So, in the twenty-second century, all over the world people were taking shots of extreme weather that wrecked whatever they had built, including the crops they were growing and the soil they grew it in. At sea level, raised to its current height just forty years before, the tenuous brittle fragile rebuilding efforts of humanity and all other living species were particularly vulnerable to superstorms in the new categories established, sometimes called class 7, or force 11, or motherfucker supreme. In the tropics a lot of construction had been dubious to begin with, and with the added storm intensities, and the ramshackle nature of the postpulse reconstruction, new weather events could simply smash coastal cities to smithereens. Confer Manila 2128, Jakarta 2134, Honolulu 2137. These were extremely sobering examples of the death and destruction now possible when an overwhelming storm hit an underwhelming infrastructure.
New York, it has to be said, compared to most coastal cities of the world, has an infrastructure like a brick shithouse. It is set in rock, and built of steel and various composites so strong that the rock is often the first thing to break. But rock does break, and not all the city is equally built to code. Lot of ad hockery in the various recovery and renovations made in the submerged zone and the intertidal. So it is not invulnerable. No human construct is.
Then recall also, if your retention still allows such a feat after so many dense pages, the peculiar geography of the Bight of New York relative to the Atlantic and the globe entire. Hurricanes, more violent than ever before, swirl up from the Caribbean, or really the horse latitudes, and as they move north at a medium speed, they spin counterclockwise when seen from space, such that the winds in the leading edge of the storm are pushing westward, and can be extraordinarily fast and powerful. Then recall the topography of the Bight, also the way that New York is an archipelago of islands in an estuary, with the Narrows connecting the estuary to the Atlantic at the bend point of the Bight, with a back door also on the east side of the estuary where Long Island Sound connects to the East River by way of Hell Gate.
What it adds up to is a recipe for a storm surge, yes indeed. A monster hurricane shoves a great deal of the Atlantic north and east into the Bight, New Jersey banks all that slug of water through the Narrows, and more gets shoved hard east along Long Island Sound until it floods through Hell Gate into the East River. Meanwhile the Hudson never stops draining a rather immense watershed, pouring its own flow down from the north, a flow that can max as high as two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. Thus a moment in a hurricane comes when water is coming into the bay from three directions, and there is nowhere for it to go but up. If by chance all this happens in a neap tide, it even gets a tug from the moon, such that upward becomes in effect the path of least resistance. So up the water goes. Storm surge of 2046’s Hurricane Alfred, eighteen feet, big disaster. Hurricane Sandy in 2012, storm surge of twelve feet, big disaster. Storm surge for the unnamed hurricane of 1893, thirty feet. Utter wreckation.
And now, recall, and this you should be capable of as it is the overriding omnipresent fact of life on Earth today, that sea level is already fifty feet higher than it was pre-pulse. Add a storm surge to this pre-existing condition, and what do you get?
You’ll only find out when it happens.
Ninety-six premature babies were brought to the Infant Incubator Company building at the 1939 World’s Fair to live their first few weeks there.
Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its sufferings but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate? For whom are psalms sung and mass said, if not for such worthies as these?
i) Stefan and Roberto
The late-spring days got longer and the rooftops burst all green. Every living thing budded and the turbid water smelled like shit, the intertidal oozing goo and reeking at low tide, its slimy mud stippled by oyster beds and old dock pilings. The great bay was so crowded with boats that the traffic lanes for big ships were well defined by the absence of little boats in them. Sun blazed off water from the half hour after dawn to the half hour before sunset, and close to shore the dark blue of the rivers turned black with silt or yellow with runoff, or prismatic with leaking gas and oil. The humidity was so great that the air grew visible, a fetid white mist weighing on the city, and the idea that just a couple months before the bay had been ice and the air like liquid nitrogen seemed incredible. Climate in the city, always notorious, a scandal, had in the twenty-second century gone nova; now the luminous miasmatic summers ranged from subtropical to supertropical, and the mosquitoes were bloodthirsty and disease-laden. The concrete chess tables grew as hot to the touch as ovens. People stayed indoors, or if they had to go out, stumbled or boated around stunned and appalled, feeling there must be a fire somewhere nearby. No one could quite believe that this city of dreams could veer so melodramatically, like a skyvillage flitting from pole to equator to pole in a matter of weeks. People begged for a blizzard.
Stefan and Roberto didn’t care. They were on a mission to locate Herman Melville’s grave, and maybe haul the gravestone back to the Madison Square bacino and mount it as a dock piling on the Met dock, at its northeast corner closest to where Melville had lived. That was their plan and they were sticking to it. Mr. Hexter had told them that the gravestone was big, possibly a four-foot-by-four-foot slab of granite, certain to weigh hundreds of pounds, but they weren’t going to let that stop them. They had borrowed a dock dolly when no one was looking, and their boat rode very high on the water. If worse came to worst, they could figure out the transport issues after they located it.
So this was in the nature of a reconnaissance, and they were happy motoring across the shallows of the Bronx, on the hunt again, dodging nasty roof reefs and blobs of black glop floating on the surface with the seaweed. The drowned Bronx was almost as extensive as the drowned parts of Brooklyn and Queens, which was saying a lot. Its current shoreline slurped many blocks north of where it had used to be, and old creek ravines and even a substantial river valley had refilled, splitting the borough with a couple north-south bays, the west one running right up to Yonkers, drowning the old Van Cortlandt Park and sloshing at high tide up and over Woodlawn Cemetery.
But not over Melville! Nautical writer though he had been, his grave still stood on dry land, many graves in from the high tide line. Mr. Hexter had determined this with his maps and assured them it had to be true. At first they were disappointed it wasn’t under water, but as they had given over their diving bell to Vlade, they became reconciled and decided it was a good thing. It would be their first terrestrial project.