When we lived in our old place on Accabonac Road – this was between 2014 and 2018, when the kids were still small and adorable and capered around the house wearing fake beards to pretend they were Hagrid from “Harry Potter” — the toilet and the bathtub would, from time to time, fill with rising water. It was an old, old, old house, dating to around 1720, with plumbing that had been installed in East Hampton’s tricentennial year of 1948. Because of the museum-piece antiquity of our hygienic infrastructure, it took me an incredibly, obtusely long time to understand what was actually going on with our pipes. I persistently called Harold McMahon to examine the works for a blockage, and phoned John K. Ott to pump out the cement-block cesspool, and ran up and down with a plunger (passing the adorable children, who were riding broomsticks, on the stairs). It only eventually dawned on me that we didn’t have a plumbing-system problem, we had a water-table problem.
My old house on Accabonac was a saltbox built by tangential ancestors of mine in the Conklin family. The house had (and still has, due to the integrity of the people I sold it to in 2018), a Home, Sweet Home-level of authenticity in its yard-wide floorboards, hand-hewn ceiling beams (which probably arrived by boat from Connecticut around the time of the Boston smallpox epidemic), and shockingly bright, original blue milk-paint parlor walls. It sits facing due south, as the oldest South Fork houses all did, so that the north winds of winter would slip up and over its sloped back. (The old houses of East Hampton hunch their shoulders and turn against the wind.) At the rear of the yard, behind a stand of birches, is what the old-timers called “the dreen.”
You may have read about the “dreens” of East Hampton Village in a recent article in this newspaper by Christopher Gangemi, in which he illuminated the watercourses, both underground and visible, that extend like fingers from the Atlantic, reaching up beyond Hook Pond and Town Pond, flowing silently under the village green, then up, under, and behind North Main Street to tickle their tips at Soak Hides. We had all kind of forgotten about this watery topography over the last 50 years, a community amnesia as the landscape was paved over and the vista disappeared behind evergreen screening, but I actually knew about the Accabonac “dreen” — a wet ditch, a onetime creek that runs north-south behind North Main Street — because I’d had the privilege of being told about it by some of the aforementioned old-timers. Still, it took me years to grasp the obvious: that my toilet and bathtub filled with water, and drained again, rising and falling inconveniently and sometimes alarmingly (and once spilling onto the bathroom floor) in harmony with the rise and fall of the water table.
The water table is very close to the surface here in much of the village and, as the climate changes and the rains increase, it’s only rising. Not just here, I would venture to say, but all along the coast, everywhere.
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, when we imagined global warming and the ocean rising to take back the land, we thought the water would come at us furiously, like the floods of the Bible, slamming in crescendos on the shore and chewing up and destroying dunes, then front porches, then the shingle summer cottages of the One Percent. It may well be doing that, too, but it becomes evident that climate change doesn’t always come with a bang; sometimes it comes with a whimper.
The water is rising under our feet, inland.
Someone I once worked with at Vogue, a dude who scared people in the art department because he never smiled (not smiling being the Vogue way), used to own one of the houses on the other side of the Accabonac dreen, on the North Main Street side. I believe it was out of the frowning Vogue dude’s house that some more recent occupant snaked a garden hose — a garden hose of incredible length — from the basement to the main road, so that the groundwater perpetually flooding its basement could be dumped out, at a distance, into the municipal storm drains. This was two or three years ago and by then, finally, to borrow the British phrase, the penny had dropped in the slot of my own brain (if not, clearly, in these neighbors’): Pumping water out of a basement that was filling with rising groundwater, only to hose it back to the groundwater via a nearby storm drain, was like a gag from a silent movie in which Stan Laurel or Buster Keaton cannot get rid of a stray cat because he doesn’t realize that the cat is tethered to his own pants leg by a string and he has sardines in his pocket. A circular exercise in futility and a handy-dandy image of human folly when it comes to the survival of the planet.
Some years ago, wasting time on my laptop as we do when we should be outside pulling bindweed out of the daylily bed, I stumbled upon something called Google Earth Engine. It’s a tool that lets you see changes in the landscape of the planet in time-lapse, through satellite images dating back to 1984. Go ahead and type the words “Google Earth Engine” into your browser. Zoom in over Georgica Pond: See the density of housing increase intensively at Georgica between 1984 and 2022? Look at Cartwright Shoal, and Napeague Harbor’s shifting sands. Zoom in over Montauk. Do you see what I see? I don’t actually see any dramatic narrowing of the beach at downtown Montauk. I obviously may be wrong, but I don’t see huge encroachment laterally.
Climate change doesn’t always — or even primarily? — come like “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” in the famous woodblock print by Hokusai. It is rising, rising.
Two more vignettes.
On May 15 of this year, we had a very heavy storm, with 3.6 inches of rain overnight, peaking with a deluge between midnight and 3 a.m. There was little wind, only the downpour. I was tucked up under the covers, dreaming of a cherry orchard I once knew in the Buda Hills, with my faithful dog beside me shivering at the sound of the storm, when an earth-shattering crack and bed-shaking thump! woke the house. An old maple tree had come crashing to earth in my front yard (blessedly missing the house, the car, the power lines, the neighbors’ fence, even politely keeping out of the driveway). The maple was about 100 years old and its rotten old roots could no longer hold fast in the sodden ground.
And in Vermont. Between July 9 and 10, there was an “extraordinary rainfall event” — in the words of a weather observer named Karl Philippoff at the Mount Washington Observatory — that, with “soils already saturated from weeks of well-above-average rainfall,” brought a cascade of “remarkable flooding” to “nearly the entirety” of the State of Vermont. On television news reports, men in wet T-shirts with wet hair stood gesturing toward the muddy gulches where their green yards and garages had been. “Much of this rainfall,” Mr. Philippoff reported, “could be attributed to a persistent trough to the west and a blocking high pressure to the east, allowing warm, moist air to be drawn northward from the Gulf of Mexico and the tropical Atlantic Ocean into the area and be tapped by disturbances passing through the region.”
Warming earth, warming seas, saturated heavens, flooded basements, Nike sneakers floating across the basin of the living room.
For some reason, as I write this, I keep thinking of scary movies in which the venomous snake in the sewer slips up into the toilet bowl, or the horror creature with fins and scales rises from his aquatic subterranean cave to stalk suburbia. But those images are inapt and not apropos. The snakes and the scaly creatures in this story of environmental peril are, of course, us.