Swear to God if you say I look like an Oompa Loompa, I will whip you with this towel.

It started with me walking across the family room in a nude bathing suit and D looking up from his laptop with a “What the …”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, putting on flip flops before walking into the frigid-by-Texas-drought-standards garage. “There’s some makeup in the car that I need.” And D got that look on his face he always gets as he figures out if he has the time and strength to pull me out of this next inevitable crisis. (A few days ago, I washed a new black dress with the gigantic cardboard tag still attached. The look D gave me with plumber’s auger in hand made me cover my behind and vow that no tags will enter this house ever again.)

In truth, it all started with this Texas Observer article: Truly Scary Texas-Themed Halloween Ideas. Rick Perry, forced sonograms, feral hogs – all scary but no mention of the most frightening, politically hot, geo-nerdiest, Texas-tastic (work with me here) costume idea of them all. Coastline retreat at Western Galveston Island.

… a new study from the Rice University Shell Center for Sustainability suggests that the entire west end of Galveston Island should be abandoned in favor of the protection provided by the seawall on the East End.

The study suggests that the coastline is eroding at the fastest rate that it has in 6,000 years, losing between three and six feet every single year. It suggests that the West End would serve better as a location for eco-tourism.

Just so you know, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality censored all mention of climate change and sea-level rise in this Rice University study called the “Atlas of Sustainable Strategies for Galveston Island” that the state itself authorized. It’s the following reactions to the study that completely tickle me, however.

1) Galveston city official on the KHOU evening news a couple of evenings ago: “[Scientific] study is an opinion and should not be used as the basis for planning and development.”

2) “To suggest to somebody that where they chose to live and build their home, and have their family is not sustainable, well, I just don’t agree with that at all man,” [a visitor from Shreveport, La] said.

Yeah, well, that’s just like your opinion, man.

A New Orleanian never forgets. I remember what these folks were saying about our having to face scientific reality about rebuilding six years ago. Bites when it’s your home, doesn’t it? Seriously, let me hear one person from Galveston say that New Orleans should not be rebuilt and there will be a major asskicking. Also note the current trend to commission independent and all-encompassing studies on topics such as sustainability and global warming only to turn around and censor or ignore them as opinion when they do not suit political talking points of the day.

So, I was all het up and already thinking about a costume idea less tired than Dead Wine Fairy (explain later, I promise) and impulsively tweeted The Texas Observer back, “Planning to go as Sinking Western Galveston Island.” Their one-word response came: “Brilliant!” Which my brain immediately translated into “Challenge!”

Great. Now how to render in costume form a retreating effing coastline.

Among other questions roiling in your head such as “What about a nice zombie costume?” and “Why am I reading this crazy woman?” I am sure you’re wondering what a retreating coastline is. Think of it as a receding hairline. Hair lessens and the hairline moves back as the sea of baldness encroaches. In the night. With a toupee. A retreating coastline is land receding or being reclaimed by an encroaching sea. Here in the southern coastal United States, we have a combination of factors that contribute to coastline retreat, including land subsidence, over-development along the coast, decreasing sand supply and a rising sea level, which results in property loss and an increased vulnerability to tropical storms and hurricanes. What I needed to depict here is land-water contact, much like a moving oil-water contact in a hydrocarbon reservoir, which put me in mind of my friend TW’s awesome aquifer pressure support costume from a few years ago. I needed blue and brown. And some green.

I knew a green wig, sea-blue opera gloves and a nude bathing suit would come in handy some day. D will never understand that this is why I rarely throw away or donate old clothes; they can always be saved “as costume material.” Here is the costume you saw above annotated with signs of coastline retreat. It needs work like some boxes cut out to represent buildings and you can’t really see the butterfly in my hair and fine green lines painted on my face. What else would you add to it? Besides *cough* sand berms *cough*

“These data do not yield a pretty picture for the future of the island,” says the Rice study’s introduction. My costume and I beg to differ.

What really pleases me is my latest acquisition from Fifi Mahony’s, one of the best fairy wonderlands of wigs and costume accessories on earth. Finally, I got out of the red rut. ‘Twas about time. I can’t wait for Mardi Gras.

And D didn’t have to do anything for me this time other than take the pictures. So there. (Don’t tell him about the green hair all over the bathroom floor.)

A float in the Krewe of Thoth parade - Mardi Gras 2008

Apropos of the reason for this Hindu festival: Questions Lit Up, in which Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes on the Delhi University ban on teaching A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana and chides the Indian left and right for hijacking the culture for political gain.

… The Right commits the mistake of assimilating all tradition to one single glob, undifferentiated, where nuances don’t matter. But equally, the so-called Left has created intellectual divisions and categories of understanding that bear no relation to the texts at hand.

A new Army Corps of Engineers rating system for the nation’s levees is about to deliver a near-failing grade to New Orleans area dikes, despite the internationally acclaimed $10 billion effort to rebuild the system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, corps officials have confirmed.

As Ray drove us through Fontainebleau and Gert Town on our way to Xavier University this Saturday, he marveled out loud at how great that part of town looks now. I replied, “Compared with what it looked like even two to three years after the storm!”

Many who live in New Orleans and those just visiting remark on how much the city is getting fixed. From Pistolette, a native of St. Bernard Parish who now lives Uptown, “We know what our problems are, and we’re on the path to fixing them with an enthusiasm that didn’t exist here before. The trick now is to keep up the momentum, and never return to the apathy of before.” Athenae, who last visited from Chicago in 2007, remarks, “I kept asking people if it sounded terrible to talk about how wonderful things looked to me.”

Dare I say it. Dare any of us even think it.

If the city that so many insistent, audacious and spirited people returned to and worked so hard to salvage over the last six years and all of the precious new hope on top of it were to be submerged in the floodwaters of the next Category 5 surge that these crap levees may not be able to hold back. If. What if?

That’s what you get for being a poor, black, gay, southern city built one million miles below sea level, right? Dead wrong.

… I like to think the challenges New Orleans faces are emblematic of the nation as whole — indeed, of the human race at this moment in history. Crumbling infrastructure, dysfunctional government, environmental degradation, social inequities, you name it … We’re only reflecting and encapsulating the future we all share.

Let me say something about being an American, about this finely-honed, missile-precise national identity that I am still very proud to have earned: Neither can you pick and choose when you are and when you’re not American, nor are you allowed to exclude folks from Americanship when it’s suddenly convenient to you. If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not, that’s your problem, but don’t make it mine or those of my friends who live in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. As a woman who happens to have brown skin, a former resident of Kuwait and New Orleans and a current resident of drought-stricken Texas, I have seen and experienced way too much Othering and it’s getting old. I am especially sick of it because when I read news from around the country, I don’t categorize it by geography, race and economics, but under Oh Shit More Stuff For Us To Fix, Our Latest Headache and/or National Challenge.

Our. Us. We. We don’t all have to be in this together, but if you’ve chosen America like I have, we are and we have work to do.

***

OffBeat Magazine: Treme Bloggers – Ray Shea and I were part of an hour-long roundtable discussion convened by Alex Rawls on the topic of HBO’s Treme. I liked this exchange in particular.

Me: … Sometimes it worked because I’m partial to bounce, but sometimes I felt like it was kind of forced in, “Okay, now we’re gonna have two minutes of ass-shaking.”

 

Ray: “I had no problem with that.”

Map of French Québec City's fortifications on bedrock relief (North is conveniently to the bottom right)

Québec City sits between the Laurentian highlands of the southeastern Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachian Mountains that were formed during the Taconic and Acadian orogenies. Bedrock here is the Upper Ordovician Utica shale that “overlies the predominantly shallow marine carbonate facies of the Cambrian-Ordovician St. Lawrence Platform” (or St. Lawrence lowlands).The adjacent St. Lawrence River, which I gather formed post-Pleistocene glaciation by cutting into the relatively less-resistant sedimentary rocks sandwiched between the Laurentians and the Appalachians, is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway system.

As a sign by one of the many higher-up river outlooks explains, the land beneath Quebec City was not chosen by the French because of the overwhelming tectonics over an equally stupefying period of time that created it but purely for defense strategic reasons. To each their own time scale.

In a time-traveling nutshell: Canadian Shield forms the core of the North American continent –> happy passive margin forms with the buildup of a carbonate platform and the transgression of the sea –> BAM BAM Taconic and Acadian continental collision events creating the Appalachian mountains –> some quiet time as the Atlantic Ocean forms to the east –> glaciation from the north –> glacial retreat –> uplifted Québec City and associated river –> some French dude named Samuel de Champlain surveys the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence area, claims the high cape of Québec City and territory all the way from north of Minnesota down to and including Louisiana for New France in 1608 and his people put up a bunch of ramparts against, well, everyone –> the Brits take over in 1763 –> Canada forms in 1868 and tells everyone to sod off in exchange for putting limey monarchs on its currency –> Canadian geologists find economic natural gas in the Utica shale. (Someone call They Might Be Giants and set this to music.)

Related reading:

• The Utica Shale Formation
• Geo-Atlas of the St. Lawrence River Basin
• American Treasure of the Library of Congress: Samuel de Champlain’s 1607 Map
• The Utica’s shale gas potential

This is my favorite Nagin line from a presser that The Gambit attended: “There were recovery strategies put in place early that are now paying dividends” By the way, El Gambito reads the book so we don’t have to … just yet.

Politicians have gone beyond lying. They are now shamelessly turning lies into the truth. Right is wrong, who controls the present controls the past, ignorance is fraking strength. What you see is not what you see.

bry4n sent me a video on “diminished reality.” Amazing how you can alter reality with a bit of upscaling. Just because you’re looking at something doesn’t mean you see things as they are.

This last episode from early 2007 brought back a lot of happy and painful memories. In the Treme Time Scale, D and I were married between last week’s episode and tonight’s, honeymooned in New York City and returned to the news that Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hill had been murdered and were we going to participate in the march on City Hall?

Yes.

Early 2007 was such a blur. I remember blogging away furiously while switching assignments at work. And I remember this mask, because I made and wore it for Mardi Gras 2007. Its theme: Crime & Recovery a.k.a. Babies With Guns (and booze and women. Yeah, babes with babes. It wasn’t referred to as the Triple Entendre mask for nothing.). Also reminds me that I need to unpack it to make sure it made it across the country alright.

A baby killed Dinerral Shavers while really out to get Dick’s step-baby. (Not only do these children shoot each other to settle beefs, they have no fraking aim. It’s gangster-movie-comical if not for the awful consequences.) And the city did nothing, NOTHING about it. This I will never forgive. I often think of an alternate history of New Orleans in which Ray Nagin lost the 2006 mayoral election. Apparently, so does James Gill.

For various reasons, I’ve been re-reading the posts from those days. I venture a guess that a number of us are.

And what about these days?

Morganza Floodway Travel Times, a photo by Team New Orleans, US Army Corps of Engineers on Flickr.

The Pointe Coupee Banner | Corps directed to open Morganza Spillway

The Morganza Spillway has been opened to protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans from the Mississippi River potentially overflowing its carefully-carved banks in these cities. According to Tim, this does not keep New Orleans river levels from subsiding, but stabilizes the flow rate downstream from the spillway. “Operation of [the] spillway and floodway will keep [river] stage from going above 17 [feet] at [the] Carrollton [gage].”

The US Army Corps of Engineers designed the spillway to be opened “when the flow of the Mississippi at Red River Landing, Louisiana, is greater than 1,500,000 cu ft/s (42,000 m³/s) and rising.” With 125 bays, that’s 12,000 cfs per bay. As of this writing, one Morganza bay is open. More from Tim: “The spillways operate to maintain 1.5 million cfs flow at Baton Rouge and 1.25 million cfs at New Orleans. Doing the math, 0.25 M cfs flows out [of the] Bonnet Carre [spillway].”

WWLTV New Orleans reports that the spillway may be open for several weeks.

My heart is with you, Acadiana.

==

• Team New Orleans, USACE Flickr Photoset
• WWLTV New Orleans coverage [with video]
• In the words of Jeffrey, “CNN is mass psycho analyzing all of South Louisiana right now,” so you can check there, too.
• Also, check GeoEye and DigitalGlobe for satellite images of Atchafalaya flooding in the coming days.
• Morganza spillway coordinates: N 30.60128 W 91.41998