James Barilla contemplates living in South Carolina during hurricane and tornado season:
I’ve spent much of my life learning the vernacular of place: the local flora and fauna, foods, building materials, soil qualities, human cultures, the folklore that grows up around what’s useful. You have to go out looking for these things. Recently I’ve come to realize that disaster is also part of the lexicon. You don’t find it, necessarily. It finds you.
The signs of local calamity, the way the sky behaves, the longstanding patterns of human anticipation, the behavior of birds and livestock: these are regionally distinctive. But it’s also true, in this era of accelerating climate change, that your local language of environmental catastrophe and mine, your flood and my drought, are connected in ways they’ve never been before. … The accessibility of meteorological data changes my sense of the bioregional riskscape. I need to care about what Cuba and the Antilles are experiencing, about what’s brewing in that oceanic expanse where storms are born, a space that previously meant nothing to me, that simply didn’t exist on any mental map I’d ever made.
A reader submitted the above photo as a VFYW:
This picture was taken from the Kentwood Branch library (Kentwood, Michigan) on July 27, 2012 at 2:55 pm. It was taken from the second floor looking east. The airport in the background is the Gerald R. Ford International Airport. The grass in the foreground is an old landfill.
The Dish 