Issue 10: How High the Water Rises
Hello friend,
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting. You’ll notice I’m using a new platform for this newsletter. I’m hoping this will make the work easier to read—let me know what you think!
Now onto business. This last couple of weeks has been a time of wild weather spurred by climate change. While the days stay unusually warm and dry here on the West Coast, recovery from Hurricanes Ian and Fiona has just begun all along the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Florida and the Caribbean. Alaska, too, has faced terrible megastorms. Unprecedented is a word I keep hearing. It’s a word we use so often these days, it’s almost lost its meaning.
When I see the footage of the destruction, I can’t help but think of traveling along the east coast of Japan after the 2011 tsunami. That too seemed like an unprecedented disaster, but of course it wasn’t. There are records going back hundreds of years that warned of this sort of thing. It’s just that no one had thought to pay them any attention in a long time. Warning signs only work when you’re looking for them.
I published an essay about part of that trip in a special issue of Canadian Notes & Queries called Writing in the Age of Unravelling (Issue #106). It was never published online, so I thought I’d share it with you now. If you’d like to track down a physical copy including this beautiful cover by Seth, you can do so on their website.
How High the Water Rises
(2019)
In 2013, a woman named Yuka showed me around what remained of her hometown of Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The small fishing town where her family had lived for generations was one of the areas on the northeastern coast hardest hit by the Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. We drove there near the end of Golden Week, a cluster of holidays that sends thousands from the cities back to their hometowns each spring, Yuka at the wheel, our mutual friend Achiko translating from the front seat, and me in the back.
Yuka hadn’t visited Onagawa in over a year, a fact she found shameful. I’d lived away from my own hometown long enough to be familiar with a version of this feeling, but Edmonton was still largely as I had left it seven years earlier.
“Onagawa desu,” Yuka chimed as we approached the city limits, imitating a tour operator. This is Onagawa. Her tone wasn’t one of irony so much as forced joy, a last grasp at something cheerful and normal before we dove into her apocalypse.
***
I’d met Yuka through Achiko, whom I’d gotten to know while teaching English in the region. I’d since moved to Vancouver, but returned to Japan twice: first in 2011 after the disaster, then in 2013 to do research for a book I was hoping to write about the disaster. Before the visit, Achiko had told me she was worried about Yuka’s unwillingness to talk about what had happened to Onagawa, her insistence that everything was okay when it clearly wasn’t. My research trip offered an excuse to break the ice between the two of them.
It’s taken me years to make sense of that day in Onagawa. For a long time, when I told people in Canada about traveling to Japan after the tsunami, they would inevitably ask about the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the prefecture to the south of the one I’d lived in and grown to love. “Are you going to stick it to TEPCo?” one man asked, referring to the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which has been justly vilified for its cataclysmic mishandling of the shutdown of its reactors. He then complained loudly that the fish we were about to eat was probably contaminated.
Last summer, I had dinner with an artist who’d been exhibiting installations using debris found on the coast of British Columbia, some of which had most likely come from the tsunami. I tried to tell him about Yuka and my friends who had lost their homes in the towns of Kesennuma and Tagajo, but he didn’t seem interested in the human part of the story. In the face of a loss of that magnitude, our urge is to turn away, to reach for something solid.
***
That morning in 2013, Yuka’s pale hands tightened on the steering wheel as we passed new buildings and temporary housing at the edge of town. The car negotiated a narrow bend and we were suddenly overlooking a low, v-shaped gorge pointing out toward Onagawa Bay. On the ridges to the left and right, pine trees huddled around candy floss clusters of early plum blossom—full-fledged cherry blossom viewing season, already cheerfully underway in the south, would make it here in a week or two. Closer to the seaside, however, the land was the dusty grey and beige of gravel. Between high ground and sea, there were no houses and no businesses, only a few parked cars near two or three incongruous concrete shapes that might have once been buildings.
On the way there, Yuka had talked about her experiences around the day of the tsunami. When the quake struck, she had been travelling north on the highway after a visit to her grandmother in Fukushima. She pulled over and was evacuated inland. The rest of the night was a blur. All she wanted to do was get back to Onagawa to find her family.
First thing the next morning, she set out on the road home, but she could tell immediately that it was worse than she had imagined. The road was choked with debris from the river where it had overflowed its banks. Amongst the jumble of household goods, she could see piles of clothes bleached grey by saltwater, clothes that might have come from her family’s shops. She was filled with panic.
Yuka’s father had most likely been at their family’s store not far from the water. Neighbours said he and her aunt had made it to the evacuation point at the hospital, on a cliff overlooking the sea, then disappeared. Most likely, they’d gone to find her grandfather. A large number of the almost 20,000 casualties of the tsunami were elderly people who couldn’t move to higher ground fast enough.
Yuka explained that her trip to Fukushima was unusual. “I really wanted to go see my grandmother that day—I don’t know why. If I hadn’t gone to visit her, I would have gone with my father to help my grandfather. I would probably be dead, too.”
Yuka’s grandmother was one of the many secondary casualties of the disaster, people who escaped the wave only to be destroyed by the trauma of what followed. She died shortly after the evacuation from her nursing home. Yuka’s brother and his young family survived. Her sister-in-law spent that terrible night perched with her coworkers on the roof of a fishery while the water devoured everything around them.
***
We like to pretend that there was no way to predict the destruction now facing us because of climate change. But the truth is, even we amnesiac Westerners have always known, on some level, that the forces we were meddling with were beyond our control. In the 19th century, at the height of the industrial revolution, when the air in Europe’s biggest cities was becoming choked with exhaust from proliferating factories, some began to see the vanity in the growing disconnect between the natural world and ourselves.
In his treatise on the position of labour in human development, Friedrich Engels wrote, “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.” One of his examples is eerily familiar today: the clear-cutting of the southern slopes of the Alps that destroyed the dairy industry in the region and led to horrific flooding during the rainy seasons.
In Winnipeg, the city of my birth, devastating floods were a part of life long before settlers arrived in the region. Records of water inundating the Forks between the Red and Assiniboine Rivers date back to 1826, and Indigenous peoples’ stories go back much further. In Calgary, researchers warned of the possibility of floods for 30 years before the 2013 deluge turned downtown Calgary into a lake. Yet we kept on blithely ignoring the signs, forgetting or dismissing what we found inconvenient, refusing the knowledge and experience of Indigenous peoples who have lived on the lands for untold millenia. Even now, we tell ourselves we can avoid the worst of what’s to come somehow. We’re so certain of the power of humans over nature, we negotiate and bicker about the economy and jobs rather than accepting the evidence.
***
Yuka pulled the car to a stop along a road that had been cleared for visitors paying their respects and for employees at that tenacious fishery, which had somehow made it through the deluge. Across the street, a four-storey building lay on its side. Metal bars, which at a distance had looked like decoration, resolved into the shape of fire escape stairs running horizontally. The green plastic membrane that had once protected the roof faced inland; the building’s exposed concrete foundation faced the bay.
Getting out of the car, Yuka’s posture recalled a newborn foal—her long, thin legs were shaky, her gait hesitant. She stepped onto a roughly defined square of coarse gravel and pointed down. “This was where my family store was,” she said. “My grandfather lived over there.” She gestured to a space a few metres away at the base of a sudden bluff, above which sat the hospital where much of the town had taken refuge, only to be chased upstairs by rising water.
“Shinjirarenai,” Achiko breathed. Unbelievable.
I had thought there wouldn’t be much to see two years after the wave, that the jumble of household objects from my first post-tsunami visit in 2011 would have been cleared away, and that communities such as Onagawa would have started the difficult but healing road to recovery. But empty spaces like this one still scarred town after town along the coast. Imagine the West End of Vancouver without any buildings, without a blade of grass or a tree. Just concrete and dirt from Burrard Street to English Bay.
The wave in Onagawa reached more than 18 metres, but the basin-like shape of the cove meant the water level in places rose more than 30 metres above sea level, or the rough equivalent of a 10-storey building. When the water came in, Yuka said, turning her narrow hands into the shape of a claw, its currents dug into the soil like fingers and pulled everything in its path deep into the bay, never to be found. That’s how reinforced concrete buildings ended up on their sides: their walls were strong enough to withstand the water, but not the ground under their foundations. Of the almost one thousand people who died in Onagawa on the day of the tsunami, more than three hundred were never found—Yuka’s father, grandfather and aunt among them. They had held a mass funeral for the missing in the summer of 2011 that Yuka reluctantly attended, not yet ready to let go.
Scattered across the ground were irregular chunks of stone ranging from the light-stippled grey of sidewalk concrete to the smooth dark slate of a yard ornament. Looking closely at one piece, I recognized the weathered outline of a tile pattern that might have been a department store floor. Amongst the rubble were the black plastic shell of a computer keyboard and the innards of a rotary phone.
Without houses and shops, the distance between the cliff and the ocean seemed too small to have once been a town. I had experienced this distorted sense of size in towns all up the coast—even in places I’d visited before the water scoured them away. But it was clear Yuka could still see it all as it had been. This was where she had been raised. This was where she had planned to live the rest of her life, managing her family’s second clothing store, which had stood roughly where the third floor of the sideways building rested now. Yuka would always carry these conflicting realities in her heart: the place as it had been before and after the water. This was what she wanted me to see, and for one breathtaking moment, I did.
***
More than five years after that visit to Onagawa, I still struggle to tell the story of that day without being pulled under by its sheer, bone-crushing sadness. As I finish a draft of the novel I went to Miyagi to research, I’ve begun to hear echoes of Yuka’s story in the daily news as disaster after disaster fills the lives of people all over this country and beyond. As I write this, the spring floods return once again in Ottawa, Gatineau, Montreal, and points east. A thousand-year flood threatens to break a 104-year-old dam in a place called Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Quebec. Nearly 8,000 people were evacuated from Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac on a moment’s notice.
These disasters are not just happening in the east. A couple of years ago, I was vacationing on a tiny wooded island when ash began to fall like midsummer snow, carried on the breeze from a wildfire on Vancouver Island. Two summers in a row, the sun in Vancouver has turned red because of wildfires in the interior of BC that have changed the landscape there irrevocably. It didn’t happen this year, but it could easily happen again next. People go home when the fires or waters have calmed only to find themselves battling the same forces year after year until they have no choice but to leave for good. And all this pales in comparison to what is happening in India and the Philippines, the low-lying places that are paying the steepest price for our industrial hubris.
There are apocalypses everywhere, small and large in scale. I wonder how many more of us will soon find ourselves in Yuka’s footsteps, walking through the unsalvageable ruins of the places we called home, visiting the ghosts of our families.
***
In the past few years, Onagawa has transformed itself into a destination for young people. It has a craft beer hall and a place that builds guitars from local cedar trees. People don’t live near the water anymore, but there is life. They faced the reality of the disaster and they found a new way forward. Humans are extraordinary that way. One article called the city’s rebirth “A Lesson in Recovery.” Yet it would be a mistake to forget those years of emptiness. We need stories of resilience, but we also need lessons in loss.
Yuka offered to show me Onagawa because she wanted to commemorate what had happened there, but that day I also saw a foreshadow of the losses we will all face in the near future. One of the last things she showed me was a line painted on a pillar outside the front of the town’s hospital. Though the building was on a high cliff, the line sat above all our heads. Achiko had to stand on her toes to read the inscription above: “We must always remember, the water came this high.”