Wetlands

(My story for the Florida Weekly swamp buggy picture)

The speed at which things change has always amazed me. Not that long ago, I would climb into my car after a hard day of work and crawl along congested roads to get home. If the a/c at the house and in my car worked, I rarely paid attention to the outside temperature. There wasn’t much I could do about it anyway, or so I told myself

Of course, I heard all the clamor about climate change and global warming, but that was all it was to me—just background noise. The global temperature was increasing by two degrees. Big deal! What interested me was which way the stock market was trending and when I could expect my next profit-sharing check.

I owned a beach house built on stilts to protect against extra high tidal surges, but I always felt it was a marketing tool to sell the property. Your neighbors may suffer water damage during a hurricane, but you’ll be high and dry, was the sales pitch. True, I’ve had a few hurricanes blow through since I moved in, but the water never reached the sand dunes behind the house.

Change can be as dramatic as a bolt of lightning or as surreptitious as a spider inhabiting a dark corner of the kitchen. If you were sailing around Greenland or Iceland when the massive glaciers increased their relentless march into the sea, you would consider the change extremely dramatic. Less dramatic, but equally devastating, is the slowly diminishing water supply in some areas of the globe. Unfortunately, not enough people are affected by these events to force the world to take notice. When global news reports these incidents, most of humanity just shakes its collective head and thinks, too bad for those folks, but we’re ok.

If you drop an ice cube into a bowl of water, it creates ripples. As the ice melts, water levels rise slightly. Now imagine the size of the ripples created as thousands of tons of ice plunge into the ocean. All that ice eventually melts, and the oceans overflow onto the land.

When the first of multiple tsunami-size ripples hit our community, I was at work. My ATV and Swamp Buggy franchise did so well I was considering expanding. Even though I was ten miles from the beach, the roar of the waves that pummeled the shoreline was deafening. My stilt house never stood a chance. Warning sirens blared and people scattered in all directions, attempting to escape the invading water. I rushed to my largest swamp buggy, topped it off with fuel, and waited.

The water never receded. Each wave forced its predecessor further inland. Once the water reached my building, I knew it was time to head for higher ground. Problem was, there is no high ground in Florida. I drove through flooded neighborhoods and what used to be grassy fields; it now resembled the Everglades. As I continued to slog north, I learned that South Florida and most of the Gulf Coast states were already under water. Listening to satellite radio, I discovered Texas had reverted to the seabed it originally was 280 million years ago.

I replenished my depleted supplies from abandoned, partially submerged homes, stores, and gasoline distribution yards. Continuing my trudge toward higher ground, the rising water not far behind, I realized how all this devastation would have been avoided if we had simply by listening to the scientists. Resisting change must be in our DNA. I recalled a conversation I’d had with a man about electric cars. His take on switching from gas to electric was, “Gas engines haven’t failed us yet, so why change?” My response was, “Neither had the candle or the horse and buggy, but we moved on.”

It took me seven days to reach the Appalachian foothills. They now formed the Georgia coastline. Maybe future humankind will learn from our mistakes, but first we all need to survive the impending ice age that inevitably follows a global warming event.