“And I have the vehicle to go with it,” Willem said. “A generic white pickup.”
“Oh, you can get in anywhere with that and a reflective vest!”
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome. So. What you want to see is the two big diversions. We blew holes in the levee. One on the left bank at Wills Point, just about thirty miles down from here, the other in the right bank another, oh, five miles farther along. Fresh water’s pouring through, dumping silt where it hits the Gulf, and the silt’s making new land—taking back some of what the Gulf stole from us. But the water isn’t clean—remember where it all came from.” Here Margaret swept her arm around in an arc directed generally northward, as if to encompass the whole watershed of the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system, all the way to Canada. “And because it’s fresh, it kills the saltwater ecosystem. All those homeless people you saw on your way in? Many of them were working oystermen ten years ago.”
Willem glanced toward the adjoining high-rise district, sprouting from a low clutter of RVs and tents. “You’re right,” he said, “that is not a choice we have to make. Oh, fisheries are always problematic in all countries. But when we build coastal defenses, as a rule, we are creating jobs. Not obliterating valuable sources of employment.”
“How’s that going, anyway?” she asked. “How much higher can you pile those things?” She was just being folksy, of course. She had a Ph.D. in this stuff. Willem smiled, to let her know he got the joke.
“As high as we want,” he answered. “But it’s not the average sea level that keeps us up at night. It’s the storm surge that overtops a dike somewhere, blows a hole in the perimeter, lets the Atlantic through faster than we can pump it out.”
She nodded. “Nineteen fifty-three.” Then: “What’s funny?”
“Not two hours ago, my father was lecturing me about 1953. You, he, and I are probably the only three people in Louisiana who understand the reference.”
“He lived through it?”
“He keeps an axe in his attic.”
“Everyone does,” Margaret said.
Willem drove south, cutting off a long eastward hairpin of the Mississippi and rejoining it several miles south of the city. According to the map, the road ran along the river. But even though it was only a few meters distant, he could not see it, but only an earthen levee that ramped up from the road’s sodden, puddle-strewn shoulder to two or three times a man’s height.
At one point he noticed the superstructure of an oil tanker high above him. Because of the way the highway curved, it looked like this enormous vessel was coming down the road in the oncoming lane. As a Dutchman he prided himself on taking such prodigies in stride; why, at home there were places where canals crossed over roads on bridges consisting of water-filled concrete troughs, and you could drive under ships gliding over the top of you. But even so he could not resist going into tourist mode for a moment. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out, immediately regretting it as his feet came down in a puddle. Not rain, but Mississippi River water that had been forced through the saturated earth of the levee by the same hydrostatic pressure that was keeping that oil tanker suspended above his head.
The ground got drier as he scrambled up the levee and came out onto its crest, currently no more than half a meter above the
river’s surface. He could now look across the full breadth of the river, at least a kilometer. The tanker blocked much of that view. It was churning upstream, headed for some refinery complex in the interior.
All this was happening in a linear, stretched-out town that ran continuously along the bank. It waxed and waned, but it never really became open country; it was sparsely inhabited by people who thought nothing of a passing oil tanker but found it very odd that a stranger would pull over to the side of the road to hike up the levee and sightsee.
Back in his truck, he drove on and reached the diversion a few minutes later. The riverside highway vaulted over it on a new bridge. Instead of crossing it, he pulled off onto a road that ran parallel to the diversion’s bank. For the first ten or so miles, this snaked through mature woods and small towns. To judge from the aureolas of rust surrounding the bullet holes in the road signs, it had been inhabited for a while. Then old pavement gave way to new, and new gave way to gravel, and signs discouraged casual motorists from going any farther.
The diversion—an artificial construct, only a few years old—was an alternate route for the water of the Mississippi to reach the Gulf. It was aimed toward parts of Plaquemines Parish that were still shown as dry land on old maps, but that had long since ceased to exist and been stricken from cartographical databases. Hydrological engineers had sculpted the diversion so that it would carry as much silt as possible out to its very end, then dump it in shallows that had been brackish or salt water until this thing had suddenly inundated them with fresh. The cost of it was that the species that had been living there all died. The benefit was new land. Balancing that cost and that benefit was a judgment Willem was glad he had no part in making.