The Return of the Canal
Water that was taken returns on its own terms.
Canal || Water || Healing || Community
The canal district came back slowly, over the course of that winter and the following spring, in the way that things come back after floods: with mud and loss and damage and the complicated emotions of people reclaiming spaces they had lost and finding that eleven years of water had changed them permanently and irrevocably, which was both obviously true and somehow still surprising. The water management authority — under new leadership, the previous director having resigned under pressure three days after the first article was published — worked with the canal district community association on the process of assessment and eventual re-opening. Some buildings were sound. Some were not. The infrastructure — pipes, wiring, sewers — required comprehensive replacement. The work would take years. The funding was a matter of negotiation between the civic authority, the national government, and the legal process that sought to establish what portion of the institute’s assets could be liquidated to compensate the twenty thousand people who had been displaced. Mara attended one of the community meetings, in January, in the upper hall of a building above the waterline where the canal district’s diaspora gathered to talk about return. She sat in the back, as she had at the Millhaven town meeting in another story in another kind of investigation, as a witness rather than a protagonist. She listened to people describe what they had lost: not just buildings and possessions but the specific quality of a life in a specific place, the accumulated routines and relationships and familiarity that constitute what a neighborhood actually is beneath its physical components. Loss that could be compensated financially but not remedied by it. The kind of loss that required the restoration of the thing itself, which was possible — slowly, imperfectly, with the irrevocable mark of what had happened permanently part of it — and which would take as long as it took. She listened. She took no notes. When the meeting ended she walked home along the canal — the canal whose water level was now nearly pre-flood normal, the buildings emerging from the sediment on either side — and thought about time. About what it meant for something to take eleven years. Forty years. A century. Seven hundred years. How time was the currency that some problems spent and some solutions required and some truths needed in order to be found, and that patience — not passive patience, but the active, costly, daily-renewed patience of people like Vane and Seline and Petra and Vorn, who kept going in the absence of reward or recognition or any guarantee of outcome — was not a character trait but a practice, a discipline, the choice made every morning to continue. She walked home. She went to sleep. In the morning there would be more work. There was always more work. That was fine. That was exactly fine.