Flood Meridian

Just before the Fourth of July in 2006, the year I moved to the Catskills, days of rain were followed by a flood at dawn. The river swept over the village park, inundating the carnival that had come to town. Water rushed in waves into my basement and took out the stream walls a few feet away. Five years later, Hurricane Irene destroyed the supermarket and our local CVS. Main Street was made desolate, full of empty storefronts with boarded-up windows. People worried the grocery store—lying in a channel, I learned, that is even more prone to deluge than a floodplain—would never reopen. (A year later, armored with some system of flood defenses the owners paid for, it did.) What we really lost were homes. FEMA and other government agencies bought the deluged buildings. Where one house once stood a mass of vetch now rises. Another desolate homesite is just bushes next to the post office. Others are marked by notices admonishing you to pick up after your dog. They could all be scenes in Noah Gotlib’s essay-film Crumbling Land, a mournful and moving document of what’s left of an American dream engulfed by sand and water.

“Managed retreat is Manifest Destiny in reverse,” Gotlib writes in the accompanying booklet, alluding to the “buyout” procedure by which federal and state agencies attempt to redress the fallout of a flood. His three-channel, thirty-minute film opens on highways to nowhere, invoking half a dozen names that have been used for retreat, including “graceful withdrawal,” which sounds like a euphemism for death. Sweeping visuals layer across the screens to let viewers connect the ideas associatively. In one shot a pioneer wagon sits next to a tombstone. It’s the marker for Churchs Ferry, North Dakota, unincorporated a few years ago after it fell into the aptly named Devils Lake. A statue of settlers heading west (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ founder, Joseph Smith, and his brother Hyrum) is framed at sunset, and at the film’s close a replica of Lady Liberty lies on her side. She wasn’t toppled in a deluge. Gotlib came across her in a museum while he was filming nearby. The message is unmistakable: The hubris of American expansionism has run aground. On the country’s 250th, I can’t think of a more appropriate verdict.

Gotlib, a Canadian who studied at the Architectural Association in London, produced a thesis there on similar themes. Last year he went on a road trip of ruin with two friends, filming barren places with beguiling names like Miller City, Garrison, and Cairo (there are some sixteen Cairos across the country). In the footage a swollen river surrounds a baseball diamond and Ferris wheel. Eerie anomalies appear in suburban plats where houses just seem to have vanished. Driveways lead to nowhere. All that remains is the green, green grass (the buyouts don’t cover public infrastructure like sidewalks). Despite the dystopian feel of the film’s imagery, the picture isn’t one of complete abandonment. An owner of a waterlogged property doesn’t have to sell at the reduced rates offered by the government, and many don’t. (To sell is always to lose: money, your home, and the stability promised by the American dream.) “Urban triage” is how Gotlib characterizes the phenomenon, which leaves landscapes pockmarked with empty spaces and few, if any, safeguards against future floods.

Crumbling Land is set mostly in the flyover country of Middle America—landlocked regions that don’t seem prone to rising sea levels. But Gotlib’s search cleaves to the Mississippi watershed and culminates in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where a 2008 flood wiped more than 1,300 homes from the town registry. In Illinois he visits Grafton, which lost 650 properties after two floods in 1993, and Valmeyer, whose residents, reacting to the same events, made the nearly unprecedented decision to relocate en masse. Such wholesale moves are rare. Over the past century only a few communities have made them: Shawneetown, Illinois, in the 1930s, and Niobrara, Nebraska, and Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, in the 1970s. Watching Crumbling Land, I remember all the conversations my neighbors and I had after Irene. “What would happen if we lost our Main Street? That would be the death of us,” some said. Others mentioned managed retreat, a phrase I couldn’t even imagine connected to a place where I lived. Gotlib captures those same emotions as he talks to Valmeyer’s former mayor, who oversaw his town’s relocation. It’s clear why so few communities manage to migrate together.

The film features voiceovers of people whose lives were changed by floods. A woman’s hard-bitten voice tells of a bend in a river now straightened: “But the river going to twist and turn,” she says, and we could be watching Elia Kazan’s 1960 film Wild River, about Tennessee Valley Authority dams and the twinned ambitions of progress and engineering to harness the landscape. Her comments fade into a man’s describing how a barge took out a levee and washed up on his father’s fields a mile away. On one screen, we watch a flatboat floating on a river; on another, a vessel is beached in a field. A third shot depicts farmland covered in sand the river left in its wake, the land now good for nothing. It was bought by the Nature Conservancy. “Tree huggers,” the man calls them, “but it’s fine.” His “fine” invites multiple interpretations like “Thank God we got something for it” or “fine” as in “What else are you going to do?” Or maybe the “fine” means, “The neighbors don’t approve, but let them talk.” Maybe it is all three; his Southern drawl spreads the word out across two syllables: fi-unn. The man and woman remain unseen, as does Gotlib. He’s a patient listener as people testify to the grief of losing places their families have been connected to for generations.

Elsewhere in the film, he meets a hydrologist from the Iowa Flood Center, a bureaucrat with brush-cut hair and a collared short-sleeve shirt, who explains inscrutable projections like the “one-hundred-year flood.” It’s a term that can make a disaster seem safely remote, but it doesn’t mean a deluge that comes once in a century; rather, it represents the chance of a disaster of that magnitude in any given year. Adding to the confusion is “stationarity,” or the assumption that floods will behave as they have in the past. But how can you control for the impact of, say, a new housing complex or highway that makes the land less permeable or of communities that lobby to have flood maps redrawn to shore up property values? The biggest challenge to stationarity, though, is the climate. As if to illustrate the fantasy of staying in place, Gotlib overlays his interview with the hydrologist with shots of homes in the Rockaways, built up on concrete foundations that look like a giant garage open to the elements. The limits of stationarity become apparent when extreme downpours overwhelm a city built for yesterday’s weather, sending water into subway stations and, in the worst floods, claiming lives.

Gotlib loves the anarchic possibilities of derelict bits of forfeited property, like the BMX track someone built on buyout land next to their suburban home. He argues that these parcels constitute a new commons, born from the collapse of the yeoman ideal. “Climate migration,” he writes, “ultimately requires a reckoning with … individual properties, municipal limits, or national boundaries. This reckoning offers an opportunity to reimagine the forms of settlement and political economy that have shaped American life since the onset of colonization.”

Insurers are retreating from risk-exposed regions, while authorities are failing to keep pace with the crises unfolding around them. Into this breach, Gotlib hopes, come citizens working in concert to navigate devastating changes like Valmeyer did (though with federal help). At the heart of Crumbling Land is his belief in residents joining together in mutual aid without government assistance. A map of green dots representing buyouts and lost land spreading across the continent is juxtaposed with a representation of the settlements of groups like the Shakers and Owenites. Gotlib finds in these tradition-bound communes a corrective to rugged individualism and a way of living in harmony with the land. This is what resilience looks like. Even as the dots fill one screen and another, though, he never quite connects them together. The ideas remain tantalizingly just out of reach. I too dream of the collective and the cooperative—small-scale consensus democracies, intentional communities—as a way outside of capitalism. Watching the film though, I’m suddenly filled with doubts about myself and my dreams and Gotlib’s as well.

In the booklet he lays out the history of federal attempts to move people in response to catastrophes like the Dust Bowl or in the pursuit of progress. The efforts were often misguided and failed. We have lived so long under laissez-faire dogma that we no longer believe government can help. But I wonder if mutual aid is less an alternative to neoliberalism than an accommodation to it. In a country where billionaires avoid taxes, build bunkers, and plot their escape to Mars, the burden of solving collective problems increasingly falls to individuals and localities. Where Adam Smith’s invisible hand fails to provide, the helping hand of a neighbor must suffice. Still, Crumbling Land is resonant, epic, and elegiac. It’s bound with all the elements that drive my own work: a quest for socialisms in our era.

The FEMA inspector who came to my house after the first flood left a brochure. On the cover was Hokusai’s Great Wave and inside were details about community. This “community” wasn’t what you or I might mean but some official designation. Had my local government agreed to certain flood mandates and codes? In the end the agency paid for a dehumidifier, not the structural damage to the stream wall that threatened the foundation. Earlier this summer, the weekly paper reported on a local agency’s decision to restrict public funding for flood protection projects in designated floodways, something that could lead to “abandoning large sections of historic Catskills communities.” Or managed retreat. Now Main Street has a dozen shops and is dotted with cafés, even a Balkan wine bar, all run by newcomers who don’t remember Irene, and for whom flood projections are still abstract. We are overdue another big one. They come every fifteen years. I feel Gotlib’s project intensely. Intimately.