Allison Hanes: Museum of heartbreak displays the personal toll of climate change

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The dollhouse Raissa Marks’s grandfather made for her mother by hand when she was a girl was stashed in the crawl space when storm water flooded Marks’s Dorval home this summer. This week it will be on display in New York City to help send a message about how climate change is hitting home with increasing ferocity and frequency.

Marks’s mother had played with the little wooden house and its miniature furniture when she was young. She passed it on to Marks and her sisters when they were children, and it was handed down to Marks’s kids — now 11 and 13 — when they were small. Marks had put the dollhouse in storage to await the next generation.

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The heirloom under the stairs didn’t even cross Marks’s mind when water soaked her basement around 8:15 p.m. on Aug. 9, as the remnants of hurricane Debby doused Montreal.

“Suddenly I just saw water coming in through the hallway to the room where we were watching TV,” she recalled. “And about half a second later my husband felt water on his socks, coming in from under the couch. We jumped up.”

Like thousands of their fellow Montrealers, Marks and her husband spent the next few hours scrambling to contain the mess, as an unprecedented amount of rain flooded underpasses, washed out roads, drenched highways, closed bridges, knocked out power — and backed up into homes. Nearly 200 millimetres gushed from the skies in some locations over a 24-hour period, during what turned out to be the wettest, hottest summer in the city’s recorded history.

“We had mops and buckets and towels and the Shop-Vac and we were funnelling water towards the sump pump and moving furniture and pulling up rugs that were on the floor. It was probably midnight by the time we started to feel on top of it, that it looked like the water was finally going down instead of coming up,” recalled Marks, who owns a consulting business that advises non-profits. “And then around 2 (a.m.) we finally went to bed. We were exhausted, but there was no standing water left at the time.”

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It wasn’t until the next day that Marks thought to check the crawl space.

“When we were working all that night, we totally forgot about anything under the stairs,” Marks recounted. “We totally forgot until the next day … and there was probably about half an inch of water in there at that point. So the dollhouse was sitting in the water.”

Luckily the sturdy dollhouse dried, emerging mostly unscathed. Marks’s basement, on the other hand, was wrecked. The flooring and two feet of drywall in the basement had to be ripped up, although she concedes some of her neighbours had it worse, with many feet of fetid water pooling in their homes. The deluge of Aug. 9 caused $2.5 billion in insured damage, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada — more than the 1998 ice storm.

This week, Marks and the dollhouse her grandfather crafted will help deliver a personal and potent message that climate change is hitting closer and closer to home for greater numbers of people. As world leaders gather at the United Nations in New York, Sierra Club Canada is hosting an exhibition of artifacts gathered from survivors of recent catastrophes that were fuelled by global warming.

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The dollhouse serves as a symbol of resilience — and of how climate change is affecting people where they should feel safest. But some of the other relics speak to devastating losses. There is a scorched doorknob provided by the owner of a café that burned to the ground in Lytton, B.C., in 2021, when the town was razed by fire a day after registering Canada’s highest recorded temperature. There is a life preserver that is all that remains of a Newfoundland and Labrador fishing hut that was swept away by hurricane Fiona in 2022. There is a charred garden gnome rescued from the ruins of a home destroyed by wildfire in Kelowna, B.C., in 2023. There are dolls and stuffies and photo albums that have made it through floods.

It’s like a museum of the heartbreak that has happened, keeps happening with rising frequency and will continue happening — unless governments enact policies that drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Conor Curtis, who helped curate the objects on display, said the idea is to get people — including political leaders and heads of state — to relate to a monumental problem in a personal way.

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“I deal with climate change as an issue all the time, I studied climate change academically and I work on it. But it’s one thing to talk about it as an abstract thing. It’s another to engage with the impacts directly and to see them,” Curtis said. “Having an exhibit of artifacts that have these very personal stories and have some of them actually be there to tell those stories, that’s a very different experience.”

The title of the show, Protect What We Love, asks visitors to put themselves in the shoes of those who have experienced the ravages of climate change first-hand.

“One of the questions we ask as part of the exhibit is: If you knew your house was going to be destroyed, what would you save? What would you take out?” said Curtis. “I think that’s a very powerful question to ask.”

Some of the victims of natural disasters that have caused havoc in Canada in recent years will be on hand to share their ordeals, including Marks. She notes that her family has actually been affected by extreme weather from climate change twice in less than two years — they lost power for several days following the ice storm that walloped Quebec in April 2023.

“You hear about extreme climate events, but it’s happening to someone else, it’s happening in another place. You’re not internalizing it. But I think the stories of regular people that are impacted by climate change is really what helps people understand the impact. And then the relics, the loved items, that people have really helps drive that home,” she said.

“I also think about how my grandfather, when he was making (the dollhouse) back in the early ’60s, would never have even dreamed about climate change, or known this was going to happen in the world, much less affect this particular plaything he was making for my mom. So I do think about that. I do think about how much things have changed and of course now, as a parent, I think about it all the time, how climate change is going to affect my kids and grandkids.”

ahanes@postmedia.com

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