Is #RuinPorn Still a Thing?
A brief note on pictures and place and finding oneself in it.
It’s probably lost its novelty as a hashtag, spent as a cultural phenomenon, and not quite old enough to enter SocialMedia scholarship, but it hovers around me like a digital specter or even just one of the tourist gaze’s many filters.
Is there really beauty in decay?
Or is it an idea to make you look dark and creative? I suppose it’s different when you hunt it down. When you hop in the car from a presumably habitable structure with running water and electricity, a boring cul-de-sac, or a spiffy condo looking for something edgy and interesting.
A well-tended Instagram does need visual and thematic balance, after all. It’s almost fitting as if to squeeze the last bit of value, an artistic comment in the act of snapping a perfect clash of color in the rusty patches and a few obstinate bits of paint holding onto an assembly line.
I haven’t found any of that.
I hadn’t even planned on going to The Abacos, an archipelago in the Northeast of the Bahamas. A chain of cays that along with Grand Bahama was hit in 2019 by Hurricane Dorian, a Category V with sustained winds of 185 mph. The hurricane stalled over the island for two days leaving not a path of destruction but near complete demolition.
It was the weather that put us here. The plan was Bermuda then Sint Maarten which became Sint Maarten which, with a Sea State 5 and a broken autopilot, became the closest option.
I’ve always enjoyed the sort of incidental travel that working on boats affords. You know vaguely where you are going but things happen and you just find yourself someplace without any of the buildup of a trip; no pre-departure context. There’s something simple and liberating about just showing up.
For me, Hurricane Dorian was an epic weekend of surfing back home. The usual short-period wind chop replaced with long-period swells grooming toward the East Coast and yet walking around what’s still left in the storm’s wake, there is an awful sense of connection between the two.
It feels naive — a shallow but punchy link and yet it speaks to the polarized, asymmetrical world we live in. Notions of developed and developing privilege swirl about as if a great weekend only came about at the horrific cost around me.
Hurricane Dorian is looked back upon and referred to as a sweet summer romance despite being likely the first of many unprecedented storms that will come in from the seas in the years ahead.
I put away my phone and enjoy my walk because, instinctively, it feels rude and exploitative. Still, that factually true but practically insane idea pesters me along with the acculturated urgency that I must get something out of my exploration if even just a facile snap.
It’s easy to tune out and even easier to be overwhelmed by Climate Change and all the cataclysmic predictions. It’s another thing to wander around what feels like its portent, a glimpse of what might easily be anywhere in the coming decades whether by Hurricane, Tornado, Nor’Easter, Flood, or Fire.
Yet the simple presence of it all has a strange power. I feel all the years of TV coverage and the endless spree of shocking but look about with new eyes, with a realness that’s foreign and haunting; as if the stupor of images and that cultivated sense of rerun shatters like all the bottles on the side of the road.
Not a picture but the feeling around it, an understanding etched in my mind that will linger and build with all the other places I’ve been and will go and will carry about me.
They’re rebuilding as quickly as they can and you don’t see resignation on anyone’s face even all these years later. There are churches everywhere, gleaming and nestled between boarded stores and roofless buildings. Many of the trees haven’t grown back, an entire marsh stabbed by thin tan pine trunks, surrounding the airport like a tray of hord d’oeuvres.
What can you do? Have a couple of excellent meals and buy from the local shops. Yet another transaction among the billions of others that make up globalization. Or like the locals, get on with life, be a good person, and stay hopeful because it is going to happen again and you’ll just have to deal with it?
I only know there will be more than a picture.
It’s been said that the world was flattened and that it’s shrunken. It has, but have we caught up to that reality? Discovered how to act and react in a world so easily connected. The answer is no, but losing that sense of remove, of chasing novelty, and feeding life into a market of appearances and content seems like a decent start.
