“I didn’t know when I took this video Friday night, that these beloved spaces would be gone when we woke up,” wrote author and environmental communicator Alice Irene Whittaker, describing the impact when the remnants of Hurricane Debby brought severe flooding to her own home and neighbourhood in Chelsea, Quebec.
“Grieving is the word! It’s hard to explain how the specific space was my/our sanctuary,” Whittaker told The Energy Mix in an email this week. “The cedar tree was my favourite tree in the world and was lost—not just fallen down, truly gone down the river.”
“Where there was road, there’s now water,” she recounted earlier this month, in a LinkedIn post illustrated with video of the flood waters. “Where there was a beloved permaculture garden, there’s water. Where there was a forested area with a treasured cedar tree with two moss-covered trunks, there’s water. Where there was metres of soil, roots, and solid ground, there’s water.
“Flooding formed a waterfall, breaking the only road in two. I watched the guardrail bend and fall into the rushing water, as large chunks of land split apart and started to fold into the creek. It sounded like thunder as large boulders and the culvert were carried away.
“The next morning, we checked on the permaculture garden we’ve cultivated over years, and the small cedar grove by the creek—and it was gone. All gone. A couple of hundred metres of land were torn away and carried off with the flood. No sign of the tall, mossy trunks that held us through COVID and became a solace. Huge, gnarled roots stuck out of the earth, which stopped abruptly where it had been torn away. Soil and logs and tomatoes and plastic garbage lay across the meadow, with signs that everything was under water while we slept.
“And we’re the lucky ones: we’re safe, we have a home.
“Loss upon loss for all of us. As we experience these losses—the fires and floods—all we can do is hold each other tight and help neighbours. We can sit with our feelings of deep sadness and fear (and demand action on climate and nature, and work towards different futures).
“All of this reminded me why many of us are working on climate and nature, and why I care so much about telling the human stories of living through breakdown. This is our home, and we can’t get it back when it’s gone.”
Alice Irene Whittaker’s first book, Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth, will be published September 3.
