High & Dry

This morning the paper shows us graveyards filled with refugees: the living camped above the dead. 340,000 displaced. The Koran Tempo (Koran means "newspaper" in Indonesian) has made its masthead wavery, as if half submerged in water.

This picture from the paper is in South Jakarta & WE are in south Jakarta. The view out our balcony is of graveyards, too--the pretty European one gated, immaculate & always empty, the Javanese one vast, overgrown, & full of trash & kids. A basketball court on the side. Flowering trees. Beyond these graves we see the red tile roof tops of a kampung, then the taller buildings of the city. Through my telescope: NONE of it is flooded.
In the afternoon the graveyard fills with children flying kites.

No, we are in a cool bubble floating 30 stories above the earth. I can ride an elevator down to a little grocery shop, a gym, a swimming pool, & the Verandah cafe where I read each morning of floods & fever & all hell breaking loose outside. Yet we walked to a mall this morning to buy groceries & found the large culvert along the sidewalk at a low flow, the streets dry, the mall filled with mall people doing mall things. You would never know. The great irony of floods: there are water shortages everywhere. We ordered a refill & an extra bottle (to cache) this morning & they arrived at once, no big deal. Location, location, location. And money.

From up here, this does not feel adventurous. It feels like a strange sort of writing retreat--which it is. When we first arrived we rose (jet-lagged) with the dawn adhan & fell asleep hard by nine. By now we have worked back into our familiar grooves: talking past 2 or 3 AM, rising at 11 from wild dreams, grumping till coffee; he's cooking, I'm washing up; we read & write from the afternoon through midnight; some evenings there are performances, interviews. Exactly what it should be.

It's difficult to know what to do with the headlines yet besides donate money. Knowing what's happening somewhere around the corner, though, makes it hard to sit up here & simply write a check...like throwing a paper airplane from the balcony. Then again, fever follows flood in short order, as do all mosquito-born diseases; it's also hard to imagine how to lend a hand just yet without becoming casualties ourselves. I think we might give blood--Dengue fever has drained supplies--but I've not yet determined how to do this safely.

In the meantime, there is much editorializing of levees & government ineptitude, of the stupid issuing of building permits ('growth is good!') in areas intended as green spaces & reservoirs: all sounding very much like Katrina / New Orleans. Environmentalists are still not yet persuasive urban planners. Pragmatists mistaken for hippies. The idea that environmental planning might HURT the long term economy is an ever more shocking presidential argument before the economic crises of preventable floods & droughts. The Indonesian president is promising to open the south Jakarta sluice gate, even though that will flood the governor's palace (& Obama's posh old neighborhood, Menteng). "Let the Palace be flooded with water," orates the VP. "The most important thing is the people."

My widgets tell me it's 2 degrees in St. Paul. From where I'm sitting just now, it is sunny in Jakarta, & feels about 80. It is not raining.