Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time
But you were always on my mind.
— Willie Nelson
I.
Like other natural disasters, the novelty of a great flood has a tendency to wear off.
That’s true even when it’s three great floods in three years. As you’ve no doubt seen in the news, Houston, my hometown, has suffered three so-called 500-year floods since 2015, and in particular my old neighborhood, Meyerland, has gotten hammered in the Memorial Day Flood of 2015, the Tax Day Flood of 2016, and the Harvey Flood of this year as Brays Bayou raged over its banks.
First, the floods and the media coverage — and then the news teams move along to the next disaster and the thing begins to pale, even to become banal. One can get used to the rhythm of it in American cultural life, even. It’s like some old bore that hangs on at the party too long, then suddenly trips over the garbage cans on the sidewalk, gathers himself with a chuckle —
I’m alright, I’m alright! — and stumbles into the night.
II.
Houston has always been on my mind. For nearly 40 years, ever since I fled my city and my neighborhood — not on the lam exactly, but something like on the lam — no matter where I’m traveling, if asked where I’m from I say without thinking, "Texas," even though I’ve lived in Portland for nearly 25 years. Or, if I want to be especially precise, I’ll say, "East Texas," which as any self-respecting East Texan with a tapering southern drawl will tell you is — with our multicultural big city and oil refinery-stained air — distinctly different from the gravelly drawls and long dusty horizons of West Texas popularized by Hollywood. All this time, too, I suppose, it has surprised me that Brays Bayou, the waterway just a few yards from my childhood home on Loch Lomond in southwest Houston, has been creeping inside me. Not flooding exactly, but running slow and low until the rains of retrospection come and the images and stories quickly rise and overflow its banks.
East Texas has always had floods. There was flooding in Brays Bayou as far back as 1843, with the bridges leading into the small city submerged under water from tropical storms, hurricanes, and thunderstorms. The historic reports are eerily repetitive. In 1900, a catastrophic hurricane hit Galveston. A third of the city was destroyed. At least 6,000 people died. A tropical storm landed near Corpus Christi in South Texas in 1919 and brought seven inches of rain over Houston, with Brays Bayou’s gage height rising to 56 feet, making it one of the hardest hit waterways. Small boats were the only transportation near Rice Avenue for a week. Hurricane Carla in 1946 forced evacuations and flooded homes from Victoria to Dallas. In October 1949, 10 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, causing Brays Bayou to overrun its banks and flood over 100 homes. Ten years later another 100 homes were flooded when seven inches of rain fell in just two hours. In 1960, strong winds and 10 inches of sideways-falling rain overspilled the banks. In 1976, it was 13 inches.
From the 1970s onward the names of Texas's hurricanes and tropical storms are like a yearbook of high water and damaged lives: Celia, Felice, Edith, Delia, and Carmen. Anita, Amelia, and Claudette. Alan, Norma, Alicia, and Barry. Flooding from 1989’s Hurricane Allison caused a quarter of the housing to be destroyed. Three hundred homes flooded over several days of steady rains in 1992. Six thousand homes were flooded in a hard rain in 2001. Hurricane Ike made landfall near Galveston in 2008 and flooded 80 percent of the homes there.
Since then the floods have only gotten more severe, especially in Meyerland. The rice farms that were here before the development of the neighborhood were well located for the heavy rains. Every road, mall, and square inch of concrete makes it harder for rain to get into the soil. The impermeability leads to more runoff, standing water, damage, and death.
III.
When I grew up in Houston in the 1970s, the rains could be dangerous, and we all knew it. A story: During one flood in 1973, my mother hunkered before dawn inside our house on Loch Lomond with her three sons, 10, 9, and 5 (me), along with my dog, Velvet, a sturdy boxer. Already my father was stranded at work; the winds had picked up to 80-90 miles per hour. Mother had woken up first and found the power out, and then decided to drink some of yesterday’s coffee while we boys were still in bed. I can see her cinching the tie of her terry cloth bathrobe, pulling down and up simultaneously. The handle of the coffee mug must have been cold to her fingers.
From the 1970s onward the names of Texas's hurricanes and tropical storms are like a yearbook of high water and damaged lives: Celia, Felice, Edith, Delia, and Carmen. Anita, Amelia, and Claudette. Alan, Norma, Alicia, and Barry.
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From inside the dining room she listened to the rain falling in shattered lines and knocking on the roof. She watched the street already filling up to the curb with water. She began to imagine water splashing against her feet inside the house, and then hurried to gather us into a small rowboat that we kept against the wall in the garage. My brothers pushed the tub down the driveway and dropped it into the shallow river of muddy water in the street, now lapping the grass lawns, the windy rain falling like a glaze of pins. We began to paddle the boat farther north from the bayou, with Velvet crouched and panting between my legs. Every sidewalk was submerged, cars floating in the high waters like marshmallows, trees pulled out of the soggy grass at the roots, some leaning on electrical lines, some against the gutters of houses, others across the roads. Suddenly, at the end of Manhattan Street, my oldest brother hopped out of the boat, thinking that to tug it by hand would be faster than rowing. He climbed out, one leg at a time, after first checking the water’s depth with an oar. But as he stepped down into the black water, he cut his foot on a shard of glass. Mother ordered us back to the house to take our chances there.
In the end the house didn't flood. After the last of the rain fell and the sky cleared, the lawns gleaming with large puddles, the neighborhood exhaled a little joy into the humid air under puffy white clouds.
IV.
I’m sure that rains like that made me crave the forms and colors of clear sky as much as I crave the open spaces of a poem. But that’s all there is to tell about it, really, even if underneath the most average experience, like waiting out a flood, a transmutation can take place in your spirit, something abstract that you float on later when you’ve become a writer.
I’m sure I could not have named any of that when I was a boy. But there it is, all the same, thunderstorms so common during my Houston upbringing, so strangely routine, that I sometimes just went to bed and slept them out, much to my mother’s consternation. Vigilance is needed, Mother said, standing in the hall outside my door, and I straggled to the kitchen in my teenage body, the electricity out, the windows stretched hard in their sashes and frames, whining against the strong winds and rain jangling on the shingles, a short white candle flickering in the center of the oval kitchen table as we resumed gin rummy to pass the time. Among the multitude of those waiting out the heavy rains, we were a couple of shadows leaning against the dark.
In the May Day Flood of 2015, I have read, eight inches of rain fell near that house in three hours. In a quarter of an hour the water went from street level to the height of the headlights of cars parked off the street. Three people in the neighborhood drowned during a rescue attempt by the fire department. Recently I’ve thought about them, and the dozens who died last summer in Houston, and all those, too, who were, for a time, stranded in the water and full of fear.
And I felt, all over again, humbled by the slow bayou.
V.
My people who still live in Texas did okay during the Harvey floods. Everyone is safe, I can report. The waters stayed out of their homes. They were lucky. Had they been living a creek’s length or two to the left, a street or two to the right, it might have been otherwise.
I’m not a scientist, we like to say in our house, mocking the politicians who deny climate change. But I’ve got two eyes and a brain, and I can read, and it sure seems clear that today's storms are worse. The breadth and intensity of Harvey’s 50 inches of rainfall exceeded every previous Texas rainfall record.
A day or so after the Harvey flood began to recede, and people could fully assess the damage, an old friend from childhood who now lives in Denver, and with whom I’ve had little contact for nearly 40 years, posted a sweet remembrance on Facebook about the idyllic days and nights of Meyerland in the 1970s. To paraphrase — it was a long post — he wrote about how he was one of the fortunate kids who got to grow up in Meyerland, having movied to Jackwood Street in 1966 when he was two. His mother still lives in that house, he wrote, and for reasons of damn good luck, it did not flood this time. No better place to grow up, he wrote, we rode our bikes everywhere. He wrote about going to Jewish day camps and youth groups and events at the synagogue, and of all the Jewish kids who lived within walking distance of each other. He wrote of playing with friends throughout the neighborhood, staying out until the street lights came on. He recalled a house he'd played in that was now badly flooded. He’ll never forget that house, he wrote. It was the first place he played spin-the-bottle in 6th grade. He went on in this vein, and then he wished everyone still living in the neighborhood good luck getting their lives back together.
Reading it, and the hundreds of grateful comments from people I knew well or whose names I recognized from that tight-knit Jewish community, I thought it's a special sorrow to recall a happy time when you're feeling miserable.
I’ve recently been working on two books that have to do with Texas,
The Education of a Young Poet and something else, a different narrative altogether, about a great drama in my life in Houston and the reasons I never returned. That’s a story for a different time. But because I’ve been working on these books, I have wormed myself far down into a hole of difficult memories and reflections. Doing so has meant that, long ago, I ditched all that rose-colored nostalgia. And yet reading that Facebook post, and all those homesick comments, and keeping an eye on the devastating news of Harvey’s impact on my old streets, and what was happening to friends there, I am even more aware of how much has changed since I left. How much, inevitably, must change.
And there’s this: "Things change" takes longer than you think it will, but then it happens faster than you thought it could.
VI.
Last December I spent a week walking the sidewalks and bayous of Meyerland. The damage from the May Day and Tax Day flooding in my old neighborhood was impossible to ignore.
It had been decades since I had spent much more than a few hours there, but the imprint of the place on both my physical and psychic orientation has held, and I could have walked street to street blindfolded and found my way. Here, where a house had been, was just a grassy lot. I’d been in that missing house many times. An oversized contemporary blue house was built in the next lot over, to replace what I remembered as a modest ranch house. The new house was completely out of scale with the older, one-story homes on the street. The houses that were still standing looked waterlogged. Ahead, another house was being demolished, standing half-upright like a fallen tree.
Time felt like it was dissolving. In the humid December air I could feel my shirt clinging to my skin. I stopped in front of where I remembered one old friend’s house used to be. It was gone, just a windy patch of grass where her bedroom used to be; where one afternoon we sat listening to “Paperback Writer” over and over, and I swore to her that’s what I wanted to be.
Even if you don't think about your hometown for years, your expectation is that it still exists. You might see it as some hidden island that you choose not to approach. Perhaps even the waters to the port are too rough. But in your imagination, the island is inaccessible to everyone else too. It’s an act of psychic preservation.
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Ahead, another empty lot. Across the street, one, two, three grassy lots in a row, the houses long since torn down. Many of the remaining houses were up for sale. I’d read that after the recent floods, families were sliding into debt. With the expectation that future storms will be more frequent and severe, there is no end to the encroaching anxiety.
I was unprepared for the feeling of heartbreak that took a hold of me. It’s one thing to read about how the high water ruined people’s homes and displaced their lives, and quite another to walk down a street you knew as well as the freckles on your own arm, on a mild sunny day, past FOR SALE signs and dank carpets rolled up at the ends of driveways, and frayed American flags stuffed into garbage cans. And this was some six months after the flood hit. It was difficult to imagine the discussions families may have had about whether to stay; or to imagine the grandmother who lives in the spare room and says one morning, as the parents leave to walk the children to school and drive to work,
We should appreciate what we have and be satisfied with "good enough." Street after street, modest brick houses were being torn down, and the new houses going in were priced such that a young family couldn't afford them.
I felt a breeze of nostalgia — all the way down in my tough writer’s wormhole — when I came upon Godwin Park, and I saw the solitary little hill where we used to play hide-and-seek and tackle football on the weekends. That little hill rose out of the grass like an island in a great sea.
VII.
I don’t think the floods made me want to be a writer.
Last December, near the end of my week of walking the streets of Meyerland, I finally arrived at the street I grew up on. I stood at the corner and felt the street’s silence. It was the feeling of entering something completely open, like a balcony. But also suffocating; and yet also, sacrosanct.
To get there I crossed under the South Loop on Beechnut Street, from over where Congregation Beth Yeshurun is. I attended grade school at the synagogue. It’s the largest conservative synagogue in North America. The main sanctuary can seat over a 1,000 people, and the flooding from Harvey nearly destroyed it.
Walking to my old house, I passed a homeless guy in sweatpants and a Texans T-shirt who was panhandling with a cardboard sign that read, "HELP ME, I’M AN AMERICAN." He was handsome, black, with strong, tender eyes, and we nodded. I passed more massive, newly-built houses. All of the sidewalks were empyy, even as I headed into the thickly populated neighborhoods.
Even if you don't think about your hometown for years, your expectation is that it still exists. You might see it as some hidden island that you choose not to approach. Perhaps even the waters to the port are too rough. But in your imagination, the island is inaccessible to everyone else too. It’s an act of psychic preservation.
More new houses emerged, like fortresses. The torn-down houses seemed to have been harvested like cornfields, and the dark trees that surrounded them had been stripped out of the ground like troublesome weeds. Construction work proceeded on new homes, the jagged walls jutting upward, like urchins, becoming larger and larger, gaining a faux homey look. Then the roofs, until you can no longer remember the empty lot with its naked foundation, or the dramas of the people who used to live there; or what each family offered to the human story of eating and sleeping and making love and pitching a fit, the magnanimity of doing things in close proximity to one another. Soon, I knew, new faces would peer out of windows and doors, or disappear into the unknowable twists of a family’s desires.
This felt like the meaning of absence — perhaps even the meaning of memory — I decided. Not missing something, but being on the outside. It’s like you can see an apple on the the windowsill inside a house, but because you’re on the sidewalk, you can't hold it in your hand. Even the birds seemed to have fled.
The traffic keeps coming all day and night in Houston, the streetlights pop off and on at dawn and dusk, and the empty lots from the floods, dug out between the old houses, are like the remnants of prehistoric archaeological sites.
As I turned to walk onto my old street, I wished to be invisible, as if I could embody perspective only, a line of vision, with nothing to occupy myself or be conscious of, unterrified of abandonment, wild as a torn heart, and with no care for what I was waiting to see; to possess nothing, even, and to finally accept what secrets of life were about to be revealed to me.
I knew better than to think like this. I had no idea what I would find when I reached my old house. Walking down Loch Lomond I tried to focus on the leafy hush settling over the street. The clouds above, moving fast in widening gaps. The sunlight sending patches onto the grass, the rays descending through the air in a fan of spires.
I remembered a photo of me and Velvet, my old boxer, on the front lawn. I’m five years old, in shorts and a tank top, summer light absorbing my skin, tan as her softest brown fur, barely higher than her head, even as she was sitting. My hand is behind her neck, fisting her scruff. She’s six years old, bright-eyed, her mug black like night, lips parted, pink tongue panting. Ears up. White paws. A muscular, staunch chest. Ahead of us is the house, the lawn a matted green. After the picture was snapped, I got down on my knees in the hot, dry grass to stroke her ears with both of my hands. I rubbed in and out of her soft ear canals, and soothed the insides, until she moaned a little with pleasure. Then I pressed my forehead gently against her forehead. She licked my face with her young muzzle.
The whole memory is like a last fling.
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David Biespiel is the author of
A Long, High Whistle, a collection of pieces drawn from his longstanding column in the
Oregonian about writing and poetry that won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction. He has also written five books of poetry, most recently
The Education of a Young Poet, Charming Gardeners and
The Book of Men and Women, which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. He is the editor of
Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, which received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He writes the Poetry Wire column for
The Rumpus. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.