or FEMA. They did not agree to join, and they have no protection. They get no assistance.

My memory: the air is water, water I carry, water sticks to me. My back aches. And, still more water to carry.