We're making weathermen cry now
Grappling with my ambiguous loss over Florida's Gulf Coast and, well, everything.
This morning, as I sat at my desk working, I watched a webcam of the beach at Longboat Key, Florida. I needed to see the storm approach in real-time, to help me accept the inevitable: Once again, climate change is going to brutally alter a place I love, and there is basically nothing I can do about it. This storm intensified so rapidly even a veteran Miami meteorologist began to tear up on live TV, a powerful moment that should have us all terrified for what we will face not just in the coming days, but the coming decades.
Back in July, I took my tween daughter on a mommy-daughter trip to a beach just north of Longboat. A beach lover like me, she had been begging to visit Florida’s “sugar sand” for years. During the day, we rode the Sun Coast trolley to several different beaches — all of them stunning. In the evening, after sipping alcohol-free pina coladas, we’d walk from our Holiday Inn to Indian Rocks Beach to stand (and swim) as the sun sunk below the horizon, taking dozens of photos, each one more pretty than the last.
It is one of many trips I’ve taken to the Florida Gulf Coast in the past decade. I first visited in 2009, after my mother’s first suicide attempt on Valentine’s Day, which broke my heart in ways I’m still processing. After, my husband knew I needed to get out of town and he knew I’d fall in love with the world-famous seashells, and he was right: Walking the endless pristine miles of Little Gasparilla Island (no cars allowed!) helped me make sense of what I now realize was ambiguous loss. A decade or so after that first visit, I started writing my memoir in 2021. Literally the first few words of the book started there, as I sat on the beach, scribbling in my notebook as a school of mullet jumped in front of me and pelicans flew in a squadron overhead. It’s hard to overstate how special it all is to me.
We can fix this but we won’t
As we all know, weather is not the same anymore — it’s wilder, more extreme, more intense. We all saw this coming, but few of us are in any position to make real change happen, beyond voting. We’re told to do things like turn off our lights or take shorter showers, when the only thing that will move the needle is when entire countries or economic markets enact large-scale carbon trading programs (cap and trade). When Obama was president, Republicans killed carbon trading in the US by rebranding it a “carbon tax.” Never mind that it was the exact same environmental economic ploy that rid the planet of acid rain. Remember acid rain? No? That’s because we fixed it. And we can do it again with carbon emissions. But it’s not feeling likely.
As this latest storm chews and spits out Florida, my ambiguous loss has resurfaced in the form of climate anxiety. I’m worried about people, of course, but I’m also worried about the helpless flora and fauna, from the mangroves to the sea grapes to the gopher tortoises to the manatees. They will all be forced to survive among an onslaught of debris and pollution that along with the storm surge, will inundate their burrows and lagoons.
Ideally, the damage is minimal. Florida rebuilds (smartly). Florida also accepts climate change and starts teaching it (again) to kids. Gopher tortoises flourish, manatees rebound. But who am I kidding? It’s not just Florida and Floridians I feel that angst for, but everywhere and everyone.
Thank you, Joy, for your poignant words. Unfortunately, Florida will need a change in leadership to acknowledge and climate change and allow the term back into its textbooks. I fear for my children and grandchildren.
The helplessness is so real. My husband has gone to LBK every year since he was a kid. We are so worried about this place and all its people. Thank you for writing about this.