Page 60 of Rhodes

No, I have work today. I just wanted to tell you. We can connect later.

Call me if you need me, no matter what time. I will put my phone on my pillow and will come anywhere you need me at any time.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. I'm okay, I promise.

See you tonight at the meeting if I don't talk to you before. xx

That's it. She doesn't ask what the news was, and she doesn't make me perform being fine to get her off the phone. That is the entire difference between that room and my whole family, and it takes about eleven seconds.

I set the phone down and get to work.

I drag the storage bin out from under the bed, the one that followed me from Charleston to New Orleans. It's full of the stuff nobody thought was worth keeping but me. All of my field notebooks with the covers soft from salt air are stacked on one side. Rubber-banded maps take up the length on the other.

I don't go looking for a miracle. I start with what I already know.

Oak Moss. I did erosion surveys there this fall for an intro to environmental preservation, staking the bank and measuring back to the treeline. I'd been planning to do that once a year to see the change over a five- and ten-year span. If it's developed, that changes the trajectory and the need to track it, as far as I'm concerned.

I spread them out on the bed, then the floor when the bed runs out. Shoreline notes, tide marks, a hand-drawn map of the point with little arrows showing where the bank was pulling back.

The land is eroding. I've known that since I was a kid. I know it better now.

And here's the thing that stops me cold, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a decade of my own handwriting around me. Eroding is not the same as dying.

My family reads those numbers as loss. Twenty-five hundred feet of shoreline slips into the ocean, worth more as houses than as bank that won't hold. That's the premise my dad's reasoning ran on.

But I do this every Friday. I go out into Barataria, I lay reef line, replace mud, plant marsh grass, and build sills. In the short time I've been doing this, I've seen with my own eyes a shoreline that was giving up ground start holding it again.

Erosion isn't a death sentence. It’s a restoration problem. Wave energy comes in, and the bank has nothing to break it, so it takes the sediment out. Slow the water down, and the sediment stays. An oyster-reef breakwater off the point could cut that wave energy before it ever reaches the bank.

I'm not saying it works. I don't have the right to say that yet. But I damn sure know selling it isn't the answer.

I grab the legal pad off the desk and a pen and start writing.

Current erosion rate, feet per year? Need a real survey, not memory.

Fetch and wave exposure at the point. Which direction is the energy coming from?

Substrate. Will it hold reef or is it too soft?

Existing surveys, what already exists on record for that tract?

Permitting for a living shoreline. State, Corps, both?

Who do I know who's done this at scale?

My hand keeps moving. The grief is still here, sitting behind my ribs, but it has somewhere to go now.

The page fills. And for the first time since Miss Ada's email landed last night, I'm not staring at what they decided to destroy. I'm staring at what might make them wrong.

The restoration side fills three pages before I make myself stop. Because none of it matters if the answer to can they still bulldoze it is yes.

So I open a new tab and type the thing I've never had a reason to look up before. I type into the search bar: how to protect private land from development.

The first real word that comes back is one I've heard in class and never chased down. Conservation easement.

I read three articles and start to see the shape of it. The owner keeps the land, keeps the title, can still sell it or hand it down. But a promise rides along with the deed forever, held by a land trust and enforced fifty years from now when everybody who signed it is dead: no subdividing, no clearing for houses. The land stays private. It just stops being buildable.

I write it down. Then I write the part that makes my stomach drop. The owner has to agree.