Essays

Category: Anthropocene

Where a Beach Town Once Was: Phragmites, a Lonesome Pier, and Entering the Managed Retreat Era


Where a Beach Town Once Was: Phragmites, a Lonesome Pier, and Entering the Managed Retreat Era

Staten Island, New York

January 20, 2020

“So, can you tell us what the story is here?” Sonja asks.

I’ve been thinking about how to introduce this quest. It’s Monday, Martin Luther King Day. Since Friday, among other New Yorky outings we’ve toured Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Central Park, and the New Museum. Today is different. We’re cruising the backwaters of New York City’s least sexy borough, angling toward the southeastern shore. Still, this part of the trip is highest on my priority list: I want to see for myself what Elizabeth Rush saw in the reporting for her 2019 Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.

“This is where the future has already happened,” I say, slowing the car down to look at the stretch of bare lawn between Tarlton Street and Fox Beach Avenue. We’re in Oakwood Beach. Or what’s left of it. “This is one of the first places in America that people have left the coast to move to higher ground.”

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Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us


Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us

In the sky over the rush-hour congestion on Manheim Pike, they take on the grandeur of a natural event, just beyond the range of dashboard and light pole, of golden arches and Coca Cola bottling plant. It was only after I began commuting to my present job that I took notice of this nightly gathering of murders (murder of murders? mass murder?) of American crows during the winter. Until then, I had always backgrounded the crows into the urban tapestry, with the squirrels and sparrows and gingko trees.


Crows over Manheim Pike, during my evening drive home

Each individual crow flies in an idiosyncratic manner, in its own space; some stop, either as individuals or in small groups, stubborn to leave certain tall trees. Others fly against the great current of wings, or obliquely to it. Some of the birds caw out while others fly in observant silence. Heads swiveling, they scan the landscape. But the shape of all of them together moves purposefully in one direction.

Last winter, I decided to check it out, to follow them. I got my family and we got in the car and we . . . we went to the mall?

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And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene


And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene

It was June, 1992. My sister and I were out of school and our grandparents took us on an epic road trip out west, to see the same places they had seen on road trips in the 1950s and 1960s. They had bought a motorhome, a Tioga, not a big one but still a proper motorhome, with its own bathroom and two beds, one of which folded back into the kitchen table by day. We set off from southwest Ohio and headed south.

First was Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, then Texarkana, Waffle Houses, KOA campgrounds, the desert, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, where the bats swarmed at dusk, the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, McKittrick Canyon, Gila National Forest. Between hiking through caves or woods or desert during the day and playing UNO in the evening, we would hit the open road, advancing along the meticulous itinerary Grandpa had typed up. I sat up front with the road atlas—the little copilot. Between cactus, canyon, and sand dune, we would encounter the abandoned settlements of lost civilizations, even as the Anthropocene was taking flower.

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