Surviving Rita

I thought I 'd repost the email alerts sent to friends and families during the recent hurricane scare. - DWRT


Hey y'all,

Well, we tried to get out twice, Wednesday night and Thursday morning. The first time we made it about twenty miles. The second time only 10 miles. Each trip took about 2 and 1/2 hours.

So, we have decided to stay home and bunker in. For those of you who don't know, we live thirty miles SW of Houston, so the current track (as of Friday 7:00 AM, CST) takes a track NW of Houston, so we may, and I stress the word may, be OK.

We have plenty of supplies, enough for a least a week or so, as well as plenty of water. We boarded up what we could, and now we just have to sit it out.

I'll try to email all of you as long as I can, and feel free to give us a call, if you want, at the home line -

XXX-XXX-XXXX

Wish us luck!

Doyle

PS To my gaming buddies: Well, I'll be in town, anybody wanna game?

PPS To Big Joe: I still blame this all on global warming, so, it's still George Bush's fault. :P


Hey everybody,

Well, today has been a little strange. Early on it felt like any other lazy Sunday, only that it wasn't Sunday. It only felt like Sunday because of the quiet in the neighbourhood. Let me tell you, having less neighbours does wonders for the neighbourhood.

So, in the midst of the day, more hurricane preparations as Rita inched closer on the TV screen, overlapping band of greens and yellows topped with cherry-red splotches. Filling the bathtubs, watching the water drain from the bathtubs (such excitement!), filling pans and bottles with water, grilling every piece of meat in the freezer, including eight Cornish hens - left over from some party miscalculation, filling the coolers with ice, moving hundreds of pounds of games and books from the floor to higher on the bookshelves, washing every scrap of clothing in the house, cleaning, storing filled trash bins in house (no garage), etc...

All under a moderately warm sun and blue sky filled with puffy white clouds. The last couple of days have been gorgeous, as long as you weren't stuck on a freeway somewhere.

But of course, the main activity of the day: watching the boob-tube as it belted out warnings, advisories, reports, tear-filled assertions of the toughness, politeness, and general good will of the citizenry and sundry other matters, always turning back to the radar, screen gradually filling with green, yellow and red.

I must admit to preferring the satellite images. Several days ago, Rita was beautiful, all puffy white, surrounding a perfect eye-wall. The better images would show a sort of 3-D view, where the clouds seemed like the brilliant cotton on the fields nearby our house (belonging to the Jester Unit prison-farm), sloping down toward that inner eye, perfect swirls disentangling themselves from the center of the storm like cotton candy.

Today she seems more ragged, as if haggard from her long journey, tired, wispy hair wild and unkempt, tears streaming from relief to be nearing shore.

The first of the storm bands is moving over our area now, and it is slightly darker outside, the sun fled, leaving a soft, subdued glow from the sky above, gently dimming down, waiting for the night.
A few drops of rain every once in a while, then nothing for an hour. The ground is actually quite dry, and the manicured lawn of our suburban home seems parched, thirsty, summoning to it a rain that will extend far past its welcome.

I do fear the flood. Different reports give wildly different estimates about amounts-in-a-24-hour-period, some asserting 12-15", others more conservative, offering a hopeful 3-5". All I know is that I don't want it in the house, thank you very much.

All this stuff surrounding me: books, games, furniture, computer. It all seems so important to me earlier, what to take, what to leave behind, agonizing over this supplement or that rare book. I was happy to come back to all of it, honestly.

Well, I have always been a hoarder. Way too much stuff. What will I do, what will I be if it all washes away?

It's gotten darker since I started this email, no more the diffuse dim glow of a sunset hidden behind the clouds. Now there is only the wind, and rain.

Lots of it, I am told.

Love,

Doyle


Hey,

I went out for about thirty minutes this morning and stared at the sky.

As some of you are no doubt aware, Rita hit the Texas coast at Beaumont/Port Arthur, across Galveston Bay from Houston. We live in the Richmond/Rosenberg area, which is 30 miles southwest of Houston. So from about midnight to 5:00 AM, all we really got was a long summer shower.Power has gone off intermitantly, but never more than five minutes or so at a time.

So after breakfast, I went outside, planted a chair in the front lawn and stared up.

As I have mentioned before, we live in suburbia, in one of those 'master plan' communities near a golf course. The street we live on runs roughly north to south, and is bordered with a fair amount of trees. The area, before it was developed, drained and sculpted, was wetlands, which means the indigenous trees are a fair mix of oak, willow, and other sorts that look different, but whom I am entirely ignorant of the names of. Have to try to change that.

So as I sat down, the first thing I noticed was the wind. It came in gusts, perhaps 20-30 mph at a time, or less, which is my best guess. The winds would come from the north and the northwest, due to the circulation of the storm. If you look at the radar images of the local area, you can see a county just to the right and slightly to the south of Harris. That's Fort Bend, where Jane Long came and settled after leaving the Alamo. I live roughly in the middle of that county.

So the storm circulates counter-clockwise as it travels north, which means that even though we are on the edge of the storm as it travels north, we still receive winds and rain from the trailing bands of the storm, which are progressing from the north and east to a southwest heading.
Thus, since my street runs north to south, as I listened to the wind, I could hear it progressing through the trees from the north end of the block, whispering through the treetops, making them shake as if in anticipation. Then the wind would reach me, and I would have a breeze that flowed over me like a caress.

The speed of the wind through the trees was about the same as a car coming down the street, which leads me to my conclusions about speed.

That amount of wind is still awe-inspiring. I could see the clouds over head, long narrow bands of them, all grey and white but tinged with the light blues and purples that come with grey. As they would whip down the street, I would imagine them as the bands I saw earlier on the ubiquitous radar shots. But they were too small to be anything but threads of the gigantic whiteness that spread over the continent.

But dimly I began to see that we were on the edge of the circulation of the storm above us, as if I were looking at the bottom of a gigantic top that spun above us. It was too far away to see the opposite side of the storm, where the circulation was travelling the other way, venting all its fury before placidly passing over us, but I could just barely imagine it, in my mind's eye.

It's 10:00, and it's raining a little more now, and will no doubt do so for several days. But the worst seems to be past for us, depending on how much it pours down in the next couple of days. I hope the rest of you receiving this email in the area have been as lucky as we.

Doyle


Hey,

Just a short note to follow up on my previous emails.

After the wind and clouds passed over Saturday morning, the rest of the day was humid and exetremly hot. We ended up only receiving six-tenths of an inch of rain, which was consistant for our location in the path of the storm. I found it somewhat ironic that we had to water the lawn Saturday and Sunday, because we had not received enough rainfall.

I also find myself possessed, along with my family and neighbours, of a curious sense of vague disappointment. Such feelings, it seems to me, are inappropriate, given the genuine human misery suffered by so many to the east from Rita, as well as those who suffered (and continue to do so) from Katrina.

Some say that every human experience offers us the opportunity to learn and grow, in much the same way as the spirit of God surrounds us, if we only can begin to perceive it.

I found that I am entirely too attached to the material works that surround me. These books and materials I have built up over the years represent to me uncounted possibilities that do not exist in my own life.

But if that were true, then no book, no game, and no experience would be able to generate them within me. It may that I do not have Ulysses in my soul, waiting to be born, but there are other stories within, waiting for expression.

I do believe, however, there was a need within me to witness the destruction all the material things around me, at the same time that I also felt attached to them. There was a part of myself that wanted the storm to come, to wipe away everything, so that my life would be forced into a change that I felt I could not initiate on my own.

I hope that such thought lie within my genuine need and desire for change, rather than a masochistic urge. Of course, it is also possible that within masochism itself rests the need for spiritual change, however misdirected.

More than any other element, my lack of thankfulness disturbs me more than anything else. Especially given how much I have to be thankful for.

Doyle