Ten Feet of Water and Everything After

Living with the feeling that everything is changing at once. Again.

Yesterday we drove off the ferry and straight through ten feet of river water covering the road. The ferry was about to stop running. No one seemed surprised. People eased through it like this is how things are now, and for a moment I felt that familiar mix of disbelief and acceptance that keeps showing up in my life lately.

TL;DR:

This piece is about strange weather in France, the instability of past decisions, and the quiet ways place shapes who we become. It’s about uncertainty, memory, and how we try to adapt — even when the world changes faster than we do.

aware

Yesterday we drove off the ferry and straight into ten feet of river water gathering over the road. Nobody panicked. Nobody even paused.

People just eased through like, yep, this is life now. And for whatever reason, that moment yanked up old memories of less certain moments, maybe just because I didn’t know what was going on then either.

This one is a little more philosophical, maybe, pulled from the stack of drafts I’ve been trying to clear (so yes, it runs long — Substack’s voice reader is your friend here) mashed up with some of my recent journal notes. I plan to do a few of these, so if it seems like a bad idea, tell me quickly.

unsteady

The weather swings wildly in this maritime stretch of France. I am still never sure how to dress for a day that goes rain sun cloud rainbow sun cloud rain more rain then vicious rain light rain sun repeat. When there’s a break in the clouds, especially in the shorter days of winter, we bolt outside.

We have a lot of rainbows. There is a sun shower every week.

It will invariable rain, in some form or fashion.

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Temperatures flip between extremes and I honestly don’t know if it was like this even last year, or the one before. Maybe they were and I was not paying attention. Or maybe the shifts are real and the people here feel them too, because no one seems entirely certain of what the weather is supposed to be anymore.

I remember snow on the beach as a child.

People joke about keeping three jackets with them. A raincoat, a fleece, and something for when the sun suddenly breaks through and the temperature jumps twenty degrees. Gardeners in town say their planting schedules no longer match their parents.

Even basic errands feel shaped by the uncertainty. As we drove off the ferry the other day, we drove through ten feet of river water preparing to engulf the road. That used to be rare. It now happens monthly.

interlude

motion sickness Phoebe Bridgers (2018)

Phoebe Bridgers — LA-born and seeming to write a series of emotional weather-reports (with due respect to Tom Waits). She’s often compared to Elliot Smith or perhaps even some of Joni Mitchell’s work, but I prefer her work to Smith’s. This is a live and more simplified version of Motion Sickness done on KEXP, but I really enjoyed the mixing.

unfamiliar

It is part of that broader feeling of having moved somewhere unfamiliar, only to realize it is unfamiliar to the people who grew up here as well. We are all operating off old tapes.

This keeps coming up in my notes.

And since I am clearing out a bunch of drafts right now, I hope you will forgive anything half formed that doesn’t quite land. I like to think the effort shows, even when the execution leans a little sideways.

For me, times of instability rhyme with one another, even when circumstances are different. When the world feels unpredictable, maybe I go back to other moments like it? maybe to remember how I was learning to navigate.

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Instability

The memory is from when we were waiting to buy our first home near New York. That period was exhausting.

All the paperwork and negotiations and the people who seemed oddly indifferent to the outcome, especially with us as first-time buyers. I felt like I needed to step in and direct the entire experience, or to hang back and trust it.

that and every trip to the place was a 3-4 round trip across the city. and we did that a lot, but it felt necessary.

It feels more true for me in New York than anywhere else in the world, but if you don’t make noise, you don’t get noticed.
snoozing, losing, and so on.

Squeaky wheels, grease, etc.

Names, places.

Anonymous people have anonymous problems.

We were in our apartment in Brooklyn then, the same one I walked into after coming back from a trip to France and announced, with great clarity, “Fuck this.”

Within three months we were moving and searching intensely and suddenly we had a place in mind. It all happened very fast.

But nothing was certain until the day we had the keys. That was the dividing line.

In the United States, homeownership shifts the way people look at you. Maybe they think you will stay longer. Maybe they want to borrow your tools. But it creates a different kind of relationship to a place.

Before the contract was signed, we could not imagine how much that house would shape our days. Afterward, everything from errands to friendships to the minor habits of a Tuesday morning were shaped by that one decision and the million small choices tied to it.

Rates of Change

One place shaped our lives. And once that happened, everything else unfolded from there. People we met, experiences we had, who we believed ourselves to be.

Who you are is often defined by where you are. It doesn’t have to be, but it definitely influences it. The challenges and opportunities of a place push or limit you in ways you do not see until much later.

Sometimes, you can’t see the bend in the road until you’ve passed it.

At the same time, we carry a version of ourselves based on the past. It’s the best we can do.

We are never fully aware of the changes happening until they have already set in - sometimes, not even then.

A new identity forms. A new baseline.

This is what I have been trying to understand in this blog.

Not always clearly.

Normal

I have started over many times in my life. I try not to forget the small things that shape a new beginning but of course I do. Still, the way we build trust with strangers and the way strangers become familiar and the way we hope to become known in return stays with me.

We have no real connections here in France. I have said before that I am not exactly a francophile, more France-adjacent. I like it here but it is not simple to be an immigrant even when the challenges are mild and the confusion routine.

And lately I am getting reminders of just how much I need connection to others, more than I ever admitted.

Our sense of normal has shifted. The earth keeps moving, turning. And in that motion we try to ground ourselves, to understand our new limits, to become known even to ourselves.

Don’t we?

Trust, Water

A sailor once told me the ocean takes a lifetime to learn.
I am one hundred percent sure he was quoting Moitessier, though he delivered it like it was his own wisdom. I didn’t call him on it.

He leaned in the way people do on a moving boat, even though we were in a bar in Brooklyn. On land.
He was drunk, but I didn’t care.

“Every sailor has to learn it through their own body,” he said.
“Trust is the hardest part. Knowing where you are even as the water moves beneath you.”

He kept going.
“You make a plan, you adapt, you react, and you hope you bring your small ship to safe harbor. But even then the harbor isn’t yours. It was built by other people.”

I’m never totally sure why I remember such conversations.

One guy I met one night, years ago, and never since.

memory is a funny thing.

other harbors

Living anywhere means living in choices made by other people—now, those who came before. You adapt to their structures and their ways of seeing the world.

Sometimes those ways become your own.

All of this has been circling the same idea for me: the quiet ways conditions shape a life. Weather, housing, bureaucracies, landscapes, the people who happen to be around you. The forces that steer us, whether we recognize them or not.

Which is probably why my mind keeps drifting back to a completely different place and a completely different climate.

Sometimes you only understand after you’ve moved on.

If this reminds you of any of your own weather-induced identity crisis, I’m all ears. Hearing about other people’s adjustments makes me feel less unprepared for my own.

Bonus tracks

Emotional Weather Report Tom Waits (1977)

Tom Waits performed “Emotional Weather Report” on German TV’s Rockpalast in 1977 — “a disconcerted, precarious emotional situation” where, as he puts it, “when I get extremely upset, I start passing out wolf tickets on a regular basis — it’s cold out there.” A smoky, half-sung, half-spoken dispatch from his early barroom-poet era, delivered in the voice of a man living inside his own forecast.