The Greatest Storm

This is the first time I've been to Houston while I'm old enough to remember it, and I have to admit that my stereotypes of the place have pretty much amounted to absolutely no spot of truth. First, it is green. I always pictured Houston as a bunch of big concrete buildings surrounded by desert, piles of dead sticks, and the occasional tumbleweed. Don't ask me where this vision came from because when as I pressed my face against the window of the plane to see what I thought were the rolling green hills of the Ozarks in Missouri the pilot announced "Please make sure your seats and tables are in the upright and locked position..."

Ok, so there were no hills, but it was, indeed green. I thought it would be dry and unbearable, but it was humid and comfortably warm for the fall... ahhhhh I thought - this is soooo much better than Wisconsin's snow in the middle of October. Why did I get a job in the Arctic again??

I was thinking, what on earth would make anyone choose the upper-Midwest over this!!??

Then we drove to Galveston and it all became clear.

Hurricanes don't happen in Wisconsin... tornadoes, yes, but when you have a tornado, big fishing boats don't end up teetering on the edge of interstates. I suppose with all the flooding we had in WI this year, I could have seen something akin to hurricane damage, but I'm not sure it would have had the same affect.

The giant resort hotel with a hole in its side and the bridge leading to it crumbled into the water... posts left standing nakedly in the surf where a house used to be... the battered remnants of a souvenir shop... countless windows broken and covered with boards spray painted with the words "Beware owner has gun"... the piles and piles of broken furniture and waste heaped in front of houses.....gas stations where the shelter was ripped right out of the ground and blown over...
It was all very surreal to survey the damage on a hot, perfectly windless day with an achingly blue sky.

The most ironic of all the images I took in was certainly the fishing cutter tipped on its side in the parking lot of a museum featuring an exhibit of the famous 1901 hurricane - the one that had devestated the pre-sea wall, historic district of Galveston. The toppled-over sign right next to it read "Experience America's Greatest Storm"...

You feel rather small and humbled witnessing how everything people ever build can all be ripped away or reduced to a pile of trash in an instant. I admire the kind of strength it takes to stand up in the face of a disaster like that, shake off the dust and peeled paint to start building a new life from scratch.

God be with all those unfortunate people - people whose homes are now bleak, vacant points of curiosity for sheltered and naive tourists like me.