Sunken+AP

Andréa Peters " The Sunken City ." //The New Yorker// 81:27 (12 September 2005), 38-39.

In Sunken city, John McPhee writes about New Orleans’ difficulties in regards to the rapid increase of the surrounding river’s water levels, and of its subsequent pulverization of the town’s land. McPhee addresses ground erosion, and explains with the use of great descriptions how nowhere in New Orleans the land or the levees are actually above water-level. He writes about how all the carports, sidewalks, and lawns are sinking, as the water engulfs more and more every year of their “man-made” grounds. He also writes about how New Orleans is not a land for wells, cellars, or graves, because when the intramural “flash floods” hit the city, coffins escape their crypts and end up somewhere in the streets.

McPhee describes Corps engineers’ attempts at fixing up the levees and sucking entire marshes dry, as an incessant process since “You put five feet on and three feet sink.” The struggle to keep a piece of land flat and even is characterized by McPhee’s quoting of a District engineer, who says “It’s almost an annual spring ritual to get a load of dirt and fill in the low spots on your lawn”, because if a child jumps at one end of the land, the terrain will tremble another child’s feet who is at the opposite end.

Lastly, McPhee concludes the piece with a quote by Oliver Houck saying “We’ve reversed Mother Nature,” and he then writes “Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north.”

As I read, there is more than one thing that has jogged my memory or made me think “oh right, I’ve seen this before”, and I think that the beginning of the piece was a perfect example of McPhee’s incredible ability at pulling readers in and making them want to read further; or at least pretend to care for another paragraph or two. More specifically, he begins the piece with a much more direct social commentary than usually, and the emotional appeal to the readers is one I’ve encountered in his work before--mostly in Virgin Forest, which was also about land.

By calling out New Orleans on its long practice of pretty much making the underprivileged people live in the lower elevations (almost as a “default setting”) and the rich on the highest grounds, he sparks interest in the reader, and it immediately made me think “what?!?”, and thus I read on. Just like when he begins a piece with an anecdote, he directs our attention at a sub-unit of the bigger picture and renders us quiet, and by the time we’ve realized he’s switched gears, we're already a page or two in…Very efficient, and tremendously "McPhee-like."

Moreover, a few times throughout my reading I found myself thinking “oh, yeah, I agree -- this is ridiculous!” or smirking, and when I read the piece the second time around, I picked up that McPhee was once again sneaking humour and sarcasm in his work; and in a few cases, he did so at New Orleans people’s expense. Just like in Whiff or in Firewood, he mocks how clueless or unreasonable environmentally-speaking people can be; and in doing so, he invites us to a) have a laugh because we recognize and join in on agreeing with what he’s saying, and b) invites us to re-evaluate where _we_ stand on the issue at hand.

Though he lets the people whom he quotes make the clearest statements on how despicable all this messing around with nature is, McPhee doesn’t take an actual stance on this particular situation until the very last paragraph. This is not untypical of McPhee, but I do wonder if this was really more efficient than outright declaring how he felt..I suppose “experienced” McPhee readers probably know that he doesn’t write a piece unless he feels very strongly about it or has great interest in it, so it’s not necessarily needed to make his position clear, since just a bit of common sense highlights the places in the text where he drops hints about what he really thinks.

Perhaps implied and sarcastically disguised commentary on an environmental issue like this one that is more efficient in communicating his disapproval, since what a reader’s mind interprets and imagine is in most cases much more horrid or powerful than any word combination someone could write. However, slightly suggestive writing is probably met with a lot less resistance on the reader’s part too, because there’s not much of a feeling that we’re being forced to join him on believing the same thing he does…Powerful piece it was, I recommend it.