Story by Spencer George
Photographs by John Gaulden & Jared Bramblett
The city is already underwater on the day I drive back into Charleston, home for the summer. Rain pours down in unending sheets, my car sliding through nearly 2 feet of it as I pull off Interstate 26 onto Rutledge Avenue, the water sloshing in waves up the sides of my tires. It is June, and humid, the sky dark with storm. Roads turn to rivers and curve into one another, seeping into front yards, doorsteps. Every so often, a car stands abandoned, lights blinking in hazard, orange beams flashing into the evening.
Soon, they say, it will all be like this. Soon the city will fall to the water, the tides rising up and up until they meet the edge of the wall that has held them out for so long, and then, slowly, they will spill over. The creeks and marshes will push up through the sand that buried them so long ago and flood the houses from inside. All the sparkling chandeliers will float around, carried on the whims of the current. The glass will burst out of the windows and wash up on distant shores, beautiful and weathered by the sea. The trees will sink underwater, great giants covered in algae. The Weather Channel gives us 80 years; others aren’t so sure we have that long. Still more refuse to even say the words “climate change.”
But the water. The water is rising. One day, only the cannons will remain, their great stone facades leaving a marker so that, if someone were to swim across the city someday, they would know of the place that once was.
Photos by Jared Bramblett
On the oldest maps of the city, the peninsula is only half of what it is today. In the spring of 1670, 150 English colonists, indentured servants, and enslaved people established a small settlement in Charleston Harbor they called Albemarle Point. Later they would rename it Charles Town, after their King, Charles II, and 10 years later that settlement would move to what is known today as the Charleston peninsula, surrounded by the Cooper and Ashley rivers on either side. On a map of the city from the early 1900s, the rivers turn the harbor into a series of jagged lines like teeth. Over time, the maps begin to fill the peninsula in: sand covering the gaps where marsh once stood. Over time, houses are built and the peninsula expands.
More time will pass, years and years of it. As the years fade into one another, the land begins to fade into water, all the creeks and all the marshes and all the rivers claiming back what was once theirs.
Photo by Jared Bramblett
On any given post-thunderstorm day in the city — and storms happen nearly every afternoon throughout the summer — much of it is already underwater. The water is so normalized here that we often think nothing of it; when it rains, it floods, and when it floods, we take to the streets in kayaks and on paddleboards, in rain boots and swim trunks. Like most things in Charleston, festivities are thrown at the first sign of a canceled afternoon. It is like a snow day; venturing into floodwater is practically a rite of passage. In this light, it is easy to forget the imminent threat of the rising water. Nor do we take it seriously on a cultural scale. Most people, when it comes to the mainstream climate conversation, picture Miami or New York falling first to the water. But the South actually faces the greatest threat; a ProPublica study examining the counties most affected by climate change in the next 20 years ranks Charleston County No. 6, and all of the counties ranked in the top 10 are in the American South.
The South itself faces another unique challenge when it comes to climate change, which is that this is an area where so many people still refuse to believe it exists. In turn, there has been a separation of language, with terms like “sea level rise” used as a euphemism for climate change.
Flooding can be seen. Flooding can be understood. No one here can deny that the water is rising, but there are plenty still who will deny the cause. We do not have that kind of time. As storm drainage engineer and photographer Jared Bramblett says, “It’s not real until it’s real, and unfortunately, once it’s real it’s usually too late.”
Bramblett began taking photos documenting sea level rise in Charleston in 2015, just before 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, when activists say the city began to publicly use the phrase climate change. In his project Mean High Water, Bramblett intersperses his photographs — the ocean flooding over The Battery wall, horse carriages being pulled through near-lakes, solemn churches with water up to their doors — with various statistics about sea level rise: approximately 45% of all coastal floods observed in Charleston Harbor from 1953 through 2020 have occurred since 2010. An average of 18.8 coastal floods occurred per year in the 1990s. In the 2010s, the annual average was 42.4 coastal floods, an increase of over 200%.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once wrote that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than serious social change.” It is almost impossible to imagine a reversal of action that could keep the water out; we are past that point. In this moment of crisis, Charleston’s artists have taken on a new role as documentarians, chronicling the changing of the city year by year as the ocean continues to infringe. Like Bramblett, local photographer John Gaulden found himself heading out into the streets when the water rose. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “The water was up to my doorstep. I just felt like I had to document what was happening.”
The Water is Rising - photos & project by John Gaulden
In “The Water is Rising,” Gaulden paints a grim picture of Charleston’s new reality: Photos from the project show streets turned into rivers, cars with water up to the headlights, flooded front porches, rusted and teetering homes, power lines falling into the center of the image. The photos were later exhibited at the live recording of musician, hip-hop artist, and One Water Artist-in-Residence Benny Starr’s “A Water Album,” which focuses on the complexity of water and the spontaneity, beauty, and joy of Black culture. Of choosing to focus the album on water, Starr says, “Water is a centralizing force to speak about injustice, environmental racism, power. … Water is the gateway.”
In “The Water Keeps Rising,” Starr’s words drop like rain as piano and drums intensify:
This ain’t nothing new to me
This another thing
When your life raft is in the path of a hurricane …
What you gon’ do when the Water keeps rising?
Tell me what you gon’ do when the Water Keeps Rising
What you gonna do when the Water starts rising
How you gonna colonize it?
It is easy to feel hopeless in the face of all this. Instead of action, there are debates. Instead of change, there are proposals. Activists and nonprofits tend to face resistance more than support from the city, whose advocacy can often come across as performative and hollow. While the city has helped in some ways, pouring money into projects such as the Low Battery Seawall Repair project, which is raising the wall surrounding the city to accommodate sea level rise and make ADA-compliant sidewalks, in other ways Charleston has failed its residents, especially those in low-income and non-tourist neighborhoods. With the raised wall, the oldest, most expensive homes will be protected first; meanwhile, many communities are being left to fend for themselves, if not facing active resistance from the city. Take grassroots community group Friends of Gadsden Creek, which has been working for years to oppose the destruction of a tidal creek in the Gadsden Green neighborhood. The city recently passed legislation to fill and destroy Gadsden Creek for a luxury apartment complex, despite the knowledge that tidal creeks are essential in floodwater management, allowing space for the water to fill and recede.
All the debate, all the conflict, and all the proposals distract from the real issue at hand: Whether we agree on it or not, sea level rise is a serious and imminent issue for the city. As part of the 2017 “Awakening V: King Tide” exhibit organized by nonprofit Enough Pie, artist Mary Edna Fraser created a 100-foot silk batik of a turquoise coastline spreading over golden-yellow islands, turning to deep green over all the areas that will be lost. The piece, “Charleston Airborne Flooded,” covered the side of Joseph Floyd Manor, an apartment building visible from the main highway into the peninsula. Every day as they descended into the city, Charleston commuters were faced with the words of Voltaire printed on the panel: “We argue. Nature acts.”
Photo by John Gaulden
The burden of dealing with climate change is most often placed on the ones who can’t ignore it. Flooding in Charleston has displaced entire communities and neighborhoods; it has further exacerbated racial and economic gaps that were already wide within the peninsula. Eventually, the flooding will get so bad that it is likely that insurance companies will stop covering homes in the area, leaving the market for cash-only buyers and renters. The city — like all local governments — has a responsibility to protect its residents. It is currently failing, leaving out vital statistics about how great the issue is and transferring the risk onto individuals instead. Despite all this, Charleston has been named the No. 1 city in America for eight straight years, and the top city in the world in 2016 by Travel + Leisure, the first time a U.S. city has ever won the award.
How do we reconcile these contradictions? In a city with one of the most tumultuous histories of any in this country, how do we decide what is worth saving? There are some who believe that the sinking of Charleston, its fall to flooding and the hurricanes that grow in strength each year, is karmic retribution for all the pain that has occurred on its soil and waterways. At times, it’s difficult for me to disagree.
When I moved away from Charleston, I planned to never look back; it had been a place that had made me sad, and hollow, and angry, and I did not like the person I was there. I did not see anything left to fight for. Alone in my bedroom in New York City, I would remember the Confederate flags hanging off of four-wheelers parked along The Battery, the protestors that came out during Pride month every year. I imagined them underwater, and I admit at times it felt good. At other times, I found myself imagining the city wistfully, aching for the glint of sun on waves, the sound of cicadas outside my bedroom window. The cobblestones and the church bells, how skyscrapers aren’t allowed to build any higher than the old steeples. I am, like every good documentarian, afraid of what will be lost if we let this place sink, and our stories and our hopes and our fears with it.
Photo by Jared Bramblett
“The work has become spiritual,” Enough Pie Interim Executive Director Thetyka Robinson says. “It is about achieving unity with the water, not fear. The water is a guide telling us something is not right.”
It is true; nature is speaking to us. Our job now is to learn how to listen. Enough Pie believes — and I agree — that art is the thing that can provide the language for these conversations, the toolkit to allow us to find overlap with one another, despite an array of lived experiences. Because that is what we have to do now: find commonality not only with one another, but with the water as well. Because the water is not going away; it is as much a part of this landscape as the swamp moss hanging from oak tree branches, the rainbow-painted houses, the marsh grasses, and the church bells. We have to reach a common high ground with the water, and start listening to what it is trying to say. That is the only way we live with this.
Photo by Jared Bramblett
Soon, I know, I will return to the city again, driving over the waterways slinking along the coast, the sprawling farmland and the forests cloaked in pine trees. There are so many trees. Sometimes, when the wind rustles through them right, I imagine it to be the ghosts of past and future, their speech warbled with water. Save us, I think I hear them saying late at night under the eye of the rising moon. Don’t let us die here. Don’t let us drown.
“Art is one of the natural predators of power,” says Benny Starr to me when asked about the artist's role in responding to climate change. "The goal of art is disruption. It is disruption that inspires joy, freedom, and community. You might be able to snuff out one voice, but you can’t snuff out the collective.”
Like the water, that collective is rising, too. Across the tides, they call back to the ghosts, their voices spilling into the Charleston streets in song and art, protest and prayer.
This story is part of our "Hell and High Water" series, focusing on creative responses to climate change in the South.
Spencer George is a writer and teaching artist based in North Carolina. Her work focuses on the intersection of storytelling, folklore, and empathy in the rural South, and her writing has been featured in The Adroit Journal, Medium, and Girlology, among others. George is the creator and writer of GOOD FOLK, a weekly newsletter about people and stories, and currently teaches creative writing in rural North Carolina schools as a senior fellow with ArtistYear. George was the 2019 recipient of the Peter S. Prescott Prize for Prose Writing, and is working on a reimagined Southern Gothic novel about young, queer love and the radical power of hope.
