Early one clear autumn morning I go down to a dock just off a narrow river on the mid-coast of Maine. Two slim wooden boats are tied here—rowing dories shaped like slips of moon, each awaiting a handful of rowers and a coxswain. There’s a thick cover of dew. It’s cool enough for sweatshirts but not too cold to row. The rowers chat as we take our positions, but this is not a social hour. We ready our twelve-foot oars and await the coxswain’s orders, eager to slide onto the calm, winding river.
I’m new to this rowing group, and somewhat new to this village. Before this year I’d never really rowed. The waters of my former long-time home, the gale-plagued North Carolina Outer Banks, would have been too choppy and dangerous for such narrow, tipsy crafts.
I am a climate migrant, among the first in the U.S. Jeff and I left the Outer Banks in 2018 after three decades of watching sea level rise and tropical storms turn the thin, once-scantly settled barrier islands into a heavy-equipment operators’ playground. It’s hard enough to hold a sandy reef together in normal times, given that the ocean constantly pushes it west. Now sand-scrapers and backhoes often work around the clock to try to block the ocean’s advance—and to save the lavish houses that line the once-open shores.
It’s all futile, of course, and what’s coming is going to make it even more so. Things are getting worse by the year on the world’s sea coasts. In 2016, when the outermost edge of Hurricane Matthew knocked down hundreds of trees on Roanoke Island, our home, we began looking seriously for a safer place to live. The center of that storm, and the most powerful winds, had stayed 100 miles to the south of us.
Many people will face a similarly wrenching decision as climate change continues to take hold. Wildfires, droughts, astounding heat waves, strengthened tornados and hurricanes: There are plenty of reasons to consider leaving the most severely affected regions. Nor are the parts of the country considered “safe” without their own climate problems, including here. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming water bodies in the world. Invasive, north-moving insects like the hemlock wooly adelgid and the emerald ash borer threaten entire forests.
Americans are a famously unsettled people. We pushed relentlessly across a continent and even now move long distances for jobs, for family, for sunnier climes. But there is a qualitative difference between electing to try life in a different locale and abandoning your beloved home to find one in a safer place. A climate move can upend perfectly comfortable lives—and it implies that there is no going back.
For me our move from the Outer Banks carried the heartbreak of leaving a landscape I deeply loved. Waking each morning there, listening to the salty breezes sing through the tops of the loblolly pines in our yard, I felt more complete than I had anywhere on Earth. Walking the miles-long beaches opened me and renewed me. I didn’t think anything would ever drive me away.
The chore of emptying our Outer Banks home of three decades, where we had assumed we’d grow old—where we had become the people we are—was painful beyond words. We walked away from the friends who knew us best, aware that our easy, day-to-day relationships would never be the same. Once north we faced the task of learning a different regional culture. On meeting you Southerners will ask all manner of questions about your life. New Englanders are kind but more quiet and cautious. Establishing friendships here takes longer. In our case the process was made even more difficult by the pandemic. Still, we were exceedingly lucky. We landed in a place that suits us well.
That’s not to say our lives are the same. Even after nearly six years I still don’t have the easy I-belong-here confidence that I enjoyed on the Outer Banks. There I knew what each wind shift meant, how it would shape the ocean waves and the very feel of the day. I knew when to step in to help a friend with an ailing relative and when such an offer would seem intrusive. That kind of deep local knowledge isn’t something I can quickly rebuild.
The crescendo of our move was followed not by climate bedlam on the Outer Banks, but by a continuation of normal life. Although a major hurricane swept over Ocracoke Island in 2019, although erosion and sunny day flooding frequently cause problems now, nothing much else has changed. A part of my heart catches when I think of the years I could have enjoyed there. Even so, I wouldn’t change our decision to come north.
How soon should people in danger zones leave, if they choose to? At some point the scales will tip, and there will be clear winners and losers in the relocation lottery. Housing prices will plummet or soar; storms or fires or floods will destroy communities. While I feel safer in Maine, this world is not particularly safe, anywhere. Yet I feel a peace and sense of solidness here that wasn’t possible anymore on the Outer Banks. During hurricane season I keep loose track of the storms that are spinning along the Atlantic seaboard. But instead of a rising pulse, I feel only a deep sadness when one threatens the islands I still love.
My new home isn’t a climate paradise. Not at all. At times the weather here resembles an ill-tempered, dangerous animal. Last year a microburst tossed the roof from a neighbor’s barn into our field. Winters are growing increasingly wretched as the reliable New England cold gives way to cycles of intense freezing, followed by immediate thaws. Mud season in spring is interminably bleak.
But for now, as autumn slides toward winter, all is well. And so I row, reveling in the clear, slanted light and the moist coolness. The smooth rhythm of the oars is like the graceful passing of days when I no longer worry about which tropical storm will next put our home in its sights. We row, passing shadowy hemlocks that dip their branches toward the water and marshes filled with wild rice—a vibrant green last month but now brown and limp. We pull back in unison and release our oars with a single sharp click. Rounding a curve, we gasp as a sturgeon leaps from the water, flexing its sleek, silvery body (while we still manage to keep stroke). As we pull and push and glide, I celebrate my new home on high, rocky ground, that—however changed by climate—will still be intact a century hence.