The two Frenchmen who came to look at our roof expressed an enthusiastic sympathy. The concrete tiles that sheltered us – and had protected the occupants of our former state house for nearly 75 years – were no longer fit for purpose, they explained. Although we had done what we could for the past quarter century to look after them, they were now porous and fragile and needed replacing.
In case we hadn’t got the point, they explained this several more times before they got up in the cavity and applied some plastic sheeting under the tennis ball-sized hole in one of the tiles that was the source of the leak in the ceiling that had appeared over my son’s bed two days before.
This bare fix – there was no question of anyone walking on the roof to cover the outside, and the spare tiles we offered were apparently no better than those in place anyway – seems to have more or less held, but there is no question about it: we need a new roof, asap.
The “possible” part of “asap” is unclear. I’d been passed on a number for the Frenchmen by one of several companies that had declared themselves so busy they couldn’t come to us any time soon. It will likely be some months before we can schedule a job (and, for that matter, before we can pay for it). What could we do until then? Keep an eye on it, said the main Frenchman.
Many of us in Auckland have got into the habit of watching the skies this past year. I have become such an avid viewer of WeatherWatch videos on YouTube that my darling has occasionally, and unkindly, referred to Philip Duncan as “your boyfriend”. The record-shattering rains have begun to erode not only our sense of equilibrium, but our physical shelters.
“That El Niño,” I typed into a social media platform, “can come any time it likes.”
The shift in the southern oscillation, from an extraordinary triple-dip La Niña to a new weather pattern of strong westerlies and clearer skies, was foreshadowed for months before it was finally announced. But its implications have already begun to show. Madly, soil moisture in parts of Hawke’s Bay, which drowned under the rains of Cyclone Gabrielle in February, is already decreasing. Parts of the country are looking at severe drought this summer.
El Niño has long since manifested and been announced in parts of the world where its implications are very different. The world cocked an eyebrow as the denizens of the Burning Man festival were stranded when the silt of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert turned to mud. The chaos came courtesy of a mere 21mm of rain, no more than an indifferent weekend in Auckland, but far out of the norm in the Nevada desert. In the same week, well beyond the reach of the southern oscillation, parts of Greece drowned under 500mm of rain in 10 hours.
The records are hard to grasp. Earth’s hottest September on record, by a margin one climate scientist described as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”, dolphins dying en masse in an overheated Amazon, colossal ice loss in Antarctica, marine observations so startlingly anomalous that researchers don’t know what to make of them. The concurrent surge in climate change denial on the internet is, like virus denial (they are largely the same people), an exaggerated means of coping with the unthinkable.
A week after the Frenchmen came, we found the heavy cowl of our chimney in the right-of-way next door. It turned out that our roof tile had not simply given up and crumbled, but been smashed by the falling cowl. The roof situation has not meaningfully changed – we still need a new one – but there was some small relief in encountering a situation that was more or less fathomable.
