Fruits of Disaster

When my brother asked me if we wanted to pick blackberries I wasn’t expecting a trip to another disaster zone. “It’s a long walk from downtown,” he said. When my brother says it’s a long walk, you best ask how long no matter how robust you feel. After all, he and his wife will set out on month long treks without batting an eye.

Ten miles seemed a little far, so the boys and I set out in the van, leaving Jesika at the house to get some writing done. My brother’s favorite blackberry patch is set in an upscale neighborhood overlooking Puget Sound. Years ago a sizable portion of the waterfront sloughed off and slid down the bank towards the sea.

We scrambled through barbed vines below a jagged scar, fenced off and forgotten, the rubble almost invisible from the road above. Under a layer of bushes sagging with ripe fruits, fragments of streets and houses peek out at us: a dog chain and bowl still attached to a broken post, a cement staircase curved around a sandy beach, a long black tongue of asphalt protruding from a sandy bank. Here and there you see garden plants that still struggle for survival under the encroaching berries. A large clump of bamboo slumps under the weight of criss-crossed branches.

I try to pay my respects to these crumbled piles of dreams. I kick at a broken flagstone and imagine the excess and opulence, and the downright disregard for nature that would lead someone to build these teetering money-pits by the bay, and instead fight off a childish smirk. Money can’t buy wisdom.

I wonder if blackberries will grow over Waveland. Will we build a fence around New Orleans and watch it sink beneath the sea? Eight years, and the rest of Seattle seems to have forgotten this neighborhood ‘s slide into the Sound. How long until we forget the wrath of Katrina?

Here in Seattle the houses creep towards the bluffs (and the bluffs inch ever closer to the manicured lawns). On the Gulf Coast Levees are rebuilt, residents return, and the drunks still stagger down Bourbon Street. We search for land and speculate about sea level rise, global warming and earthquakes, and suddenly the finality of land-ownership seems a little less secure.