When I was 20, late summer and fall of 1972, I worked for a contractor setting up mobile homes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Hurricane Agnes had enticed the Susquehanna River to overflow its banks the night of June 23rd, resulting in the worst flood since the 1930’s and perhaps the most costly disaster in American history to that point. At the time it was a shock, and before FEMA. The mobile homes we set up were emergency housing provided by HUD.
On my current road trip I found myself near Wilkes-Barre again and decided to take a look. I reviewed several books at the library written about the event…one of only photos, another of only newspaper clippings. I also walked the main square, two blocks from the river, that had been inundated almost to the traffic lights. I’ve long remembered the water marks high on power poles and wondered if I had imagined them. But no, the old photos proved that. The central business hub, as well as businesses and homes for blocks around, had been inundated to the second floors. Much the same had occurred in nearby communities above and below town.
A particular memory I had was of seeing coffins and pieces of coffins everywhere, one on top of a gas station. At the end of a straight stretch in an upriver town, a cemetery had been located on a bank above a curve in the river. The hydraulic pressure exerted by the river making its turn there effectively excavated hundreds (possibly a couple thousand) graves and spread them along its course…coffins and corpses in pieces. Curious about that event, I looked for and found the newspaper accounts around it. Sure enough, my memories were true.
Surprisingly, it was not on my youth that I reflected looking at the photos and walking the streets. It was instead on the elements of nature and how they will be the ultimate cause of our eventual obliteration as a civilization…famine and disease may take down our numbers, but it will be wind, fire and floods that wipe all sign of us from the face of the earth.
We blind ourselves to the earth’s power. Having made gods of engineers, we think foolishly that we can control it. But that is so much hubris. Since Agnes we’ve had Katrina and Rita and Harvey and Sandy…and of course tornadoes in the midlands and western fires that have leveled entire towns. It’s only a matter of time before, our numbers decimated by disease or war or our spirit deflated by the cost and effort of rebuilding, we cease to keep up.
I like this post exceedingly, particularly the last two paragraphs. That is precisely the way I see things. We are living through an interlude in the Earth’s history congenial to the appearance and proliferation of human primates. But conditions will not always be so congenial and we are appallingly destructive stewards of our fragile planetary home, in orbit about the life-sustaining Sun for 4.6 billion years. We will vacate the scene like the Great Reptiles and Mammalian Mega fauna before us, and the beautiful Earth will recover from our toxic presence and continue its journey around the Sun. After so brief a tenure, nothing of lasting significance will have transpired.
The singular word I picked out of your comment was “significance.” If only we were able to see just how insignificant we are…
One thing I failed to mention in my original post was ice. “…wind, fire, floods and ice.” I remember musing a long time ago on the power of ice. It breaks down mountains. A handy glacier would make short work of New York City…it would scrap away all evidence that it ever existed.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice…”