Mackenzie+Heckbert

The Sunken City by: Mackenzie Heckbert

The Sunken City is set in New Orleans many years before Hurricane Katrina. Mcphee describes in great deal the devastating erosion taking place there at that time. His descriptions of the city are unbelievable. He talks about seeing a child jumping on a lawn and seeing another child on the other side of the lawn jump up from the water beneath. Mcphee also describes home owners constantly putting gravel down and building large structures to keep their houses from sinking. I feel like these particular scenes are almost preluding the devastation Katrina brought with it. It is as if the world and all the citizens of New Orleans knew it was sinking and only uses temporary "quick fixes" but could never solve the problem completely. An image that stood out to me was one of the floating coffins. It almost horrified me, as if it was a scene straight out of a horror film. I could not imagine having an area be so flooded that graves are uprooted. It made me wonder why people risk belongings and even sacrifice the sacred tradition of after life practices to live in a place that is under environmental destruction. One line that particularly struck me was the one that McPhee quoted Mark Twain on. Twain said when he first saw New Orleans that it was "the town being built on made ground". This line stood out to me so much because I really believe in the notion that society decided at a certain time period being human was not enough, so then people began to play God. Humanity is fixated on the belief that everything is possible and constantly push nature, until nature eventually reaches its breaking point. Human beings are constantly testing the elements and are never satisfied with working with nature, they have to control it. Nature is uncontrollable however and I really believe that is the theme of The Sunken City. People were inevitably not supposed to manipulate New Orleans in such a way as they have and now today the citizens and the world in turn are paying for the mistakes. Natural disasters seem to occur a lot more frequently in this generation, as unfortunate and devastating as they are; they should be teaching the world a lesson. This articles sort of reminds me of the song "Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell and the whole notion that the world really does "pave paradise and put up a parking lot" we make people pay to see natural things and we destroy habitats to put in useless man made objects. It is also true that the nobody understands the beauty of something until they do not have it anymore, just like that song says.