Houston, We Have a Monstrous Problem

Here, along the northeastern passage of the Gulf Coast, weather is something that holds a mythic grip on the people who call this area home. My family was one in so many others who made the exodus to Houston, Texas in the oil-booming eighties. Texas holds not only a certain poetic allure to those who are unfamiliar with the hyper-conservative xenophobia that pervades her, but also the promise of plentiful work and cheap housing. That you might find this place as harsh and unforgiving as the climate is something that usually only happens once you are firmly entrenched in this marshy swamp fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

And so, if you travel those fifty miles to the coast, where you end up is Galveston. Galveston, once the jewel of the Gulf Coast, is now a tourist island in as much as it is a refuge for outcasts and misfits of all stripes. Galveston is a sort of voluntary penal colony for the Texas undercurrent of unique personalities and catastrophically unstable beachcombers.

To take it one further, take the small hop over on the ferry up the northern edge of Galveston and you find yourself on the Bolivar peninsula. Bolivar is like the wild west in comparison to the already unpredictable lunacy of Galveston. On the peninsula is a small town called Gilchrist, and it is in Gilchrist where this story takes a tragic turn.

Summers here in Houston are long, sweltering, and quite-simply brutal. Each year we labor through the endless days and nights of high nineties temperatures and a cloying, soup-like humidity that ensures that even in an otherwise acceptable eighty degree day, you will still be sticky and stifled and begging for a break. This goes on pretty much from about the beginning of June through about mid-October, and after nearly thirty years of it, it hasn't gotten much easier to endure.

Better still, because of both our excessive heat and our proximity to a large body of tropical water, we are prone to one of the ugliest and ferocious things that nature can produce: hurricanes.

In 1983, Houston was set dead in the sights of a Hurricane that formed after a bit of unorganized weather weirdness left the mainland and headed into the Gulf whereupon is very quickly reacted to the favorable winds and water temperatures and before practically anyone had time to prepare, became not only a hurricane but a major category three storm capable of catastrophic damage in the area closest to the eyewall.

At the time of hurricane Alicia, my family was still reeling from the effects of my parents divorce. My mother had just sold the family house to my father, and then she had moved my brother and I to League City, a small but growing town directly on the water and only a few miles from the NASA space center in Nassau Bay.

Within weeks of our moving in to our new condominium, Alicia came to life just off the coast and set her sites on the Houston/Galveston area.

I remember having to evacuate our brand new home and head back to my dad's to ride that storm out, not knowing if we would have a home to go back to when it was all over and done.

Alicia was a relatively small storm, though she packed a strong punch. And once it was all over, it became apparent that all those strong winds ended up playing havoc on the trees and power lines of the Houston area.

I still remember the roar of the wind and the way that my dad's place shook with the gusts. I also remember watching the bayou across the street for signs that it was going to overflow its banks and head directly into our ground floor. I also have a very clear memory of going out into the yard once the eye of the storm passed over our yard and helping my father pick up debris and fallen fencing before having to rush back indoors to ride out the second half of the storm.

Our League City home sustained no real damage, only a little water leakage, and before long, life was back to normal. But things for me were never the same now understanding what was always out there, threatening our livelihood at anytime during the summer months.

In 2005, hurricane Katrina changed the way we all thought about hurricanes in this country. How could it not with its devastating effects on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the nightmare that occurred when the New Orleans levee system failed to hold back the rising levels of Lake Pontchartrain and caused unprecedented flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans as well as most of the rest of the small, crescent shaped city? The response, or should I say the lack of response from the federal government as New Orleans literally burned, people died from heat exhaustion and looters ravaged the city in search of food and water revealed just how wide the divide between rich and poor was in this country and just how vulnerable we all were in times of crisis.

Just a few weeks following the debacle of Katrina came Hurricane Rita. Rita hopped over the Florida Peninsula and worked her way through the Gulf of Mexico gaining strength seemingly by the hour. By the time Rita was in the middle of the Gulf, she was, at that time, the most powerful storm ever recorded. Rita was, by the Wednesday night before landfall, a massive and terrifying category five storm with winds in excess of 160 miles-per-hour and gusts into the 180s. It was time to make a decision. Rita was heading directly for the Houston/Galveston area, and it was pretty clear what would happen if we were to take a direct hit. Worse still, nobody wanted to stick around and find out how Uncle Sam unintended to handle the situation. So what happened next was a disaster unto itself.

The Gulf Coast areas in the direct path of the Storm began issuing mandatory evacuation orders, and with so many people using so few routes out of these coastal areas, the traffic was horrendous. Added to that was the panic-induced flow of Houston area residents who rightfully feared a real motherfucker of a Storm coming in and really devastating the way life functions in this, the fourth largest city in America. The freeways were gridlocked and with the tough Houston heat, things went from bad to worse. Cars began running out of fuel and overheating and the passengers in these cars began to reel from the effects of heat exhaustion. Sick and elderly people began to get sicker and many ended up dying in the severe heat. And then a bus transporting elderly nursing-home patients to safety caught fire. Before anything could be done, the bus was an inferno and 24 people were dead.

In the end, the storm took a small hop to the east at the last moment and Houston was almost miraculously spared the worst of the storm.

This year we were not so lucky.

Hurricane Ike first made landfall in the Caribbean, trashing Haiti and Cuba without mercy. Lives were lost in the ill-prepared and impoverished island of Haiti, and in Cuba, five-story waves washed up over Havana's sea-front buildings. First landing as a category two hurricane, Ike weakened over land to a tropical storm before hitting the open Gulf and quickly regrouping to hurricane status with its sights set directly on the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Center hit it right on the money as the storm remained a very respectable strong category two that ended up making landfall as a direct hit on the Houston/Galveston area.

The Friday before the night of the storm we rushed about town finding cheap available groceries and gas (which was no small feat considering the level of fear already whipped up locally). As the evening approached we bunkered into our apartment to ride the thing out.

We watched as Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula quickly became inundated and unapproachable by land as the surge rushed in a good twelve hours ahead of landfall.

By dark it was already getting windy around our place and Galveston was getting more or less hammered by heavy winds.

By midnight Galveston was being trashed and things here were breaking down fast. Somewhere around three A.M. we began to get something close to hurricane force winds, and all the while I couldn't help but keep checking the huge tree directly over our bedroom. I was exhausted at this point and decided to get some shuteye. In order to tune out the howling outside I put in earplugs (standard for anyone who ever played in a band as retarded as mine have been). I was rewarded with about three hours of sleep. By the time C woke me up the worst was over. It was still insane out there, but the steady 110 mph + winds were finally gone. By sunrise the winds were down to a mere tropical storm level and we were able to go outside and survey the lunacy.

As it turned out we were fairly lucky. We had almost no damage at all. In fact, all we ourselves had to deal with was some water that leaked into our window, water which had been propelled horizontally into the the side of the place for hours.

Beyond that, there was some flooding from a small incident wherein I was filling the bathtub for water to use to flush the toilet in anticipation of the power being out for god knew how long. In my agitated stupidity I forgot that the water was running and only figured it out once I stepped into Lake Bedroom. Nice one. It wasn't too bad, I cleaned it up in shame and went about my night.

Our complex also fared unsuspectingly well with the only damage I saw being the tree over the carport right by our back door. That thing was blown onto the carport (which it trashed). Otherwise, we were good.

Next up came the worst part: the power outage.

With predictions of power being out in terms of weeks and not days, I was a little concerned that we would be sweating profusely and hating one-another in no time. And to be sure, being without power is only bad when it lasts. We turned out to be among the lucky ones. Our power was only about for about three days. As I finish this interminable and tedious post there are still over a 100,000 customers in the area without power, and as we have learned, forget getting new power turned on anytime soon.

The thing about the power being out is this.

For the sake of argument, the entire fucking fourth largest city in America was blacked out. That means that when you go outside at night for a walk down, say, San Felipe, a large and important thoroughfare here in Houston, it is a fucking ghost town. There was no one out, not a soul. Maybe a car every few minutes and that was it. No lights, no stores, no cars, no-fucking-one.

I expected to run into Will Smith at any moment.

And as I went back out to show C the apocalypse, a funny thing happened. The cops that were passing by so feverishly stop in my general vicinity and start flashing their spotlights around. They appeared to be looking for someone.

Great.

We're out in the badlands, strolling, and the cops are itching to put a bullet in someone just because they can.

Better still, a fucking cop helicopter flies overhead and guess who gets spotted from their eye in the sky? Yup. We do.

Now we're on the radar. I can't explain how creepy it is to be followed by a police helicopter, how much it reminds you of 1984.

At this point we are walking rapidly -- but trying to do so without looking scared --
back to the safety of our place.

Yes, we pulled it off.

Every night after that until the lights were back on our street endured a late-night phalanx of cops parading the street, spots ablaze, letting everyone know who was in charge. The whole spectacle was disturbing.

About town, signs were blown out, trees were down everywhere, almost all light signals were out or blinking, everything was closed, no gas was available, stores were closed, and it was all a very bad movie.

Through this we all just did our thing and rode it out. It was less a crisis than an event. Houston is a big goddamn place, and during that week following Ike, we saw a lot of her.

We found food in several small foreign grocery stores filled with curious Arabs. We found someone an apartment in the midst of all this craziness. We spent a very tense night in an emergency room (don't ask), and we thanked whatever an atheist thanks that we had each other through all this ridiculousness.

We came up with the idea of holding signs on the street corners that read: "Satanist, Need Goat," and then never executed it. It would have been great stuff.

Had this storm been as strong as these things can get, we would be in a world of hurt. Any major city that gets hit with a category four or five storm, however unlikely, is in deep shit. Ours was a strong two, and things are very, very far from normal for huge swaths of our area. As bad as it is, it could have been so much worse.

Maybe Houston can learn from its unpreparedness and fare better next time with more effort put on limb trimming and dead/weak tree removal. Crappy signs should be removed, and perhaps those that live right on the fucking beach should be forced to do so without any insurance since the question is never "if" with storms like this, it's "when."

If you have never been through one of these storms, it's quite an intense experience, and as an adult with all the ensuing responsibilities, things are even more tense. Thrilling as it may be, I won't be upset if I never have to go through that again.

Something tells me I won't be getting my wish.

This post has been an albatross for me. I know it sucks, but I had to write it to move on.

So much has happened in the last three weeks of my life that I can't even begin to comprehend the importance of it all. And on top of all of it, last night was the two-year anniversary of my mother's death and I don't miss her any less than I did the day I got the call.

Next week I have to go to Florida, spur of the moment, and finish wrapping up her estate. I am not looking forward to it, but it has to be done. It will be the first time I will have entered her home since her death and probably the last.

Milestones, changes, paradigm shifts and epic battles for sanity, happiness, and survival. All in the waning days of summer. May the fall bring peace and calm. Now that would be a real shocker.

The Blind Butcher is still cutting away. Are you still reading it? There is always more to come.

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