I used to have dreams of floating away down the Suwannee River, the water blackened opaque by oak and cypress tannins. It always went the same way. I'd be lying on the floating dock at my grandparents’ cabin. The old fraying rope that latched the dock to the banks would break away, the water gentle but strong, and off I set sail on a floating 5 x 5 of creaking boards and styrofoam coated thick with algae sludge. Sturgeons jumped, the sky was sunset hour. 

I was in the process of becoming lost. This was not a good dream. But it was not a nightmare. The floating away was somehow calm; I didn't struggle for mastery; I just submitted to my untethering from the familiar.

I refreshed the page over and over all day while trying to be useful at work. From California, I watched as Hurricane Milton headed towards the Tampa Bay of Florida, where I was raised, where my family still lives. All day, I checked to see: did the storm track, tend, shift, the path arcing north or south? If they get the north side of the eye, they'll get winds; if they get the south, they'll get the waters. 

Social media was abuzz about the meteorologist who cried live on air yesterday because hurricane Milton dropped pressure in wholly new ways, expanding from a category 1 to a category 5 storm overnight. I read that it is the third fastest 24-hour hurricane intensification in the Atlantic Basin since measurement started in 1960. The other two were also in my lifetime, in the 2000s. The collective bad sign of a weatherman getting choked up moves the collective consciousness—this video is repeated, copied, and reposted for days in an echoing hall of Instagram mirrors.

I am scrolling, trying to collect as many stories as possible, attempting to build a memory around what my long-distance body cannot simply feel. 

The writer Paul Connerton talks about what it means to our bodies when we experience major life events in mediated ways. He describes it as an "evanescent accumulation of images"1 that creates weak links between the images and someone's personal experience. It is within physical personal experience, he shares, that information and life experiences have a greater chance of "settling down" and becoming memorable.

When we don't have physical memory-making experiences available, mediated imagery then comes in floods as a weak but hyperactive fix. I can't be in the storm with my family; my body wants to be, so I try to fill this void with endlessly scrolling news feeds, Instagram reels, 24-hour reporting, and a frenzied group chat. This is a yearning to know how it feels, to know how they are, to be with them. 

So many of us are in familial relations across great distances, with the digital as a connective tethering, but these floating memories attach to our bodies in odd ways. Like remembering the photo of the childhood birthday but not the party itself, or memoirists who accidentally replace an actual memory with the storied version they crafted for effect, or like my dream of floating away on the river, recalled as a childhood memory with vivid tangibility, despite only inhabiting the virtuality of dream space.

When I watch the impending digital storm, I know it re-wires my body with disorientation. I have more than a little fear that these mediated images will blur my tangible memories and connection to home—watered down by my inability to physically be with the place about to be hit by a whirling storm.

But still, I cling, I refresh, I scroll in loops, I text the family chat. For now, it seems the closest I can come to holding up the hurricane shutters while my dad drills them down or helping my mom pack up water, food, and family photos, passports, and letters from my grandma. I can't stop looking at the descending storm as a warped form of helping, carrying my share of the weight, so I can remember this moment just like my family will.

I call my sister to see if she wants my help finding a hotel or a way out. She doesn't. She's fine, sort of. It's only been two weeks since Hurricane Helene surged the Tampa Bay a mile inland into my sister's living room, shorting out her electricity and starting a house fire despite the storm being 100 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. My sister and her husband got the small fire out, and the flood was inches, not feet. Months of construction followed, but they had insurance coverage and never lost housing. They were lucky, privileged, ok.

But crying meteorologists seem to suggest that this coming storm will be even worse. Meanwhile, I watch another weather anchor dourly demonstrating what a 12-foot storm surge would look like with graphics overlaid upon her body in an otherwise weatherless TV studio. She raises her arms, hailing the rise of computer-animated waters. One foot means soggy carpet, and 12 feet means houses float off their foundations, drifting in the black, dark, glimmering real-time CG. 

This kind of reporting feels gratuitous, click-baiting, and maybe a tactic to encourage action, since hardly anyone followed mandatory evacuation orders for the storm two weeks before. Maybe this weak accumulation of images could help people know when to submit to their own untethering. Or maybe only dreams can do that?

In 2024, eight scientists found that dreams seem to help us with emotional memory processing, especially for negative emotions.

By emotionally triggering participants just before sleep and then tracking their patterns of dream, memory, and waking anxiety, we know that bad dreams may actually be a form of survival practice. According to the study, these dreams may "serve to simulate threats and rehearse coping methods in a virtual context.”2 The study's authors go on to suggest that perhaps dreaming about a stressful situation helps dreamers connect dreamt memories to past waking ones, in turn preparing the dreamer for future stress.

I think back to the dream where I float away, sitting on the dock, drifting down the wide Suwannee River. That dream reads like an actual place-memory of mine. It feels a part of my childhood, like it actually happened. 

How strange that I dreamt of becoming lost to water so vividly that today, I cradle that dream carefully in my hands, holding a dark nostalgia for an event that never actually happened.

In the dream study, most participants woke up feeling less stressed or anxious about the emotionally charged thing they dreamt about after their sleep-time coping rehearsals.

Dreams are virtual and mediated experiences too, but unlike floods of over-produced media, they take root in the body differently. It makes sense, as dreams are movies made by the body and mind. The link between this media and personal experience is not weak but a projection of the very body onto itself.

I have no waking childhood memory of fearing the water, of fearing the flood of that river, of concern that I might one day float away or be overcome by its waters. But I do have a near spiritual reverence for wet whirlwinds and all the ways that they are bigger than me. Perhaps my dream brain knew it must practice adapting to life in a hurricane-prone swampland.

Just as my childish bones stretched and elongated, calcified and set, so too did my connection to swamplands grow, stretch, and imprint, becoming a part of my body. 

The hurricane churns closer, quickly, yet so slow. These happenings are distant and remote. They elude healthy incorporation into my bones and nerves. I feel like a scattered and evanescent accumulation of particles myself.

My parents finally evacuate to the center of the state, to Orlando. When the storm's outer bands get to them, my mom texts to say they still have service and are doing ok. She sends me videos of bending palms, wind shrieking through door jams, and banging windows. I imagined the roof blowing off, the giant camphor tree in the front yard crushing my parents’ small cinderblock home, or more water unmooring my sister's foundation. So, ultimately, wind in the palms looks fine, almost gentle.

Once I feel that they are safe, I still have a vague unsettledness about the intensifying weather that becomes more normal each passing hurricane season. I can't shake the preoccupation with it in a way that seems illogical to others. "What are you worried will happen specifically?" asked my therapist, friends, loves.

As the hurricane makes landfall, my body's memory-layer sets in motion too. Maybe it's not worry, specifically, but a tidal surge of memories, firsts of their kind, swirling and eddying out of control.

Memory researchers have found a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump, wherein our strongest memories well up between the ages of ten and thirty. With these storms my reminiscence bump swells and surges, floating the present off its carefully laid foundation.

I write the memories down to contain them, to slow them. A memoryscape of intimacies comes flooding back. 

I order them from childhood to early adulthood as if stacking sandbag after sandbag against cracks and fissures in an earnest attempt to organize the meandering, chaotic lyricism of water:

When I was a child, a big tropical storm came near the Suwannee River cabin. My grandparents told me that they boated down the dirt road to the house because the river breached its banks and flooded through the forest, the yard, and onwards until the road became the river too. My grandparents told me of snakes dangling from trees and fish swimming down the road. They were adapting to the homes created and changed by the rising river, just like us. Before the storm, I thought rivers were as fixed as city sidewalks. After the storm, my child body knows that living here means being unattached to the way things usually are.

Maybe stability means learning to swim. My cousins and I are holding our breath and deep diving into the sapphire sinkhole portal that leads to the bottom of the cold-water spring emanating up from the aquifer. We are looking for water fairies and precious shells. We believe we are diving straight to the center—the deep blue heart of the aquarian earth 100 feet down—as my mother unworriedly looks on at three children swimming capably just one foot underwater. No matter how shallow our dive, we practice our exquisite adaptations with skillful seriousness.

I met my first hurricane as a harbinger of wonder, novelty, and wind. My first hurricane day simply meant no school. The storm weakened and veered in the Gulf of Mexico, far enough from my parent's house that the eye wall would miss us entirely. My parents take us to the beach to play with the edges of the storm. My brother and I are testing our bodies against the wind, an unending lean into rushing air, a trust fall that never completes.

Post-hurricane lands and flooded places welcomed my falling-in-love firsts. I suspected I couldn't trust the people around me with things like sex I wasn't supposed to be having yet or girls I wasn't supposed to love. But places held my desire just fine. In them, we wrapped up close, an intimacy with watery lands just as much as with each other: having sex with him, barely nestled behind the sand dunes on the first-hurricane-day beach; letting the sound of the river's rush flow me closer and closer to her until we slept spooning on the treehouse porch of the floodplain cabin, awash with feelings that were getting harder to ignore; sleeping with him in the back of my car during weekly escapes from the ordered Christianity of our college housing to the fluidity of the prairie—the ground flooded from a summer of whirlwinds, the sky flooded magenta from light pollution, the air flooded with humidity and the droning comfort of cicada song. 

These places make it feel easy to detach from the way things usually are.

A jungle-themed gay club in the north Florida swamplands inundates me with a similar intimacy of belonging. The humidity outside as thick as the humidity inside. The sparkle of lights over sweaty clustered bodies and jungle décor. We dance and get drunk and all my art school friends are there, my humid body, inside and outed, with many other bodies humidly the same; I hope the group body euphoria will last into the next day or every day. But usually, the wildness wears off in the flat, hot light of noon.

During my first direct hit hurricane, we all stay inside for a week, my mostly Christian roommates and I. The hurricane times are the main moments I feel belonging in this house. We cook dinner and carry candles down the halls. The power is out for a week. Big oaks fall in the yard, water pools up in the back, nightly curfews keep us in. We become equal as our reality suddenly becomes about shared earthbound survival instead of the abstraction of a very old spiritual disagreement. Living here, we practice making home within difference, but the storm demands even more of us. We come closer together in the face of our hurricane-shaped fear. It feels as liberating as it should, as it always does when earthly forces unite us in our vulnerability as human, humble, humus—bodies made of earth like the Bible says. I only seem to remember the most animistic parts of that book.

When my grandma died, my mom led us in spreading her ashes below a tree in the forest around the floodplain cabin. That way, my grandma would always be there in that place just before my grandpa sold it, flooded by the loss of her, selling the house as a way to quell the waters. "Until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall remain," it says in Genesis. But, on the day we spread my grandma's ashes, my mom, despite, or maybe because of her Catholicism, didn't lead us in any kind of prayer, not like that or otherwise. She led us in ritual and connected us to the rich, dark floodplain soil underneath the gum, sassafras, and oak trees. Maybe she only remembered the most animistic parts of that book too. This is the first time I was given a clue that maybe my family's Christianity wasn't as rigid as I feared it to be, that maybe they were simply searching for something to guide the meanderings of spirit and were not trying to contain a river into a channel as fixed as a city sidewalk.

There is a dark and comforting nostalgia in this flood of memories, a coming-of-age in the form of eddying debris, jumbled and unmoored. But more than unique to me, I imagine this phenomenon is becoming commonplace. So many of us left home, left the places that imprinted on us first, the places that composed our topographies of reminiscence.

As the climate breaks down with events more frequent and intense, I will have to learn to swim and carry my nostalgias with me in the new flood of it all. We all will, in our own ways. 

I wonder about loss and how our bodies will carry change witnessed from afar. More specifically, what dark nostalgias stir during climate disasters witnessed at a digital distance?

I think again of Paul Connerton's idea that place-memory is encoded to a body's very cells:

"For me to no longer know my way around the limbs of my body, perhaps through amputation, or for the pianist to no longer know her way around her piano, perhaps because of failing eyesight, is tearfully distressing, an aching catastrophe: as it would be to no longer know my way around my own house, or to no longer know my way around the paths, landmarks, and districts of my own city. That would be a defamiliarization that would shake my very being."3

A place we habitually move through encodes onto our body—syncing our understanding of place to our very physicalities. Each storm reminds that one day I might no longer know my way around the memories of my childhood, that my parents might no longer know their way around their home place. These storms will be the rhythm that we all age to—defamiliarization a part of the everyday.

As the climate changes around us, we are learning to move at new speeds of change, to incorporate that experience into our bodies and memory drives, to be with our places as they transform through rapid change and reassembly.

On the day Hurricane Milton hits, I realize that as hard as it is to break away from my digital tether, it is important what I do while the eye of the storm makes contact with the land that grew me. When it happens to each of us, we had better take pause to create embodied experiences with and against the rhythm of the transformation, even if by proxy. Doom scrolling and memory spirals won't do it. I close all my tabs, shut my laptop off, and after taking one last look at the pixelated and swirling whirlwind, I move my mind from the past and into the present—or try anyway.

I go to the beach with my girlfriend. We walk the edge line of the Pacific, making contact with the power and sublimity of oceanic forces: salt water, wind, birds cycling through the sky. The sunset is strangely theatrical, beautiful, one like San Francisco rarely sees through the fog. Dark fuchsia crescendos with tangerine streaks and peach pink flows. We are awestruck. We take pictures and breathe the salty air deeply. 

This place reminds me that when the chaos of long-distance emergency overtakes any of us, we must try our best to re-materialize into the flows of real time and space. We must learn to live fully in a distracted and half-there world: A walk becomes a prayerful procession, a calm beach a cathedral in honor of change and chaos on another beach, a coast away.

I'm trying to find this fullness and hear what this sublime sunset casting wonder over fear wants to show me. I breathe deep.

Two months later, in December, I finally take my actual body to Florida. My dad picks me up from the airport, narrating all the places where two-story tall debris piles were until just last week. 

My sister's house is under construction—from the first storm, not so much the second. In the end, the eye wall of Milton did hit where my family lives, but they got the wind side, not the water side. We meet her new cat—he and six of his family members were abandoned in a neighborhood debris pile during the back-to-back storms. She and her husband rescued and adopted off all the other cats before the bulldozers came to clean up the streets.

As we drive, I see things are not fine exactly, but as far as climate disasters go this is ok. This is overcomeable. This is not the largest story of tragedy and recovery produced by this hurricane season. This is a story about relatively minor everyday chaoses that will continue as the new normal for even the most privileged among us.

During my visit, I am continually confronted with how misplaced my weird hurricane nostalgia feels amidst actual, non-abstract debris piles. Immersed in the reality of it, I finally see my nostalgic read as an odd after-effect of the mind. This after effect is enabled by distances of geography and time, memories of first loves and flooded places, and my own personal luck at having never met a really bad storm. 

If I had met a really bad one, my memories would have been whisked away long ago by the practicalities and heaviness of storm survival and replaced with solstalgia instead. Solstalgia: a new climate change word for feeling homesick at home as climate collapse rapidly changes the land and place around you.

I think back to my grandparents’ cabin in the floodplain. No matter how we try to control, order, fortify ourselves against change, home and our memories of it are only as stable as a river in flux.

I am learning how to become at home in a floodplain—a place of constant change, meanders, and re-routes.

Maybe my lived experience with hurricanes, after 18 years of living away from them on the West Coast, is more a mix of nostalgia and mediated witnessing of climate collapse in the place that formed my core memories—in the place where the weather is part of my muscles, sinew, and bone.

On Christmas day, we go to the beach and drive the storm-battered streets. Most of the damage happened inside the houses when the storm surge was high. So, at first, things look normal. Further south the damage is more externalized. Walls are missing, eroded and crumbled; trees are dead from saltwater intrusion; heaps of debris, weird piles of sand and palm tree trunks are jumbled in front yards; docks are wrinkled and warped; beachside restaurants and hotels are closed until the unforeseeable future; local people are out, but hardly any tourists, fishing and walking the beach. 

I wonder if they feel homesickness at home or something like it.

Yet, lives are happening. Houses are being rebuilt—on stilts this time. People are surviving and getting through it. It's not as bad as it could have been; there have been losses, but for many, it read like a warning shot, a practice run for what could come. Being here, I am no longer floating in between an eddy of recirculating memory, short-circuiting my system. 

I remember in my dreams of the river that the dock broke loose, and I just let the waters take me.

My grandparents’ house in a floodplain triggered my dreams of preparation, my understanding of becoming untethered from the familiar, from floating away from home as a practice of letting go of what once was—a mediated practice that will buoy my mind as the waters rise and swirl. 

More storms will come stronger, hotter, faster every year, and like floating away on the dock, we can submit to the untethering. This is what's happening—here we go. Floating away with the current, with full-bodied presence is the only direction to go. Our power lies in how we make home on this floating-away dock, in this every day of constant change.

In a way, I dreamt of this long ago—my childhood preparations are bone-bound. 

1. Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 144

2. Jing Zhang, Andres Pena, Nicole Delano, Negin Sattari, Alessandra E. Shuster, Fiona C. Baker, Katharine Simon & Sara C. Mednick, Evidence of an active role of dreaming in  emotional memory processing shows that we dream to forget (Scientific Reports volume 14, 2024), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58170-z

3. Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 32