Hannah Morris - Counting Down the Tides

 

Now, I am the daughter of a geologist. What this means is that I grew up on bedtime stories of peak oil and environmental catastrophe. [audience laughter] No, we also did some fun stuff when I was a kid, like collecting fossils. But a running theme throughout my childhood was sitting outside with my dad and talking about big oil and pollution and global warming. Yes, I was that kid. Really, I can't remember a time when I didn't know what these things were. 

 

Now, as I got older, I found that I wasn't scared of the dark anymore, but I had this knowledge about climate change, just a little bit of knowledge. And it became this big monster that lived underneath my bed. I had a very particular response to it. I call it worrying out of the corner of your eye. It's this mixture of fear and anxiety that is so strong that you're compelled to worry about this thing, but at the same time, it's so scary that you can barely stand to really look at it. 

 

Now, one night when I was about 16, I was outside on my parents’ porch and I just finished a paper about global warming for science class. I'd wanted to learn more about this topic and just peek underneath the covers. So, I'd read about chlorofluorocarbons and the greenhouse effect. I'm sitting outside, and there's this warm breeze coming down off the mountain, and I can hear frogs and crickets and the creek rushing by. I suddenly have this intense moment of fear that one day there will be no more beautiful nights like this. At this time, I had no idea how to handle that type of emotion. The only thing I could think to do was to ignore it and try and distract myself from it. 

 

Now, at 16, this was not incredibly difficult. A few months later, I was tagging along on my dad's geology class to Wyoming. We got to spend a day out on a dinosaur dig. We were out in the middle of nowhere. We were on the side of this hill and we were picking away at these little pieces of bone and squirting them with the solution to harden them. I just get lost in this. I am loving every single second of it. 

 

Now, as the day is ending, the students are tired and hungry, and they're making their way back to the vans and they're going to leave me. I decide that I'm just going to keep working. It took my dad coming over to me and physically placing his hands on me to drag me away from the site. 

 

Now, a little while later, I was in college and I took anthropology course. And one day, the professor starts talking about archaeology. As he's describing what archaeologists actually do, which is nothing like Indiana Jones, for the record, I have to say that, [audience laughter] I realized that it's pretty much just what I was doing in Wyoming, except instead of dinosaurs, I would get to dig up people. It's very apparent to me that people are much more interesting than dinosaurs. So, in the span of about 5 or 10 minutes, I just decided that I'm going to become an archaeologist and spend the rest of my life playing in the dirt. 

 

Now, one of my first jobs was actually working for the American Museum of Natural History on St. Catherine's Island, Georgia, which is a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. Now, I never knew that you can fall in love with a place the exact same way that you can fall in love with a person. The first time that I arrived on the island, it was late summer, the time of year when the gnats are trying to eat you alive and it's been way too hot for way too long. 

When I stepped off that boat onto the island, it felt like I was stepping into the world as I always hoped it would be. There were these huge live oak trees with these long, graceful limbs that were covered in Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. By that time of year, this plant called dogfennel is blooming. It has this nice, light green, earthy scent. And then, of course, there's the sunsets, and the marsh and this beautiful language that they have to describe the different kinds of tides, a neap tide, ebb tide, my favorite, a sparrow tide. So, before I knew it, in this quick and breathless way, I was just in love with this place. 

 

Now, St. Catherine’s is not just a beautiful island, but it's a place where amazing research happens. There are people who work on everything from sea turtles to birds to geology, and of course, archaeology. The island has been occupied by people for about 4,000 years. One of the most interesting sites is a 16th century Spanish mission. Over the course of the history of this mission, there was a rebellion, and it was destroyed, and then rebuilt and eventually 432 people would be buried in the fort of this church. 

 

Now, I worked on archaeological sites on St. Catherine’s for a couple of years and then I took a break to do my masters. When I came back to the island in 2012, there was something different. Suddenly, it seemed like the words climate change and global warming were coming out of everyone's mouth. Everywhere you went on the island, you could see evidence of these forces, and every year you could see more and more. 

 

One day, I went down to the very southern tip of the island to a place called jungle beach. As I came around the last corner, I had to stop my truck, because I was literally about to drive into the ocean. I got out to watch the waves wash up into what had been the road, and I felt that same sense of fear that I'd felt at 16 out on my parents’ porch, except this time, it was very real. I could see this one spot where I'd camped underneath these two palm trees and that was now underwater and those palm trees were gone. 

 

So, the island as a whole is experiencing these somewhat traumatic effects. This is impacting the archaeological sites as well. When I came back, we had a new protocol in place. We call it archaeological triage. Basically, that means we work on the most vulnerable and important sites before they're destroyed. And in fact, the 16th century Spanish Mission, the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, is exactly this type of site. It's located on the western edge of the island, and there's this tidal creek that runs along the bluff. And every single day, with every tide, this creek inches closer and closer to this church where 432 people are buried. So, a few times a year, we go down to excavate and document this area. 

 

Now we've learned that, because you can't stop the tides, you have to work harder and work longer to try and outrun them. One night last September, I found myself knee deep in water covered in sand holding a floodlight. We were working into the night, because we didn't know what would be left of this site in the morning when the tide went out. Like any research project, we only have so much time and money. We had been counting down not the days we had left on this dig, but the tides. We have three tides left. We have two tides left. This night we had no tides left. This was it. The monster was in the water with me that night, it was coming in with this tide and swimming around my feet and it was telling me exactly what the consequences of climate change would be. 

 

Now, I rode home that night on a cooler in the back of the truck. I was tired, and I was scared and I was very sad. I knew that I had done things in my life that had directly contributed to what was happening to this island and what was happening around the world. I was riding home from sight in the back of a gasoline powered pickup truck. And that irony is not lost on me. 

 

We came through this one area where the dogfennel grows really high on either side of the road. I could see this mist rising up from the ground, and there was moonlight and starlight coming down through the trees. I felt all of those emotions settle within me just looking at the beauty of this place. I realized that I could survive all of that that I could survive this fear. Ignoring it had once felt like the only way that I could be in the world and love the world, but I'm no longer a child and that's no longer possible. 

 

Now, the erosion on the island will continue and it will probably get worse. Today, the erosion is threatening the 16th century Spanish Mission. But in the future, it could threaten the houses that we live in when we go down to work on the island. For me personally, this means that I'll continue to go down every chance I get to try and save this site and to try and really understand this monster that we've created. It means that I'll probably be going back to graduate school, which is something that I never thought I would say talk about monsters. [audience laughter] And it means I'll be getting to know this monster very intimately and probably wrestling with it for the rest of my life. Thank you.