Rising. Elizabeth Rush

      A light wind moves through Chris’s house, making the exposed beams whistle. This place was built by Chris’s grandfather, who insisted on using Douglas fir trees for their strength and resistance to rot. It has been standing in exactly this spot for the better part of the last century, though Chris has lifted it twice: first after Hurricane Lili, and then even higher after Katrina.

      “For a while my parents were completely self-sufficient,” he says, “but by the time we were adults they went to the grocery store.” Chris grew up eating blackberries, oranges, pears, and cantaloupes all grown in the garden alongside his home. Back then gardening was easy, because there wasn’t any salt in the groundwater.

      He rolls over to a big wooden chest and lifts out a warped photo album. I watch as he flips past pictures of his house, water lapping at the window frames, back when the structure rested on the ground. Past black-and-white photos of his father playing guitar. Past the image of himself, much younger, and the brother who died a few years back, orphaning Howard and Juliette. Past the image of his sister Teresa, in a pair of John Lennon sunglasses and a striped jumper, smiling in front of a live oak tree with a double trunk and Spanish moss cascading down. The same one still stands behind the house, but is a husk of its former self today, a rampike with all its branches removed. Past the photo of Father Roch’s place next door and the forest of cypresses that once separated here from there.

      Eventually Chris arrives at the photo he wants to show me. In it his father is tilling the ground in a dirty white button-up shirt, flanked by okra plants. “That was all the way back in 1959,” Chris says, “the year he married my mother.” His father is working the land his parents had given him as a wedding gift. Chris runs his finger over the image and hands it to me. “It looked so different back then.”

      I have been in the Terrebonne Parish for over a week, and everywhere I go people keep telling me how it used to be. They even have photographic evidence. It is almost as if the islanders have lived on a different island. A near-perfect copy of the Jean Charles of today, but ruled by a slightly different set of laws. Everything here is just as it was there, with a few notable exceptions.

      The cypresses are all in the same places, but their leaves have vanished. Some of the land where gardens once sat remains, but salt rests in the soil; the plants won’t grow, and the land lies fallow. And what was once a wetland rich in fowl is now open water. In the photo Chris shows me, his father stands surrounded by pastures. You can even make out a black cow in the upper right corner. In the sixty years since, the meadows where the cattle used to graze have all slipped beneath the surface of the sea.

      “When I was a boy,” Dalton says, “my papa used to go out into the marshes just south of the house. He would be gone all day and would return with a sack full of dead ducks. He gave ’em to people. That’s how many ducks he had. My pa was a good hunter, but back then there was also enough to hunt, enough to go around.”

      Today, if you were to open up Chris’s refrigerator, you wouldn’t find ducks, fish, beef, or homegrown vegetables. Instead you would probably discover two gallons of industrial milk, three two-liter bottles of no-name soda pop, and a box of Frosted Flakes.

      “Right out there, that’s where the marshes were,” says Chris, pointing south through his paneless window. I look out and see only water. The wind whips up a couple of whitecaps and the sun glitters hard atop each one. “It used to be that you could walk all the way to Montegut without getting your feet wet. Now you can see clear across to the water tower, but you have to take a boat to get there.”

      Since the ducks that his father used to hunt no longer nest nearby, Dalton drives to Houma to purchase Purdue’s saline-soaked poultry. Both he and Chris still eat local shrimp, but they supplement that with government-subsidized grains and vegetables grown by agricultural giants.

      “Sometimes we have these unplanned reunions at Walmart,” says Chris. “I mean, you can run into a lot of the people who used to live on the island and even those of us that remain. We are all there buying food, catching up. It’s nice to see the people I miss.”

      Chris’s statement is so matter-of-fact, so tinged with nostalgia, that I nearly miss its implications. The actions he is describing are not harmless or merely circumstantial; they are a feedback loop, if a relatively slight one. The disappearance of coastal land is causing human beings who were once self-sufficient, whose impact on the planet was slight, to use fossil fuels to procure the food they once were able to grow at home. Every time the islanders drive to Houma they are, in some small way, accelerating the disappearance of this ecosystem. I want to ask if they know the consequences of their new way of life—but I can’t think of a way to formulate this question without sounding rude. Instead I ask for another slice of cake.

      By the time I return to my rental house, a dark, sinister feeling has taken root. At first I try to distract myself by watching a bad Sandra Bullock movie on television. Then by boiling the shrimp I was gifted back in Pointe-aux-Chenes. When I fail, I step out onto the front porch and watch islands of water hyacinth floating down the channel. Since coming to Louisiana I have temporarily taken up smoking again. I don’t know what I hate to admit more, that I smoke three Lucky Strikes out there in the storm light, or that after each one, I cry. For all I left behind and for the even more the islanders have lost. But mostly out of fear. Because I know that the future will look nothing like the past.