pure personality, where survival depends on the strength and tenacity of individuals who resist group safety or survival efforts—Jake Gyllenhaal in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or The Rock, a decade later, in San Andreas (2015)—amid the tumbling wreck of American civilization.
In these films, love of family trumps (and triumphs over) the emotionless bureaucracy of the rescue effort, of government-protected “higher ground,” FEMA and its conspiracy of trailers. The storms roll in, destroy what they can, whom they can, especially those who follow the lead of others, into the fire, the epicenter, the flood zone, the imploding skyscraper. We do not witness their deaths with horror when the faceless group diverges from our hero’s advice and collectively miscalculates the stability of that shelter, that road, that path through the woods. Rather, we pity their foolishness, and are relieved that The Rock did not follow them.
On screen, no one believes the various Cassandras who insist that global catastrophe is drawing near, that a superstorm will destroy the United States, not even the protagonists tenacious enough to go against prescribed safety to survive. They survive because they refute the premise of the prediction: life will go on and will never end no matter what the clear and consensus-based science says. A catastrophe is an opportunity. San Francisco will be wiped out, but it will carry on for those who keep it within them, for those strong enough to rebuild.
And us? We now abandon theory for practice, weather forecast for weather event. The email arrives with a series of images claiming to show the devastation of the storm. A wave overtakes the Statue of Liberty. Cars lift up in eight feet of floodwater in an underground garage in Lower Manhattan. Standing in the rain, anonymous guards keep watch over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Scuba divers shine a light in the 42nd Street–Times Square station. A McDonald’s is flooded to the counter, the brown water littered with branded trash, a statue of Ronald McDonald floating facedown amid the debris like a mob hit. A great white shark attacks a rescue helicopter rocking in the stormy wind above the East River, the EMT dangling by a rope in reach of the animal’s jaws. Lightning bolts tear through Midtown Manhattan. I’m pacing an apartment that isn’t mine, smoking a joint I eventually flick into the fire when it’s finished. A strong wind beats the windows. The doorman calls up to recommend that I unplug any electronics, especially the computers, in case of a blackout that might cause a surge when and if the power returns. The electric plant explodes within minutes of the call, and the apartment goes dark. I run into the kitchen to fetch a flashlight or candles, though I don’t know where to look for either. I rummage through the drawers of Chris’s home, and find nothing but plastic forks, birthday candles, Citarella receipts. In the film version of this scene, Jake Gyllenhaal plays the character based on me. In it, he calmly manages to locate a self-generating flashlight and a set of candles in a closet that he uses to relight the apartment, only to realize that eleven flights below, water is beginning to rise across Lower Manhattan. Somewhere his fellow protagonist is trapped in a taxi slowly filling with river water. The music begins to swell. Anxious violins. How to save her, he wonders, thinking nothing of himself. The lighter’s flame fades. A supercell hovers over Queens. The Brooklyn Bridge is inundated by the East River, which isn’t a river, but a tidal estuary. A flashlight. A siren. Traffic, snarled on Fifth Avenue, vibrates with the tumble of water raging up the street. Everyone slowly gets out of their cars to look south, where a hundred-foot wave is headed toward them. Flee, push aside fellow commuters, cabbies, strangers, Jake Gyllenhaal. Go under. A Burger King is destroyed. Water rises.
PART ONE
1
The room where we gathered was pink. Or the first dusk light that filled the room was pink and everything in it—a table, walls of books, several handsomely framed antique maps of New York State, even the members of “the project,” each tottering in their expressive blankness and dressed in uniformed shirts and shorts of white linen—was bathed in a soft pinkness. We were late. Simon, my sort-of boyfriend, and I had pulled into the small New York town at the base of the hill, near where the project lived, about half an hour after we were due. We parked the car in the town’s small, crowded municipal lot and followed hand-painted signs to a path dimpled with orange salamanders that wound into a thick stretch of trees, and continued for about quarter mile up, into a clearing at the hilltop. There, the steel face of the central building of this project—an imposing, Brutalist cube, designed by the artists Helen Hunley Wright and George Wright in the early 1990s—stopped us at the end of the path. It stood in defiance of its otherwise rustic surroundings, glinting meanly at dusk.
The building was divided into three distinct parts, with each section built of a different material (brick, steel, and wood) that formed a capital T-shape. The back of the house opened onto a porch elevated by stilts fifteen or so feet off the ground with a generous view of a weedy field that ran down to the Delaware River between the hydraulically fractured counties of Pennsylvania and the untouched ones of New York, and where a small number of dumpy cottages lurched in the grass for the residents of this artists’ colony. In summer the field was thick with gnats.
Inside, we joined the other guests and residents in the living room, where Helen was midway through her introductory remarks, after which she welcomed us into her large kitchen that opened onto the porch. The dinner, Helen explained to all of us who were gathered around her, would be held here, under mosquito nets in the prettiest evening you’ll find outside of the city. “What a story this place will tell,” she said.
Near an array of copper pans that hung from the back wall, an old astrological chart of the Sun and its nine planets (including Pluto), each celestial body’s orbit traced in a dotted line, distracted me from what Helen was saying. In it, the Earth was a grim, faintly blue ball on yellowed paper, the Moon nothing more than a small thumbprint-sized smudge to the upper right of our sphere. Helen was saying something about how happy she was to have us in her home. Also, that this place, whatever this place was, was a different kind of art community.
I want to show you that. To Simon and me: Good evening, boys. And hello.
She spoke with the rehearsed confidence of someone who knew a routine that would never change. Guests, pink light, sunset. She was smaller in person than she appeared in the images of her that I had found online, though her features were kinder, less hardened than in the black-and-white photographs that were taken during her East Village years two decades ago, when she lived on east 11th Street and “knew people,” mostly people who were now dead. Her hair—speared by two silver sticks—jiggled in a tidy, gray bun at the top of her head as she talked about what she and her project did. Clapping her hands together, she outlined for us, in brief, the rich history of what she called the “project” or the “community,” which was not “her” project or “her” community, she clarified, but one that belonged to many, “so many.” Founded in 1992 with her ex-husband, the artist George Wright, the project has provided artists, writers, and musicians with a space to broaden their practice beyond the art studio or the writing desk for some twenty years: instead, they farm, harvest crops, churn butter, build. She explained, in slightly dated artspeak, how the artists at the project work with each other and the materials of the earth in “open space” rather than the studio, the gallery, the museum. She talked about moving beyond “normative” art production, with a requisite, if odd, reference to Bourriaud. Then she concluded this speech with a smile, wide as the view behind her: “And we are so glad you’re here. So. Let’s have a quick tour while there’s still some light.”
We toured, trekked across the campus, trooped behind her through the gnat clouds, and trudged toward cabins and workshops and farming sites and other makeshift structures that evinced various green initiatives. Ever a host, she made small talk with each of us, including me:
Why are you here? Who do you know? Are you interested in applying to work with us? How long have you and Simon been friends?
“Oh not long, six months.” Helen wore all white, too, though her uniform differed in kind from her monkish residents in that it appeared to be a custom if incredible zoot suit, the ankles discolored with mud. No, I didn’t plan to apply.
Presenting the project’s well, she told us that the community had taken an active, let’s even say aggressive,