driving back from floresville. sunday after the storm hit early saturday morning. i'm not sure what to expect. exit from i-45. the first thing i notice is the lights are flashing. my brain freezes for a second. what do i do? i follow the car next to me and as i turn left i realize it's like a stop sign now. they're all like stop signs. it looks deserted. power lines down. these are just open fields so they don't look to bad. cross highway 3 and there's whole trees uprooted now. this isn't clear lake. not as i know it. there's no pristine lawns. they're now covered with limbs of every shape and size and type. trees down. there's no fake front put on anywhere. the businesses are all boarded up. i take a right turn. fences are down. trees. there's trees everywhere. i turn into my neighborhood. you can't go more than 15 miles per hour because of shock. the trees. the limbs. the yards. it looks like a giant came around and tore everything up. like a giant toddler didn't get his way and threw a temper tantrum. i know these houses now. i pass the houses of my friends. i see them at home, so i pulled over to talk to them. one of them pulls out their iphone and asked me if i'd seen pictures of the seabrook waterfront. there's a picture of a boat on the road. another of a mast sticking out of the water. there's the tip of a boat. dead fish on top of a boat shed. it's getting dark fast now and the 9:00 curfew is quickly approaching, so i head home. we have power. how in the world? i'm so grateful. so a few of my friends who didn't have power came to stay for a while. to sleep in the air conditioning. houston in september usually isn't fun weather to not have air conditioning in. but a cold front blows through, making for perfect working weather. and boy did we work. now here i am, more than 2 weeks later. as i look around my backyard i don't see the effects anymore. except for the limb still hanging in the tree like a gymnast on a balance beam. as i drive around the only thing showing there was even a hurricane here at all are the piles of limbs slowly turning brown covering the front of the lawns. waiting fro the city to come. it was so apparent, but now you forget about it. the homeless, powerless, lifeless people. we're back in the bubble where you don't see the real world outside. we're back to clear lake.
refrigerators stacked like domino's. cars piled like trash with their hoods pulled back like the lids on those cambell's soup cans. debris everywhere. i saw galveston a few weeks after, but bolivar...and it's nearly 4 months after. the whole land is flat. a house here, some stilts there. the few houses left are few and far between. no dunes. there's actually lakes where the dunes were before. "we'll be back!" the spray painted signs scream. defying nature. how do you even start over here? driving along, looking at the flattened land, you see nothing for a while. but after driving for a while you'll see random objects. a couch nothing around it. just a couch. the sheer power of the water amazes me. i try to imagine what it would be like to see the storm surge come in. it's just hard to picture. i giant wall of water taking out cars, tree, houses entire towns. it just reminds you we're seriously not in control. and i can't imagine how you can be complacent about this. i can't believe we've just gone on with life and we hardly even think about it anymore. i mean, personally i haven't thought about ike in a long while. but these people are still living through the affects of it. it's crazy. insane. crazy.
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