From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:
According to his precisely worded blog, Harrison Gelertner was born and raised in San Francisco. He’d spent all his working life in that city; he had been a lawyer, specializing in civil rights cases. He had traveled the world-but oddly, through his wife’s taste for the exotic, mostly abroad, never much in his own country.
Age sixty-five Gelertner retired. And age sixty-eight he found himself left alone when his wife succumbed to cancer; it was quick, shocking. And age sixty-nine he observed that large swathes of America, the country he had never seen, were fast disappearing under floodwater.
He resolved to put right the gap in his experience, while he had the health and resources to do it-and while it was still possible. He decided to begin at the top: at Washington, DC.
Thus in February 2018 he caught an American Airlines flight into Washington National. As it happened this turned out to be one of the last civilian flights ever to reach that airport.
On the face of it Washington wasn’t impressive. It struck Gelertner as just a small American city, and a shabby one at that, dirty and grimy and apparently unbearably hot in the summer, though the weather was pleasant enough on a crisp February day. The flooding was already apparent, the water bubbling out of the drains and sloshing over the sidewalks; it was difficult to walk. Sirens wailed, and traffic backed up everywhere. There was a sense of urgency, of things fraying, he recorded in his blog, everything grubby and falling apart.
But then he turned a corner and came on the White House, just like that, the planet’s center of power practically in the middle of downtown. According to the news on the Angel radio his grandson had shown him how to use, the President and her administration had long fled to their refuge in Denver. But the protesters were still here, a ragged band of them opposite the gates, their banners complaining about taxes, foreign wars and inequities in flood relief. And there were headquarters of other tremendously important institutions only blocks away, like the FBI and NASA and the World Bank. It was a city that was somehow too small for its significance.
He walked to the grassy expanse of the Mall, where the Washington Monument stood tall and slim. Gelertner oriented himself; there was the Capitol building to the east, the Lincoln Memorial sitting grandly to the west. The grass was soggy, giving under his leather shoes. Though he could explore the Lincoln Memorial as much as he pleased, the Capitol building was closed to visitors. And he was disappointed to find that the various Smithsonian museums were closed too, although there was much activity around them as staff bundled up precious exhibits for moving.
He was vague about the progress of the flooding. That evening the TV news showed alarming images and maps of the threat to DC; the rising ocean had pushed into Chesapeake Bay, and was backing up the Potomac to the city. He wouldn’t have thought that DC would be under such immediate threat, but there you go, he recorded in his blog.
He was woken in the night by a fire alarm. The hotel had to be evacuated.
Gelertner had his airline ticket, but quickly learned the airport was closed. Unsure what to do, he stayed put. By mid-morning he found himself in a crowd of families, mostly black, mostly poor, waiting for a requisitioned school bus to take them to higher ground. Stern-looking Homeland Security guards made sure they didn’t try to get away from their allocated group, or compromise the convoys that were already underway, taking out the remaining federal government employees, major corporate players and the rich.
Gelertner was out of the city by noon.
That was pretty much all he saw of Washington, a city he happened to visit in the midst of its abandonment. He saw nothing significant of the flood itself. It struck him as strange that the very first visit he made to the capital, at the end of his own long life, might turn out to be one of the last made by any tourist, ever.
Gelertner was particularly disappointed not to have got to see Apollo XI in the National Air and Space Museum. He never learned if the heavy capsule had been evacuated successfully.