My sister lives in western North Carolina, a few hours from our childhood home in east Tennessee. She evacuated just before Hurricane Helene arrived, but her roommates, friends, co-workers and neighbors — people I knew, people I’d been to parties and trivia nights and potlucks with — did not. Soon there was no word from them. Texts and calls went unanswered. Social media pages showed the earliest impacts of the storm — falling branches, ominously rising water — and then went quiet. At first, all we could find from my sister’s town, Spruce Pine, was a single photo, blurred with rain, that showed the downtown area entirely swallowed by the small river that usually flows placidly beside it. The mountain soils had already been saturated when the storm blustered in, its swirling clouds laden with some 40 trillion gallons of rain, and when the water fell earthward there was little that could stand in its way. Hillsides and light poles collapsed; trees lost their grip on the sodden earth and fell across phone and power lines. Sweet little burbling creeks, the sorts of places where salamanders and crawdads usually laze under rocks, rose up into monsters that swallowed houses and erased roadways. The region’s residents were cut off — from one another, and from the outside world.
Stuck on the outside, we started sending one another images and videos, whatever scattered scraps of digital information we could find. We searched for familiar landmarks and place names, trying to guess what some crumb of nearby news meant about the places and people from which no news was coming. There was a woman in the next town who posted a video of waterfalls cascading over the broken slabs of what used to be her access road. On a Facebook page for Spruce Pine residents, suddenly the only activity was from people like us: people who weren’t actually there. Person after person begged for any news of friends and relatives, until finally the number of posts grew so overwhelming that it was clear the problem needed to be corralled into spreadsheets. Several versions appeared, with columns for residents’ names and addresses and one for the vulnerabilities that made those who couldn’t contact them especially frightened: the people who were elderly and living alone, who needed oxygen tanks or dialysis, the ones whose houses were in bad condition already and located very close to a creek.
The spreadsheets went on for name after name, hundreds of them. Next to nearly every one was a little status box marked “Unknown.”
Eventually, once some people had time to start chainsawing out of wherever they’d been trapped — once they found the remaining roads or paths that could take them to the few scattered places that still had cellular service — videos began trickling, and then flooding, out of the mountains.
Yes, this is what it looks like when you film through a car window while everything around you burns.
After so much silence, I couldn’t stop watching them, one after another. Here were roads turned to rivers, creekside towns turned to empty flood banks, dams that looked like waterfalls as they struggled to hold back reservoirs. The algorithms that power the internet quickly caught on to my hunger. Once, they were convinced I wanted to watch endless videos about gardening and cooking; now they offered me an unending torrent of raging, brown waters.
There were so many videos that, eventually, some of them started to seem off — the trees, the style of houses, were wrong. I clicked beneath a video of a woman clutching a dog as they sheltered on a roof marooned in a turbulent river of floodwater. The comments were full of people asking where the video had been filmed, followed by a series of confident answers: This was western North Carolina, absolutely. No, it was Poland, or no, the Czech Republic, or Germany, where record-setting rains had swept away houses the week before. No, it was the floods of the last few weeks but in Nigeria, where an estimated 200,000 people were displaced. In fact, the video was from southern Brazil, from floods in May. There was a seemingly endless supply of destruction, captured firsthand, waiting online.
Ours is a hyperconnected world, a place where it’s strange not to walk around with an internet-connected recording device in your pocket. When something big or new or scary happens — something like the natural disasters that are becoming more frequent and intense as the global climate is disrupted — the videos of people living through it follow shortly thereafter. They drop anyone who watches right into the drama, as if the world were a Twitch stream of some apocalyptic first-person video game.
Suddenly, some experience that previously seemed distant or impossible becomes something we’ve watched happen — not with distance or solemnity on the evening news, but mixed into the jumble of images of everyday life that scroll across our feeds. The details move rapidly from the inconceivable to the familiar, from things we would never expect to things we can easily picture, things we almost feel that we’ve experienced ourselves. Yes, this is what it looks like when you film through a car window while everything around you burns. This is what it looks like when the ocean crashes through the window of your living room. This is what it looks like when a riverbed tries to carry nearly two dozen times more water than it usually holds, or when houses bob downstream like rubber duckies. To quote a viral tweet about a previous calamity: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones, with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
As the outside of the disaster zone was becoming a digital barrage, the inside remained stubbornly analog. News was a game of Telephone, delivered on foot by someone who had heard from someone that someone else was OK. It was distributed by poster or yelled out to a crowd from atop a picnic table in a parking lot; it was scrawled on whiteboards or the backs of repurposed banners. It bounced from the inside to the outside and then back in again, as those who still had reliable telecommunications tried to keep the spreadsheets updated and the rescuers oriented. Days passed, and many, but not all, of the status entries were updated from “Unknown” to “Safe.” The posts in the Facebook group began to focus on what access routes had been tested or were becoming passable, what supplies and help from the outside were most urgently needed and the best ways to deliver them — how to help the region face the arrival of cold weather and long weeks without power, heat, water, road access or communications.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the overwhelming isolation of those earliest days: about how much scarier and more disorienting it had been than even the actual images of horrifying destruction, once they began to emerge. It was one thing to actually see the world transformed, to begin to recalibrate to the requirements of a new reality. It was something much harder to live in the terrible uncertainty of not knowing what that reality would be.
The damage that we are doing to the stability of the climate is causing a paradigm shift, a leap into a void whose dimensions we cannot fully understand. We are already living on a new planet, one that will no longer behave in the ways around which we have built the most basic details of our lives. We can build models and make predictions, but this new home will keep surprising us with how relentlessly unfamiliar it can be, how often it can set and reset our expectations of what is possible. We’ll keep watching the transformations, absorbing and even normalizing the new possibilities of storms and flooding and fires and droughts. But it’s not just the previously inconceivable new disaster that we have to prepare ourselves for; it’s living in a world whose capabilities and vulnerabilities will always be beyond what we can imagine — until, suddenly, they aren’t.
Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about how climate anxiety is changing psychotherapy.
Source photographs for illustration above: Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Willie J. Allen Jr/Orlando Sentinel/Sipa USA, via Alamy Live News; spxChrome/Getty Images; Dorothea Lange/FSA/OWI Collection, via Library of Congress.
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