Instead, when he stepped over the levee, he found himself in Rivertown. It wasn’t much of a town—it was a long band of shelters built into the grade with desperate ingenuity, a patchwork village made from salvaged materials, most of them timber, trash, and other flotsam left behind by the river at flood stage. It looked like the set from some old western, crossed with the set from one of those movies about life after the end of the world. Donny spotted a trio of teenagers holding sticks over a tire fire, and they looked back at him like you would look at a cop who has walked up to your back porch. Donny wondered how long it would be until the next flood, and if the shanty-builders’ guesses as to how high it would flow would prove correct.

Donny remembered when kids like that first started showing up, all those years before. It took a while before people started realizing that what they thought were homeless bums were climate refugees. Refugees from their own country. Often from not far away.

In the early days, there were no FEMA camps or FHA resettlement projects. Just people displaced by a bad situation where they came from in Nebraska, New Orleans, or someplace in between. Crop failures, dead fields, dying towns. Places that used to be wet gone dry as a desert, and places that were always wet now underwater and battered by hurricane winds. And the fires that burned long and hard, all through the year, sometimes scorching off the edges of the big cities.

Donny remembered when he was starting out at the law firm, and the people you would see camped out under the overpasses started to change. The white kids were the real giveaway. Milk-fed and freckled like you’d see in some sitcom from the century before, gone dirty, hungry and gaunt. It got pretty bad like that, until some of them started getting organized. Donny realized now what an ass he’d been for only paying attention when the people suffering looked like him.

Taking people away from the land where their families have lived for generations turns out to be politically destabilizing. Americans kind of perfected that model. They just never considered the possibility that it would happen to them, in no small part because of how they had abused that land.