Pools On Highway One

On the Quiet of Sea-Level Rise

Driving back from Muir Beach at eleven at night on Highway One, I saw what looked like a cavernous nothingness there in front of me. I slowed down, then spotted the reflection of the stoplight ahead. It was a giant pool of water spilling out of the sidewalk and covering a good forty yards and a lane and a half. As I drove through the underpass beyond the puddle, another pool lay, this time deeper. A car sped my way and I flashed my hazards to get them to slow down. 

I passed through the puddle and turned onto 101 and closer to my new apartment where I live, stacked with others in a growing city that smells like the tumorous remnants of industry and the swells of waters in the trapped marsh that is Lake Merritt. 

I am shocked, not so much that sea level rise is occurring, but how quietly it appears. It is almost like the feeling of fatigue and an abnormal yet forgettable ache before some terrible diagnosis. We stretch out our bodies to relieve it (or buy sub-pumps to reduce residential flooding: a temporary fix) until the aches are ever present. We may know what the condition is and how it could be remedied, but for now we’ll drive over pools of salt water, hoping they’ll always leave with the lowering tide, and we can then get into our cars, and safely drive home across endless paths of crumbling cement. We can forget the aches at home in the growing city, because Lake Merritt doesn’t yet overflow. We may be forced to admit it exists when the fish all die, but eventually, like the tides, the smells will dissipate, and we can go on pretending that the sea rising might not be so bad.

I don’t mean this to be so sad and desperate, though it is true that our situation is sad and desperate. I only mention this to point out that it is happening, and that the fear of its happening is so shocking as to put us in a somnolent state, to dissociate from this reality. Which makes sense. We can’t always be living day to day facing the mortality of our society, let alone the potential end of our species. But I point it out, just to remind myself, and you, whoever is reading this, that around the beautiful and stressful lives we live, this is happening to the world that made us. I don’t want you to feel as though you must, as one person, be constantly facing the tragedy, but, for this one brief moment, see it standing there right in front of all of us.