A Frog Knows When to Jump
or: being alive during the Louisiana Apocalypse
(a photo from National Geographic’s 2004 feature “Gone with the Water”)
When I was nine years old, an incredible rainstorm thundered over Southeastern Louisiana. Through a square window in a back room of our house the world was green and opaque. Water roared to earth. The small lake behind our house overflowed. The street in front filled. I imagined the water on either side rising so high that it rushed through the house and met in the middle and swept us away; my little brother took a canoe ride through the neighborhood.
I had a subscription to National Geographic. Ten years after the incredible rainstorm, in 2004, that magazine published a piece called “Gone With the Water,” about Louisiana’s coast. Deprived of the Mississippi River sediments that build it, cut through with industrial canals, and subject to sea level rise, the coast is dissolving. In the magazine was an image of a man standing chest-deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The man held a sepia photograph of the old family house that once existed on a patch of land that once existed in the space behind him. In the time between the rainstorm and the day I read “Gone With the Water,” an area of Louisiana, south of and to either side of New Orleans, about four times the size of Boston was erased.
A frog in a pot of tepid water brought to boil actually will attempt to jump out when the water gets hot—so long as its brain has not been removed. I wonder: When does the frog know to jump?
The Sorites paradox asks us to determine when a heap of sand ceases to be a heap. You have a hundred thousand grains of sand and one is taken away. Now you have ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine, and have suffered no great loss, and your heap is still a heap. Repeat this process enough and eventually you will not have a heap, but when does the transition occur? Is there a clear delineation between a heap of sand and a collection of individual grains? If so, when is this line crossed—at a hundred grains of sand? At fifty? At five?
After how much of it becomes water will the Louisiana coast cease to be a coast? How long before I step outside my apartment into the ocean? Since the first time I saw the National Geographic image, about half a dozen Manhattans worth of land here have become water.
Some researchers in the nineteenth century heated their frog-and-water combination so slowly that it took over two hours to boil. The frog died. A report from an 1897 book by Edward Wheeler Scripture, The New Psychology, uses the passive construction—the frog “was found” dead—leaving us to envision a rigged experiment involving an unobserved frog who, being still equipped with a brain, likely grew frustrated with the situation before the end.
We live at the intersection of ignorance and action. The fact of South Louisiana’s annihilation is uncontroversial. Farmland has become wetland; wetlands have become open water. Oil from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster killed the vegetation on a small piece of land called Cat Island, and the water obliterated it, and now it is gone. Find a map of Louisiana. Maybe the shape of it has been described to you as like a boot. That shape no longer exists. It’s been shredded. Now, skeletal fingers stretch out into the sea from what used to be far inland.
(image via Flickr user Donkey Hotey)
Still, the apocalypse always seems to be a future event, rather than a current process. We have a heap of sand, and even though we know one day that heap will be gone, our inability to determine the moment of change inhibits our national will. Louisiana has only mounted a fighting retreat. A decade ago,. the New Orleans non-profit news organization The Lens reported the state had spent up to $2 billion the previous few years on projects designed to limit the blood loss, but that amound was only between two and four percent the price tag of salvation. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has balked at the bill: In 2007, Congress authorized, over the then-president’s veto attempt, fifteen restoration projects worth another $1.6 billion, but never actually produced the money.
When it still existed, the land erased from Louisiana since 2007 was collectively larger than Brooklyn.
In 1915, a great hurricane struck New Orleans and flooded parts of the city and its winds damaged many structures. “STORM PROOF!” a newspaper reported, according to Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella, who cites the additional “1900-square-miles of wetlands” that existed here a hundred years ago. Most parts of my family were in New Orleans in 1915, and so experienced a disaster the city shrugged off. What was their experience? How were their lives disrupted? After it was over, did they want to leave? Did such a question even coalesce in their minds? That I was born in New Orleans in 1985 is evidence it did not.
Fifty years after the great hurricane of 1915, Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans and flooded more of the city. My mom was four years old and water washed through her house. As the storm approached, her family fled across town and power lines exploded in the dark. Betsy killed many people and flooded thousands of homes and the U.S. government built new levees that collapsed forty years later, and almost the entire city flooded and more people died than were killed in 1915 and 1965 combined, several times over.
Sometimes I surprise my wife with her favorite coffee. When I order it, a line painted on the wall at our neighborhood coffee shop, two feet above my head, marks how high the water rose at this spot in 2005. I marvel at the difference between the land here and the land in New York, where I went to graduate school, at the way it shifts and moves like a living, dying thing in New Orleans but New York rides on granite. Houses lift themselves off the ground in New Orleans as if to protect themselves, to avoid sinking into it; New York attacks the ground and makes use of it. Basements are weird, to me. Basements feel safe, to me. It’s as if they represent nature conquered.
A now-deceased University of Kent philosophy professor named Laurence Goldstein solved the Sorites paradox. In the April 2000 issue of the journal Analysis, he published the paper “How to Boil a Live Frog.” The unappreciated will of a slowly-boiling amphibian to save itself has, it seems, been the key all along. “We know,” Goldstein writes, “that frogs survive perfectly happily in water at 20°C. If the frog survives at this temperature, then surely, we reason, it will happily tolerate 20.001°C...and so on.” Logically, we would conclude the frog will tolerate boiling water just fine. “But, typically,” Goldstein says, “we don’t reach that conclusion, for at some stage in the reasoning our judgments flip-flop…” There is, in other words, a point at which we respond to even an incrementally-changing environment. We flip our reaction when one condition changes to another, but, in Goldstein’s words, “the difference between those conditions is invisibly tiny.” Still, we know when a heap ceases to be such, and a frog knows when to leave hot water.
“I have never known anyone else,” a best friend once told me, “who is as emotionally dependant on their geography as you.” She was right about me. I like most places and love a few. The one I love best is the most mortal, or at least the one most reminded year by year of its mortality. I don’t know if that mortality is the reason for the way I feel. I do know that the lives of places are worth saving, just like the lives of people. Consider Carl Sagan’s reflection on the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph: “...every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Stories are being deleted in South Louisiana: centuries-old human cultural traditions, the ancestral nesting grounds of sea birds, etc. The loss of those particular stories is, relative to an unfathomable universe, no less significant than the loss of every such story on Earth.
In 2014, the longtime restaurant critic at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune (now with the New York Times), Brett Anderson, wrote an essay called “Louisiana Loses Its Boot”, which explores the apocalypse using a new map as its MacGuffin. “Early this year, I drove from Arnaudville, Louisiana, to Morgan City,” Anderson writes, spectacularly, “hoping to walk where I’d heard there was land.”