Rolling Down the River (part 1)

When we first moved to Texas, I had no idea what our landscape would be like. The kids and I, looked at the map, searched for weather patterns on the computer and tried to get the lay of the land, before we ever got on the plane that would take us to our new home. Our atlas has dog-eared pages where Texas is shown. We found out that what we knew of our country’s landscape was next to nothing. We all sort of pictured our new landscape to look like something out of a John Wayne movie. Whenever Texas was featured in any kind of media, it is always scruffy, rugged terrain, barren of grass or trees or anything remotely green. Other kids asked our children if they planned to ride horses to school. My kids would shake their heads as if the kids surrounding them were completely ignorant, but in fact most of us have no idea what it’s like to live elsewhere.
When I am asked what my new hometown looks like, I describe it as Ohio with palm trees. We live in a tropical zone, with weather that rains and has the sun shining high in the afternoon sky at the same time. A downpour here will flood our streets in a matter of minutes. And the lightening, ooh, the lightening is something to see. My first week in Houston, Mike was working at his new job, so he was completely distracted by all the new responsibilities it carried. We had no furniture, nowhere to sit except on hard tile, or concrete outside. We had to buy a dorm size refrigerator until our new one was delivered. My car was on a flatbed somewhere between Ohio and Texas. I felt alone, afraid and completely out of my element.
The boys were with us, while the girls hung back for a couple of weeks back in Ohio, saying their last goodbyes. Feeling restless, the boys and I decided to walk to the store one day. Our skin was fluorescent white. Having just come from up north where it had snowed in May, we had not seen the sun in months. The first real sunny day we had all spring was the day we were packing up our last few items and piling them onto a truck that would disappear with all our earthly belongings not be seen again until we were in our new house. We moved on the last day in May and May is hot here in Houston. When I say hot, let me explain…Hot here is hell everywhere else. Our concrete is composed of different materials to withstand oven like temperatures, melting even human skin if one stood in one place long enough. The thick, sweet air hangs on your skin like heavy dew witnessed on delicate blossoms in the morning sunlight. The full smell of jasmine, adheres to the inside of your nose, making you think you have dreamed up this glorious perfume, for surely nothing could possibly smell this sweet. Our night jasmine in full bloom as the sun sets in the balmy evening urges the most splendid, luscious aroma. To partake of our sweet smells, our incredible foliage here in Houston, feels nothing short of feeling as though we have drifted back in time, to place from long ago where Scarlet and Rhett may show up for dinner. The days in south Texas, well, they make you feel faint. One must endure the sun, so as to become ‘heat hardy’, a phrase I had never encountered before, but now use on a regular basis. To hide from our sun if you live here is more dangerous than if you take it in. We, Texans live outside most of the year, even in the summer. We force ourselves to sit in the heat and the sun, so our bodies acclimate to our surroundings, mostly so we don’t pass out walking to our cars.
I learned, the hard way, when we first got here, never walk to the store at two in the afternoon. The boys and I got dressed, and headed out to walk the mile and half to the store to pick up a few items. Being May, we didn’t think about a heat index. Being naive northerners, we had lived through lots of wind chill factors, where our weather knowledge came from. By the time we got to the store we all were one step away from heat stroke. Perspiring profusely, red in the face, boiling from head to toe, and exhausted, we called a friend of ours to rescue us from having to attempt walking back home. Her husband later told us the heat index for the day was 106 degrees at the very time we were taking our hike. I take walks during the warm months, walking the dogs, riding bikes around town, but I don’t do it at two o’clock in the afternoon when the sun is baking the earth to a crispy finish.
We have acclimated to our weather here in the south. We had to evolve or perish. We have learned where the idea of siestas came from, greatly appreciating the chance to escape from the oven like atmosphere, hiding away in a dark air-conditioned room. Before we moved a friend, who had moved to Houston years earlier, had told us they grow sick of the sun here. Being from a state where the sun was a precious commodity, we could not comprehend what she was saying. “Some days we just pray for rain, just so the sun takes a day off”, she said with a straight face. Nothing could have seemed more foreign to my natural born Ohio mind. In Ohio we pray for sun starting in April and keep vigil until well after school starts. By Halloween we just give up, knowing any sun we see is a gift after that. I get what she was talking about now, I really do.
After enough years of getting fried, my body and the bodies of my family all adapted to the hot Texas sun. We are used to great tropical storms blowing in off the gulf, shaking our houses with thunder, producing a light show in the sky that pyro-technicians worldwide envy. Several times a year a house gets hit by the light show and burns to its core. Our electricity often leaves us for hours at a time due to the extraordinary power of a storm pouring its’ heart out.
2005, was my first experience with any kind of hurricane. First came Katrina in Louisiana, then came Rita sweeping just east of where we live, hitting my friend’s house and property. I am trying to think of appropriate ways to describe the enormity of those situations. I say those, because the two separate hurricanes are forever bound together for Texans. Due to the extreme nature of the devastation in New Orleans, many Texans, the very Texans who gave to those in need from Katrina, ended up suffering massive damage in their own homes and businesses. FEMA, a bogged down bureaucratic mess of a group, could not cope with the first hurricane, so those in Beaumont who suffered heavy damage, and several other smaller, lesser known places, where people were literally trapped for days, had little or no help from anyone outside of the state, and even then they found themselves begging for help, literally calling in from jammed cell phones, trying text their desperation to the outside world. Everyone bore witness to the tragedy handed down from Mother Nature, herself in Louisiana, but few were given the views of Texans without electricity for two months, or the blue tarps that remained on roof tops for years. Rita, while devastating in her own right, and Texans were still in the process of helping those who had been flooded out in our neighboring state, Louisiana. Those two hurricanes were the perfect examples of adding insult to injury.
For Rita, we had prepared by filling every trash can in the house with water, plywood covered our large plate-glass windows that normally showed our beautiful backyard, canned food was purchased, tubs were filled, closets were emptied so we had a place to hide from high winds and debris, should the storm break through all of our other barriers. We made sure the cars were filled with gas, our important papers and documents were accessible, my precious pets were readied for evacuation if need be. We had never lived though anything like this before, so we did the best we could. We weren’t sure what we needed. They had lists readily available everywhere for those of us who probably wouldn’t evacuate since we were far enough away from the Gulf, but after watching Katrina, the disorganization, the chaos, the terror, none of us felt like we were safe regardless of how prepared we were.
(To be continued)