home waters, n. the area of sea around one’s own country.
home wind, n. a wind blowing toward one’s home or country.
There are at least two ways to swamp a coastal city or town.
One is a storm. Among types of storms, tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes, are the heavyweights. They develop over ocean waters that are warmer than about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and heat and the process of convection supply the energy to stir them. On a warming planet, these are already becoming more devilish and destructive, with even faster winds and heavier rains. Other kinds of storms are also growing more severe, like nor’easters, which can drop blizzards, heavy rain, and colossal waves along the Atlantic Coast. So are heavy inland rainstorms.
A second is via high tides. The moon follows an elliptical path around the Earth, and sometimes she tugs more forcefully on the oceans than at other times. The highest of tides are sometimes colloquially called king tides. Very high tides can happen, for instance, when the moon aligns with the sun—so that both are pulling on the oceans—and the moon is simultaneously at perigee, a word that sounds like a ballet move but refers to moments when the moon is closest to the Earth. Add some extra rain or swell to a king tide, and the water can overrun sewage treatment systems, seawalls, and other structures engineered to handle water and avert floods under average conditions.
Shallow flooding from tides and small storms is also called nuisance flooding, the water that makes a deep pond between the road and the storefront, the water that burbles up through the storm drains or seeps into the engines of parked cars and ruins them.
But I would argue that this is the wrong term. This flooding isn’t just a bother but an omen, like the first raindrops in a deluge.
Early on a Monday in May 2019, Andrea Dutton, a renowned geologist and oceanographer, told a group of people in St. Augustine what such flooding portended. The Keeping History Above Water conference—the event coordinated by Leslee Keys of Flagler College and Marty Hylton of the University of Florida—convened on the ground floor of the Casa Monica Resort, a nineteenth-century architectural marvel formerly owned by Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, about a block from city hall. The conference was intended partly to draw experts to St. Augustine to help with its high-water problems.
The crowd sat around round linen-covered tables and sipped coffee. Dutton wore a scarf decorated with red and blue bands. She had the same red and blue image projected on a slide, and she unfurled the scarf for the audience, like a magic trick. What you’re looking at here is a color scale, she said. It was a visual representation of the planet’s temperatures over more than a century and a half: all the warmer-temperature red bands were at the far (recent) end of the scale. You can wear it to your next dinner party, she said, so that you can go talk to your friends about this and show them, look, this is real and it’s happening. This was only partly a joke. A few slides later, she reached an image labeled sea level commitment, as if to tell them they had all made a pact with the sea—not such a far-fetched analogy. The image showed a trend line depicting the change in the rate of sea level rise over time. From several thousand years ago through the time of the shell-mound cultures until the modern era, the rate was relatively flat and slow. This is the time period in which we built on our coastlines. We got comfortable there, unfortunately, she said.
But from modernity onward the graph jutted upward rapidly, the waters surging into several possible but uncertain future states: the sea could keep rising at a faster or slower rate, depending on how much carbon humans chose to keep sending into the atmosphere.
Global mean sea level has risen about eight to nine inches since the year 1880, about a decade before Rudolf Diesel patented the engine that bears his name and that helped set us on this fossil fuel–based, high-carbon, high-water journey. Even this change has reverberated all around the coast already, boosting the erosive power of waves, which smack against the landscape. Already the sea is punishing the land, a problem especially noticeable in places like barrier islands, which protect the coasts. (The Davis Shores neighborhood of St. Augustine—where city historic preservationist Jenny Wolfe used to live—stands on such an island, Anastasia Island, and to the south, its beaches are eroding, and the county has to regularly truck in sand to keep them intact.)
In this part of the twenty-first century, the global rate of sea level rise is two to three times faster than it was when the shell mounds were built: about an inch every eight to twelve years. Moreover, because the oceans are not a giant bathtub but are shaped by currents, tectonic shifts, and other forces that alter topography (such as land subsidence, i.e., the sinking of land), in some places the rate of rise is even faster than in others. A few years previously, Andrea Dutton and some of her colleagues discovered that, between 2011 and 2015, ocean waters from Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina south to Miami, Florida, rose six times faster still than the global average, or about three inches in just four years. A few inches sounds small until it is the difference between, say, the water level below your tide gate, your doorsill, or your street surface and the level above, the tipping point between dry and wet. It sounds small until you notice, for instance, that the frequency of tidal flooding along the U.S. coastline has doubled in the past three decades.
But these troubling observations were not the most alarming part of Andrea Dutton’s presentation. Geologists are the historians of the Earth, and like scholars in the fields of history and preservation, she had studied the past in order to understand the present and the future. She had estimated past sea levels by traveling around the world and examining fossils of coral (which grows, of course, at the coastal edge). She was part of a global collaboration of scientists who were using this method to determine how high the water was between ice ages—at three million years ago and again at 400,000 and 125,000 years ago, the final date occurring after humans had arrived but before we had built much of anything durable. The scientists had connected this work to models and measurements of past temperatures (such as those derived from studying fossilized sea creatures—foraminifera, which store details about ancient climates in the chemistry of their intricately patterned, microscopic shells). And the story she read in the old reefs was troubling, because it appeared that it had taken just one degree Celsius (or nearly two degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, averaged over the entire planet, for the corals to climb up twenty feet or more—onto what is currently dry land. For that to happen, the planet’s vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica must have shed a lot of ice.
And all this evidence from the past suggested that some shocking things lie in our future: since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have already warmed the Earth by about one degree Celsius. We may have already warmed up the planet enough to commit ourselves to something like twenty feet of sea level rise, she explained.
But the scientist meant to move on to other business right away. All right, this is the depressing moment in the talk, she said, to dispense with the shock—another magic trick—and a murmur of uneasy laughter passed through the room. Call me Depressing Dr. Dutton, or do whatever you need to do to get through it. The good news is that this is not going to happen overnight.
It would take more than a century, probably much more, for twenty feet of additional seawater to arrive at anyone’s doorstep or floodgate. The trouble was, no one could predict the exact pace of change and whether it would arrive gradually or in bursts. The future of the sea would depend on a great number of variables, and the greatest of these would be choices made by people in the twenty-first century.
Dutton revealed another graph, with a set of rainbow-colored pathways, each representing a different level of carbon emissions and consequent rise in the oceans by 2100—the possibilities ranged from less than two feet to eight feet. Which one would we choose? How much carbon would we keep emitting? How much would we warm the Earth ultimately? How quickly would we melt the ice and augment the ocean? How much time would we buy a place like St. Augustine or Annapolis or Miami or Manhattan? How many generations would be able to hold on to these places? And when they were abandoned, would people still be able to keep their histories and their ancestors close to them, as the builders of the shell mounds had? Would they still be able to renew the world? These were not just hypothetical questions.
A day after Dutton’s talk, about a dozen people from the conference, including a couple of St. Augustine city officials, staff from the National Park Service, and engineers from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, walked along the waterfront to examine the series of seawalls that had been built there over the city’s history and discuss plans for new flood control measures. They strolled together to the old Spanish fort. A Naval Academy professor had agreed to lead his students in researching a series of engineering strategies—such as a breakwater, a levee, or a living shoreline made of natural material—to protect the seventeenth-century structure and the grounds around it from floods. Still, it was easy to see that any barrier would hold the tide for only so many years. We’ve really got our work cut out for us, said the city public works director.
I drove to the conference from Tampa through a heavy rainstorm that pounded my rental car and dropped sheets of water across the highway. A few hours after my arrival, I joined a trolley tour offered by Jenny Wolfe and a local archaeologist. Trolley tours were a standard local attraction; a fleet of them circled St. Augustine constantly, filling the air with a running narrative about various eras of the city’s history and making stops at miscellaneous attractions like America’s first wax museum, the chocolate factory, and the Spanish Military Hospital Museum, a reconstruction of an eighteenth-century hospital.
But Jenny and her colleague were offering a different kind of tour: half about history, half about flooding, it was called “Heritage at Risk.” We looped through the damp, narrow streets, many of them gathering puddles.
Some of the most fragile places are cemeteries and archaeological sites. St. Augustine has a shallow water table. In some spots, you can strike groundwater a couple of feet beneath the soil surface. Among other things, it is hard to dig a grave here without it filling with water. Jenny pointed to the Tovar House, one of a few houses in St. Augustine from the eighteenth century. Archaeologists had combed through the site, looking for clues about how the house had been used and modified over time, and had wanted to leave the dig open as an active exhibit. “But during the process, the archaeologists were dealing with rising floodwaters from the water table,” she explained, so they had to close the site to protect the building’s foundation. The story of this place must either be documented or lost altogether. When higher waters start to reach the building more often, it cannot easily be relocated—the old foundation is too fragile. The story of this place must be documented, so it is not lost altogether in a future flood.
St. Augustine is a treasured place. It is full of epic stories and oddities and attractions, but I didn’t get a sense of it as a community or a home until the last day of the conference, when Jenny Wolfe borrowed a vehicle from the city’s fleet and assembled an ad hoc tour for four historic preservationists from out of town. She planned to spotlight the city’s posthurricane reconstruction and renovation, and she invited me to come along.
Jenny pulled up beside the Casa Monica in a giant white Chevrolet truck. Her hair loose, her feet in gray moccasins, she was wearing blue jeans and a royal-blue polo shirt embroidered with the city crest (a coat of arms, originally drawn up for St. Augustine in 1715). This was half-business, half-social. She knew all four women taking the tour from various professional gatherings and events, and they cracked jokes and fired questions at her. Jenny proceeded slowly down the waterfront boulevard, Avenida Menendez, named for the city’s founder, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. She stopped the truck in front of a row of houses, most from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose first floors stood at varying heights above the street, some elevated more than others in anticipation of floods.
Here was a wood-shingle building that had been elevated an extra two feet—to about ten feet above the tide line. It was still under construction, the walls covered in black tar paper. Beneath it, the contractors had discovered coquina piers of unknown vintage. Here was a Mediterranean Revival house with hollow clay tiles and arched doorways. The first floor had filled with water during both Irma and Matthew. The owner refused to evacuate during the second of these storms. “He has video where he’s standing on his porch, and the water is just sloshing around,” Jenny recalled. Rather than give up on the house, he decided to convert his first floor into a waterproofed porch and live upstairs.
Here, at the front of another house, stood a wall maintained by a private resident, a replacement of an older broken wall that was made of coquina and concrete block: the water from Hurricane Irma had retreated so quickly that the pressure sucked it toward the sea and busted it into pieces. The new wall was a couple of feet higher.
Jenny drove on, turning away from the waterfront and into Lincolnville. Oaks draped with Spanish moss leaned over the streets. Here was an empty lot where a house had been torn down, then another demolition, the site of a neighborhood community center that had been derelict and too expensive to fix after two storms and decades of deferred maintenance.
She crossed the bridge into Davis Shores, where she had lived at the time of Hurricane Matthew. She no longer called this neighborhood home. After the storm, the return to her cottage had triggered too many feelings of loss and vulnerability, and she had decided to move in with her then-boyfriend, who thereafter became her husband. Here were houses on wide, grassy lawns, then more empty lots, then a ranch elevated in defiance of the traditional low-to-the-ground style for such a house. Here were the tiny, rectangular dwellings put up after World War II. Here was an unobtrusive green city park where an archaeologist was searching for remnants of a second Spanish settlement.
She rounded a corner, and a tiny green cottage came into view, framed by a wooden fence. “This is where I used to live,” she said.
“It’s super cute,” I exclaimed.
Jenny looked wistful for a moment. “I lost the place where I felt very content.”
What do we lose when places like St. Augustine—places dense with ghosts and relics and remembrances—fall within the grasp of salt water?
Did it matter, I asked myself, to remember what had transpired here over the centuries? I didn’t like these questions, but I knew others would ask them, powerful people with money, people who could make decisions about what mattered and what didn’t, about what to salvage and what to abandon, and about who would keep their homes and their histories and who would lose them. “We all hated to take U.S. history, right?” Leslee Keys told me, in a tone of half-jest, half-alarm. “Well, don’t worry. You won’t be seeing any of that.” I remembered years ago walking Boston’s Freedom Trail with my brother past the house once owned by Paul Revere—who famously rode from there to Lexington in 1775 to warn American Revolutionary soldiers that the British were on the march. Some spots along that trail are already at risk of floods and will become more so as the sea rises. Places like this wouldn’t disappear from textbooks, but some of them would become inaccessible, and we would lose the ability to revisit them.
History has always been a contentious project. But the stale, broken-spined history books I remember from my school classroom were not at all like the experience of encountering raw, cacophonous, unfiltered history—the struggles, the strangeness, the misdeeds and crimes, inventions and ingenuity that often speak in shockingly direct ways to the present condition. Heritage allows people to find belonging in a place, to claim it as their own and gather strength from the lessons of the past. But written history can easily gloss over complexities and rob people of their stories, alienating or marginalizing some in order to make others feel comfortable or powerful. “We have always been a pluralist nation, with a past far richer and stranger than we choose to recall,” writes New Yorker journalist Kathryn Schulz in an article recounting the history of tamales. Social and racial reconciliation—the restoration of dignity to people who have been wronged—always requires wrestling with ghosts. But reengaging with history in this way often means returning to the landscape and to the places where past events occurred. Sometimes even the tiniest details matter when making sense of a community’s origins—a broken piece of pottery, a cannonball, an etching on a wall, a corroded metal button, a bead, a bit of paint, flecks of rock or ash or pigment in old layers of earth help us locate people from the past who might otherwise have been erased, people deemed ordinary or inconsequential in their time but who later became a clue or even a momentous symbol. If we are not careful, when we lose a place like St. Augustine—especially if we do not safeguard the records and evidence of its existence—we will forfeit some of our ability to recollect, reclaim neglected stories, and correct our mistakes. To lose the past is to let go of possible futures as well.
I spent a week in St. Augustine after the conference, wandering through layers of history. The people who settled colonial Spanish Florida were culturally diverse. And there were glimpses of pluralism here, both deliberate and accidental, well before it was any kind of American ideal. On the side of a building along one colonial avenue, for instance, I found a plaque dedicated to “the memory of the 400 Greeks who arrived in St. Augustine, took on fresh supplies, then journeyed south to help settle the colony of New Smyrna, Florida. After ten difficult years, the survivors of that colony sought refuge in St. Augustine … the first permanent settlement of Greeks on the continent.” The building is the oldest surviving Greek Orthodox house of worship in the United States.
But the most extraordinary story I encountered was already submerged and buried under a combination of water and earth, land and salt marsh. About two and a half miles from the downtown, Fort Mose Historic State Park (pronounced Fort Mos-ay) is understated compared to many of St. Augustine’s attractions—a green L-shape on the map, not advertised by flashy billboards.
An archaeologist I met at the conference put me in touch with one of the park’s chief defenders and advocates, Thomas Jackson, who agreed to meet me one afternoon at a coffee shop off one of the main highways through the area—in the strip mall zone just beyond city limits, southwest and across the river from the historic district. Thomas had wire-framed glasses and a voice like a cello, low and mellifluous with a warm drawl. He grew up in St. Augustine and remembered visiting the Castillo de San Marcos as a kid on Easter Sundays, and some of the older people would murmur, “We had a fort, too.” He would hear it a handful of times in the Black community in St. Augustine, but he didn’t fully understand its meaning until later.
Over time, rain and wind and decay concealed the evidence, but Fort Mose was the first legally recognized free Black community in what is now the United States. “Freedom seekers came down from the Carolinas,” Thomas explained to me as we sat at a café table, “and made their way here to Spanish Florida.”
Fort Mose was a product of the bravery and perseverance of those who escaped slavery and the opportunism of the Spanish colonial government. “Black history is so intertwined with Spanish history, and the story is not told,” Thomas continued, tapping the table with his hand emphatically, “especially in English-speaking society.”
Spanish slavery was brutal, but, in its legal code, Spain treated slavery as an “unnatural condition” and “established mechanisms by which slaves might transform themselves from bondsmen into free vassals,” writes historian Jane Landers. When Pedro Menéndez and his crew founded St. Augustine in 1565, the sailors-turned-settlers included both white Spaniards and people of African descent, some who were free and some who were enslaved. Then in 1687, when eight Black men, two women, and a child fled from their captors in St. George, Carolina, in a boat and landed in St. Augustine, the men were given paid jobs building the Castillo and working as blacksmiths and the women as domestics. When an English officer arrived to try to apprehend them, the governor of Spanish Florida refused to release them and sought input from the king. Eventually, in 1693, the king of Spain issued an official edict on such refugees from slavery, “giving liberty to all … the men as well as the women.” Conveniently, this would also bring new laborers and soldiers to the Spanish colonies and destabilize Spain’s rivals, Landers notes.
But it was a guarantee in writing only, and colonial leaders were often loath to enforce it. Fort Mose might never have existed without the unwavering determination of one West African man, who would take the Spanish name Francisco Menéndez. Menéndez escaped British slavery and fought against British colonial forces with the Indigenous Yamassee Nation but was forced back into slavery when he came to St. Augustine. He became captain of St. Augustine’s Black militia while still enslaved and had to petition the governor of the colony for freedom for himself and other fugitives, which was granted in 1738.
Menéndez’s efforts resulted in the establishment of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (meaning the “royal grace of St. Teresa of Mose”), a community of initially about forty people. He became its leader.
“They could live free at Mose, as long as the able-bodied men joined the militia, and everybody in the community became Catholic,” Thomas said. “Catholicism was the official religion of the Spanish crown, so that was a requirement. And the militia would help defend the city from the north.” The place evolved into a multicultural society—the refugees had roots in a number of different African cultures such as the Mandinga, Mina, Kongo, and Carabalí, and some intermarried with Florida’s Indigenous communities. The residents grew crops, served as blacksmiths, set up their own retail shops selling provisions, worked on construction projects in St. Augustine, and received rations and supplies from the Spanish colonial government. They built a fort, similar in shape to the Castillo de San Marcos, but made of earth and palm logs, with prickly pears and yucca (also nicknamed “Spanish bayonet”) planted around the edges to deter intruders. Fort Mose was burned down by the British two years later; then a second fort was rebuilt a dozen years after that.
When the Spanish ceded Florida to the British in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the inhabitants of Mose mostly fled to Cuba and the fort was abandoned. But Fort Mose remained in the memories and stories of the community’s descendants, and Black Americans’ connection to this place endured. “We’re almost sure that the inhabitants of Mose who left with the Spanish in 1863 and moved to Cuba—some of them moved back,” Thomas told me.
He felt that the legacy of Mose resonated through the entire arc of Florida’s Black history: “I think there’s a direct connection between the Mose community and Catholicism, and the Lincolnville community,” which was established in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended. The influence of the Catholic Church continued to thread through this storyline. In the early twentieth century, white Catholic nuns were arrested in Lincolnville for running a school for Black students. The neighborhood became a key battleground in the American civil rights movement and was the site of a series of important protests, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that helped galvanize the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Thomas Jackson’s grandfather had come to Lincolnville in the 1920s, and Thomas attended school and church in the neighborhood as a kid. When Thomas asked why his family chose this place, his father had said, “We had been there before,” though Thomas is still trying to find out what that meant.
But it would take centuries for this community to be able to reclaim both this story and the place where it happened. In the nineteenth century, a civil engineer hired by Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler obliviously dredged sand from the area that held the ruins of the forts, partially marring the site: Flagler wanted to fill a tidal creek downtown, so he could build his fancy hotels atop land that had been marsh. In the 1960s, a military historian bought the property suspected to hold Fort Mose’s remains. But it wasn’t systematically excavated until the mid-1980s, by a team led by archaeologist Kathleen Deagan and supported by the archival research of Jane Landers. With aerial photos, they found the imprint of the second fort. Then their excavations uncovered wooden posts, the edges of earthen walls, and a “smaller oval or circular wood and thatch structure … which may have been residential,” the scholars wrote. Thomas Jackson watched what was being uncovered at the site. “I started getting involved with Fort Mose once I realized that there is a story that needs to be told.” After the dig was complete, the state of Florida purchased the land that held the archaeological site. In 1996, Thomas and other locals set up a citizen advocacy group that prevented an adjacent parcel on higher ground from becoming a condo development. Both properties became part of Fort Mose Historic State Park, and the upland now houses an interpretive center.
Jackson volunteered to accompany me to Fort Mose. And three days after our coffee conversation, we strolled the park’s boardwalk to the edge of the salt marsh. “When we first started, none of this was out here,” he explained. “We had to pretty much tell the story in the thickets.”
To make the experience more tangible, Thomas had learned to fire a musket. He had acquired a costume several years ago in the style of an eighteenth-century Spanish colonial militiaman, sewn by a woman in St. Augustine. He practiced the Spanish military drill regularly both at Fort Mose and with a group from the Castillo de San Marcos that performs musket-firings for the public. And over the years, he and a group of locals have held annual reenactments of a 1740 battle against the British at Mose. They have also organized regular events in which they play the parts of Black militiamen, priests, the Spanish governor, and other characters from the era. Members of the public could listen to each character tell a story about the journey from the Carolinas to Fort Mose—sometimes along the same path where Thomas and I were now standing. One of his favorite parts to play had been Mose founder Francisco Menéndez: he admired what a resourceful character Menéndez had been—warrior, sailor, speaker of multiple languages.
That day on the boardwalk, Thomas Jackson was dapper in a white polo shirt and black walking shoes, and equipped with a stylish long black umbrella for whatever the gray sky might unleash. Looking out into the river and marsh, I saw no visible traces of human history, just a lushness of cedars and oaks and palmettos, an anole lizard scurrying along one of the railings, fiddler crabs running through the mud, a heron carving through the sky, and an orchestra of birds chirruping and insects singing. Farther out into the marsh was a rookery with a breeding colony of wood storks. In the distance, the land rose up into a small, low island. A series of blue and white signs, cracked and heavily weathered with some of the letters smudged, described the vista before us. ALL THAT REMAINS OF FORT MOSE IS UNDERGROUND—ON THE ISLAND BEFORE YOU, AND IN THE SURROUNDING SALT MARSH.
Now it was simply home to the plants and animals of the marsh.
JUST 250 YEARS AGO, DURING THE OCCUPATION OF FORT MOSE, THE AREA SURROUNDING THIS DOCK WAS DRY LAND USED FOR FARMS, RANCHES, AND FORTS, announced the sign. GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALSO HAVING AN IMPACT. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO OUR LOCAL COASTLINES IF THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET MELTED, RAISING GLOBAL SEA LEVELS BY AS MUCH AS 20 FEET? The signs were about ten years old, Thomas said.
When the water rises even farther and the site becomes inaccessible even for research, the story of Fort Mose will have to live in the retelling, repeated by people like Thomas Jackson and those who come after him—people who believe that memory matters, that stories help keep us grounded and alive and give us a way to feel like we still belong in this unruly, unpredictable world.
In the fall of 2019, Hurricane Dorian whirled through the Atlantic, making landfall in the Bahamas and at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. This hurricane dampened St. Augustine but didn’t inflict the same level of damage as Irma or Matthew. According to the local newspaper, the St. Augustine Record, it mostly drenched the “commonly flooded areas.” But a few feet of water filled parts of Davis Shores.
By now, the city government had a detailed plan for building infrastructure to manage somewhat higher waters, but it could happen only in a piecemeal manner, as all such bureaucratic efforts must. One part of the plan was to try to keep storm surges out of the city and its underground drainage networks. Twenty miles of stormwater pipes run under St. Augustine, some of them fifty years old or more. During Hurricane Matthew, the seawall at the bayfront had performed decently, but floodwater had risen up through the storm drains. So the tiniest first step was to install new valves in drains that would flow in only one direction, outward, preventing the sea from climbing up through the storm sewers during a flood and then seeping into the streets. At the south edge of the historic core of St. Augustine, the streets ended at Lake Maria Sanchez (a remnant of the creek that Henry Flagler once decided to fill in order to build the city center). The city would install a new pump station there and a bulkhead to keep stormwater from pouring in via the lake. The streets around city hall would also be getting major drainage upgrades.
Another part of St. Augustine’s strategy was to set aside land that was becoming waterlogged much more often. On Anastasia Island, two pieces of flood-prone land went into retirement—one south of Davis Shores and one within that neighborhood. The former would stop an apartment complex from popping up on a site that gets partly drenched more than two dozen times per year—nuisance floods averted. The latter held a historic 1940s house, the old home of a turpentine farmer. It was one of the lowest-lying properties in that part of the neighborhood, and all around it lived residents who were sick of flooding, restless, and impatient with the city. The project became controversial. It was quite a battle, admitted Jessica Beach, a city stormwater engineer who became St. Augustine’s chief resilience officer in early 2021. (A local news blog accused the city of using flood control as “a cover story … to create a park in one commissioner’s neighborhood.”) Still, the city government ultimately acquired the land; helped haul the farmhouse to the Florida Agricultural Museum about twenty miles south; filled and elevated the entire site, turning it into a barrier to control flooding; and added some park benches. They named it Coquina Park. It did not solve flood problems, but Beach said it fixed one of the neighborhood’s weakest (or perhaps wettest) links.
Meanwhile, one of the city commissioners led a task force to change the building codes, with new guidance on proper drainage when elevating a building to move it out of the flood zone—and what not to build, including giant gravel foundation pads, which could change your neighbor’s hydrology and send all the floodwaters next door.
These were all pieces of the much larger scheme to raise the city up: the streets, the seawalls, the barriers, the pump stations that were part of the wastewater treatment system. Piece by piece, project by project, until as much of the city as possible was higher than the flood level of Hurricane Matthew, which was also the estimated flood height of a more minor storm after about a foot and a half of sea level rise.
By and large, other cities were trying the same tactics. Raising, pumping, lifting, moving. St. Augustine had less money to work with than some. The Lake Maria Sanchez project alone would cost $30 million, and the wastewater treatment improvements another $14 million, high price tags for a fifteen-thousand-person city even after help from the state and the federal government. Miami Beach—with six times the population of St. Augustine, glammy and wealthy and dazzling with celebrities—had lifted three miles of its roads to the tune of $41 million and was spending $400 million on pump stations.
None of these efforts will ever be enough to save everything. The giant old hotels, the cemeteries, the archaeological remains, the delicate colonial coquina foundations—these can’t be moved or raised, and only some can withstand a regular soaking.
Even the most ambitious engineering fixes may or may not protect this place through the end of the century. A previous St. Augustine mayor had traveled to the Netherlands in 2018 to speak with Dutch engineers about whether a major engineering project could protect the city—perhaps a seawall around the whole city or tide gates at the inlet. She had met with Senator Marco Rubio to ask for help funding a study with the Army Corps of Engineers to consider possibilities. But she had to resign in 2019 after facing serious health problems. The city public works department has carried the torch and continues to look into this possibility. But such federal funding is highly competitive. In the end, a big engineering project might never be feasible for a little town like St. Augustine. And Floridians may never have an appetite, even a tolerance, for the massive collective public solutions that Europe can pursue.
Meanwhile, the waters kept rising relentlessly, charging into the city again and again. On more than a dozen days every year, you needed boots to get to your car downtown.
In September 2020, a nor’easter arrived at the same time as a king tide, and nearly the whole city flooded for three days, almost as intensely as during a hurricane. Fierce winds blew water over the seawall at the waterfront. Floodwaters rose into much of the city, including the streets of Davis Shores around Coquina Park, into the garages, under the doors, up to the knees of people who lived there.
Later that fall, Jessica Beach began holding small gatherings on behalf of the city government, neighborhood by neighborhood, to talk with people about water.
Some locals were angry. From a man who had come to Davis Shores with his wife in 2019 to start a family: If a hurricane is coming, that’s fine. That’s an inherent risk of living a hundred yards from the Intracoastal and five hundred yards from the ocean. It’s just the normal stuff, you know, a little storm, a little bit of rain, the tide, the wind; you shouldn’t flood out during that. The problem is water comes into places that people live. So we need to find a way to prevent people from being affected by said water. Because people choose to live here. You know? I’m never going to get rid of this home.
Some were worried about equity. From a Lincolnville resident: A throwaway house. That’s how we feel about ours. If this house just drowned and floated away, we’ll be okay. But not everybody can do that.
Some were shocked by the flooding and planned to sell and depart.
But some asked about how to raise their houses. Some asked for help. Some had been there for generations. Some didn’t want to leave. Some worried about their neighbors—elderly civil rights veterans, for instance, some of whom couldn’t easily afford to go elsewhere; families with roots back to the Spanish colonial era. Some developers and home buyers were moving west to higher ground, snatching up properties sometimes at the lower-income edge of the city, potentially pushing other residents out in the process.
What will be saved? Who and what will get to relocate? Who will be left to fend for themselves? Will this be the usual game where money wins and displaces the people who lack it? Or will someone set up better rules, a clearer path out of the rising water, one that can lift most people to safety?
St. Augustine has decisions to make about what to do when all this water rushes in.
They are the same decisions that every community along every coast will ultimately need to make.
In all these battles against the tide, I notice it is hard for people to talk out loud about how much we will inevitably lose, even in the rosiest scenarios.
“I can’t really think about, you know, the 2100 scene—or whatever the projection is that we’re going to be so severely impacted that our city may not be accessible,” Jenny Wolfe admitted when I spoke to her in the spring of 2021.* “But we’re still trying to think within that range of the lifetime of the mortgage—so like fifteen to thirty years—to put it into bite-size pieces.”
To think beyond this span is almost profane. It is almost unbearable. Who can blame anyone for avoiding the thought?
Only a few people would ever say it bluntly out loud to me. One was Lisa Craig, the former Annapolis preservationist who had gone on to launch a consulting company for historic communities that were in danger of drowning, literally and figuratively. (Leslee Keys, who was no longer full-time at Flagler College, had been working with Lisa on this venture—a pair of realists trying to get aging cities to plan for the climate disasters advancing toward them.)
“In the big picture of it all, Annapolis is going to be underwater,” she said, “as will certain portions of St. Augustine, as will certain portions of Nantucket.” She could have gone on to list nearly every coastal city in the country. “There is just no way to stop and slow this unless they decide they’re going to put up these massive seawalls, which nobody is entertaining.”
Every little tide valve, every lifted seawall, every raised house only purchases time, not a permanent fix.
But time is necessary. It is important. If done right, with luck and thoughtfulness, buying time might shield people from the impacts just long enough. It might allow a community to help the vulnerable and the people least able to move on their own. It might let people consider their options, collect themselves and their families, gather their belongings and memories, and move up and inland. Done wrong or thoughtlessly, the process of adaptation could lose cultures, histories, people, homes. And every community will do it alternately right and wrong—some saves, some losses, some failures.
In the long run, the most powerful way to buy respite from the sea is not just with infrastructure and engineering but also by reducing carbon. If the planet runs hot, if nothing is done to slow the pumping of carbon into the air, to reduce the rate of ice melt, to prevent the hurricanes from raging more fiercely and more often, the water will rise faster. The engineering will fail faster. You need to tackle both. Without engineering for sea level rise, St. Augustine will have a shorter life, a dimmer story, marked by greater losses. But a worse fate will await people at the coasts everywhere if the world keeps burning fossil fuels—less than two versus eight feet of sea level rise within a lifetime. The first situation might just be manageable. The other will surely be catastrophic.
St. Augustine had never adopted a formal policy about carbon emissions. The mayor who visited the Netherlands, Nancy Shaver, had insisted on avoiding the term climate change altogether. “We’re kind of a practical city … we don’t really have a program around CO2,” she had told a public radio reporter. “We don’t do those things.” She said this without irony, like so many people who choose the “practicality” of politics over the uncompromising truth of atmospheric chemistry and physics. In early 2021, St. Augustine’s state senator, Travis Hutson, introduced a series of bills making it more difficult for local governments in Florida to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. All three were signed into law in June 2021.
Sometimes the past leads us to more creative and more realistic solutions than the most fanciful, most ingenious, most technologically rich futurism. The past is what brings us home, the story of who we’ve been and where we came from.
But somehow even St. Augustine is failing to grasp the lessons of time—the behavior of water for millennia past, the things our ancestors knew, the evidence scientists have found recorded in the layers of rock. The most powerful lesson of history, when we encounter it raw and unfiltered, is its truthfulness—its realism about the arc of change and the things that drive it.
Written in the millions of clamshells piled and fossilized along the coast is a story about the challenge of making a home beside water.
We could read this story again; we could remember it. It could remind us of what the sea can do, and how we need to renew the world.