How Hurricanes Have Shaped My Destiny
On August 18th, 1983, a small but powerful, Hurricane Alicia, came crashing into the Texas gulf coast.
My mother, living in west Houston, was pregnant with me at the time. I was due mid-September, and my mother wore a sapphire September birthstone ring to celebrate the occasion of her first child.
But it was not meant to be.
Alicia’s aftermath left 21 people dead and thousands without power or water. While August in Texas is unpleasant with AC, imagine being a human incubator with no relief from the heat and humidity.
Maybe that was the reason I was born prematurely.
Make mine a hurricane, baby
Of course no one remembers their birth, but from what I’ve been told mine was dramatic. I was being choked by my umbilical cord of all things. Luckily, I was smaller and earlier than planned.
If Alicia and her barometric pressure had not popped me out when she did, I might’ve not made it through birth.
Instead, I was born into the torn-up, powerless aftermath of the monster storm.
Rooftops ripped off houses, billboards punched straight through, knocked over and uprooted pecan trees, 80s cars abandoned in flooded streets, heat and humidity, and brown foamy flood water with clusters of fire ants floating collectively in reddish hell-balls down the drainage ways… this was my welcoming to the world.
Life on the Gulf Coast
Decades passed without another killer hurricane hitting the gulf coast.
Growing up in Houston was great, and taking a five hour drive over to New Orleans was even better.
New Orleans, October of 2003. Maybe there was never anywhere better to be.
NOLA, before Hurricane Katrina. Before climate change, social media, and the orange man.
The old southern charm still whispered in the air. The smell of rotting leaves, petrichor, and simple syrup all in currents of cool air mixed with warm humidity. This is Magic’s signature scent.
We were there for Voodoo fest. I crowd surfed to A Perfect Circle’s Weak and Powerless (which is how we are as humans when it comes to hurricanes). I still remember the man’s face who gave me the boost up to surf the crowd. His face slack with drugs, but not unkind, his hands laced together by his knee. He had given a few others a boost up and now he had his eyes on me. “C’mon! C’mon!” He raised his bushy eyebrows gesturing towards me to take a chance and ride the crowd to the stage.
I was 19 years old. I put my Adidas shell-toe into his hands and he thrust me forward, up onto the heads of the concert goers. Another man flipped me over and I caught a glimpse of the night sky. I felt hands on my back, pushing me much faster than I had expected.
Like a human wave, the hands pushed me towards the stage, towards Maynard’s hypnotic voice, towards the lights. I made it to the front and saw the singer before a security guard pulled me over the edge of the front row audience and into a walk way.
Laughing, I walked back to find my friends. I had lost my left shoe! After the concert was over, I found it lying in the open field of concert debris. Somehow, I knew I would.
Katrina breaks the levees
When Katrina drowned New Orleans on August 29th 2005, we in Houston watched the news in mixed horror and relief that it didn’t hit us.
As word of mouth spread of the hurricane’s destruction(pre-social media) a rumor started that NOLA was completely gone. Wiped from the face of the earth. My jaw dropped in disbelief when I head this.
However, the city survived, barely. Worse than the hurricane, was our government’s reaction to those who needed help. People had little choice but to leave New Orleans, losing their homes and jobs in the process.
Like their ancestors the Acadians (who were forced out of their Nova Scotian homes only to reunite in New Orleans and become Cajuns), the Cajuns again were forced out of their homes as FEMA did little to help them stay. Many Cajuns found their way to Houston, where for only a short while they would be safe from the storms.
Houston has Rita parties
Only a month after Katrina’s devastation , another big Hurricane, Rita, aimed herself at Louisiana and Texas again.
The anxiety around Rita was largely based on what had happened with Katrina. We would listen to reports and predictions of paths the storm could take. Everyone boarded up their windows, and families talked of evacuation plans. I remember becoming acutely aware that elsewhere they were not dealing with hurricanes, which gave me some solace and also some strange sense of pride; that I was somehow tougher because I survived where hurricanes happened.
Rita hit further East than expected and Houston and Galveston were spared the worst of it. The hurricane was intense; demolishing hundreds of thousands of homes, and killing over a hundred people.
I was 22 at the time, and had begun drinking alcohol. While we waited for Rita to make landfall we drank margaritas at a Rita party. Hurricanes are like snow days for those of us living near the Gulf. Businesses close down, and everyone just anxiously hangs out. Sometimes you even let yourself wonder, “will I make it through the night?”
After the wild hurricane season of 2005 passed without doing much damage to Houston, the attitude of Houstonians became skeptical. Cynicism around hurricane reporting grew along with the complaints of having to accommodate New Orleans refugees.
Time is cruel to those who have suffered a trauma. They’re expected to get over it at the same time the public does, any delay is seen as tiresome. The Cajuns did their best to keep up with the hustle and bustle of Houston, and New Orleans struggled to her feet, minus her natives.
Years passed without another deadly hurricane and those of us living near the Gulf began to forget.
Then Ike came
September 13th, 2008. Hurricane Ike managed to push his way into the news just as people were staring in wide horror at the collapse of the American financial system.
Almost simultaneously, the massive cat. 4 hurricane hit us in Houston just as hundreds of dazed-looking employees of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers poured onto the sidewalks of Seventh Avenue in Manhattan (holding their entire desk in a box) thus signaling the worldwide financial collapse to follow.
I was 25 years old. I had no idea at the time that what was happening in New York would affect my entire future, that it would mold my destiny. That it would mean that my entire generation would scarcely be able to get a job, much less buy a house or pay off debt… to me at the time, what was happening in New York was far and away. It was something I didn't understand the ramifications of, because even Bush said it would just mean an adjustment. No, I was only focused on the incoming hurricane. Because I knew hurricanes.
At least, I thought I knew hurricanes. The strength of Ike was like nothing I had experienced before. Ike hit Houston full on, causing an estimated 37 billion, that’s billions with a B, in damage.
Ike came in the middle of the night, like monsters tend to do. Although I was skeptical of the hurricane actually hitting Houston, I slept in a tent in the living room. I felt that the tent would protect me from any shattering glass.
People do strange things during storms.
On the night of a hurricane the wind starts blowing and doesn’t die down. Then you realize that there is a howl, and you wonder how long you have been hearing this howl…surely longer than you realized. And you focus in on the howl, but you cannot place it. It is not coming from outside. It is there… in your lap, no, it is in your head. Oh god, your head! There is so much pressure in your head. Fuzz and noise.
I go to look outside. The false hickory tree is flattened on the ground. A man is walking on the sidewalk, his jacket flying behind him, he is leaning sideways into the wind. Am I really seeing this?
I go to bed. I am so over this hurricane. I fall asleep fast.
When I wake up I wonder why I am on the ground. Without moving, I can see out the window. It is mid-morning judging from the light. The tree on the ground stares back at me. So we are both lying flat on the ground, perhaps the tree is wondering what it is doing there too.
There is no power. That is ok, that’s to be expected.
A week passes. Still no power. We are lucky to have a generator that we use to charge our phones and watch TV. On the news, there is talk of the financial market collapse. I stare down at my soda can. I am sick of drinking warm drinks. I miss ice.
Two weeks later, we still don’t have power. People are getting angry. We picket a power company with hand painted signs and chant “What do we want? Power!! When do we want it? Now!!” but the power stay off.
On the third week our neighbors on the other side of the street get power. We do not speak to them, but we see the lights on in their house. We hope we will get power again soon.
At work, everyone asks each other if they have power. Seems like half of us do, and half of us don’t.
I think it was about 3 weeks that we went without power but I remember others not having it for months.
New beginnings
In 2009 I moved away from Houston. I made a new home near Austin and had a son. It was many years before another hurricane managed to touch me.
Hurricane Harvey, another cat. 4, came on August 25th 2017. His rains reached all the way to central Texas and flooded the area I lived in.
A couple days later, and 34 years after Hurricane Alicia brought me into the world, we celebrated my birthday with strawberry cake.
Afterwords, I take my 2 year old son outside with his little yellow rain coat and boots and we dance in the rain. I smile as I watch my son splash gleefully in the hurricane’s puddles.
