Okay, I admit it. I let September slip through my fingers and again accomplished nothing toward finishing novel number three, Port of Miracles. But, as has been the case for a few years now, I have excuses.
Earlier in the month, I was spellbound with the Katrina disaster visited on the people of New Orleans by Mother Nature and then the one inflicted by our government's too-little too-late approach to disaster relief. Then, later in the month, I had a ring-side seat for the Rita evacuation fiasco.
After several days of federal and local officials telling everyone that Rita was the killer storm of the century and everyone with a lick of sense should evacuate, Texas Gulf Coast residents did just that. And the result was a massive traffic jam all the way to north of Dallas, all the way to west of San Antonio, and all the way as far in every other landward direction as people could get on a tank of gas. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
(After it was clear the evacuation was itself a disaster, these same government officials said, "We did mean all of you; just the ones in areas prone to flooding." Huh? The only hills in Houston are the highway overpasses; most all parts of town have flooded at one time or another; and, most of the feeder roads flood so if you wait to find out your section of town is going to flood it's too late to get out of Dodge! Forget mandatory testing of school children. We've dumbed down government as much as we can stand, from the White House on down. What we need is mandatory testing for intelligence, integrity, and basic common sense as a requirement for running for or being appointed to any public office. But let's save that rant for another day.)
Yes, we evacuated, but not on Thursday, the "evacuation disaster" day, because on Thursday we had no idea which direction to head for safety, and we were still watching the news spellbound, and we still had decisions to make.
Since my husband and I -- the old folks still left at home after the kids moved to other parts of the world -- didn't think we would survive the traffic snarl any better than the thristy out-of-gas two million Texans already in it, and none of the government officals or weather forecasters seemed to know for sure which direction the storm was headed, we let indecision be our guide.
Friends in the Hill Country were willing to take us in and their between-Austin-and-Waco location looked to be clearly out of the storm's path, so where to evacuate to was decided, subject to Rita's final turn. We would wait until the early morning hours on Friday to make our escape from Houston.
There were still other important decisions to be made. One car or two? We decided on just one. Less stuff could be hauled away, but if stranded, we would be stranded together, and together, it would be just another grand adventure in what has turned out to be a life full of grand adventures. Which route out of town? Not any government designated evacuation routes, that was for sure. We had seen what happens when you follow those. Backroads take longer, but a road trip is always more fun if you stick to backroads.
But the big questions was what, if any, of our worldly possessions was worth saving? What do you take with you when you believe that all you leave behind will fly away in the angry winds of September?
Not a lot, especially when you're an aging baby boomer with bad knees and live in a multi-level house. You quickly decide that if it isn't on the main level, it will have to save itself. But, we're talking about gut-level decisions here, deciding what among our forty-some years of married-life accumulated stuff can't be left behind.
Turns out, that list was relatively small. It didn't include any furniture or china or household goods, even though there are family treasures handed down from parents and grandparents and great-grandparents that we would surely miss. We sorted through drawers and cabinets for the stashes of "baby pictures" -- our children as babies and as they grew up, of the birthdays and graduations and weddings and grandchildren as they came along -- the sum and substance of our adult lives and their youth. All the packets of photographs that never made it into albums, pages from the albums (covers too bulky), photos extracted from frames, all of it went into a Rubermaid plastic container.
After a couple of repackings to try to make it all fit into one, and we couldn't, we moved the excess to another container and added folders with the most recent bank statement and insurance policies and passports and birth certificates and three years of tax returns. In two other containers, we threw in enough clothes for a week for the both of us. An air mattress and a tent (just in case we were stranded by the road), bottles of water, enough for us and to share, and a cooler full of assorted refrigerator items filled most of the remaining car space. My husband extracted the hard drives from our computers and they went under the seats. That was is. The history of our lives in plastic tote containers loaded into our Grapes of Wrath Chevrolet.
Friday morning at around four a.m., we responded to the alarm by turning on the TV news to see if there were any traffic reports that would give us a clue as to whether we were heading away from the storm or toward it in heading to the Hill Country. Still warnings that it was a killer storm. Still not sure if it would hit Galveston and then Houston on it's inland path or just sideswipe us as it wiped out Port Author and Lake Charles. Our national and local officials were then thinking it would only give Houston a glancing blow. They were also in the process of recognizing the error of their ways in sending people out on roads without water or gasoline staged along evacuation routes and were now urging sheltering in place.
So Friday's decision was of a different nature. The car was packed. Friends were holding a confirmed reservation on their guest room. Do we leave or do we unpack the car and risk our lives on these guys advice to shelter in place? Follow the advice of the same guys who had told people to evacuate into massive traffic jams the day before? I think not.
We hit the road. We took a backroads route and arrived at our friends' home in early afternoon, sent out emails to children and friends to let everyone know we have evacuated stafely, then enjoyed the terrific lake view from our friends' living room as we watch television news. Late into the night, Rita blew into the Gulf Coast East of Houston and all the news channels quickly went back to worring about New Orleans' problems.
CNN, the leader of the pack, was more interested in New Orleans reflooded areas where no people were than in finding out about the storm damage to the people and property of Port Author and surrounding areas of East Texas and West Louisiana, which was and still is substantial. Our beloved FEMA took the same approach as with Katrina -- teaching the populace self-reliance. Apparently our government second responders only responds where CNN tells them to go -- it's the photo ops that count, after all.
So, with a virtual news blackout on Houston's fate, we decided on our own that we had been spared. Surely if Houston had been blown away, CNN would have left the New Orleans levee situation long enough to say something about it. We enjoyed another day of our friends' hospitality on Saturday, thinking all those people who had rushed to evacuate on Thursday would be rushing home again -- after all there were no shelters to take them in. On Sunday, staying with back roads to avoid "returnee" traffic, we headed back to Houston.
Arriving home some five hours later, we found that Rita had been gentle with us. There were a few limbs down in the driveway and yard and the power had been out so a small drinks refrigerator in my office had defrosted itself and wet the surrounding carpet. All in all, there was little to complain about.
So what is the point of this non-event evacuation tale?
If there is a point, I suppose it is that evacuating your home is one of those times you have to decide what in your life is really worth saving. I've always know that it is the people that matter; if you have your family, you can start over, with or without worldly goods. Had we still had children at home or grandchildren visiting, they would have gone into the car and the photo records of their lives would have remained with the house. And I'm well aware that you can't take it with you when you die; a brush with serious illness a few years back had me plotting about who I would saddle with the "stuff" of my live when I went. But, of course, I had never gotten around to actually trying to transfer possession.
But this was a new situation -- fitting a life-time into the backseat and trunk of a car. When you know your home and everything in it could be blown away in the angry winds of September, you have to make serious choices. And we had, quicker than either of us would have thought possible, made those tough choices that we were delaying until the witching hour of "retirement" still a few years off. Was Rita God's way of telling us it was time to declutter our lives and downsize?
I think it might have been. Once you realize that most of the stuff you've accumulated is just too bulky to carry around on your backs the rest of your lives, it gets you to thinking about how much simpler life would be if all you had to worry about "keeping safe" was four plastic tubs of wordly goods. That's about all you can fit into an "assisted living" room or an RV -- where we're told this generation of aging baby boomers is headed.
I haven't unpacked, except for a few clothes. I have gone back through a couple of rooms and culled the stuff that needs to go to a charity shop so it can find it ways into someone else's cluttered home. But there are rooms to go before I quit. The angry winds of September created unwillying gypsies out of millions of Katrina's and Rita's victims. It reminded us all that our government can't or won't protect us from Acts of God or Acts of Terror. Our government it is much too cluttered with rules and regulations and procedures and decision processes and inept cronies of plunderous politicians to be efficient or effective at anything as unimportant as saving the lives of taxpayers in imminent danger.
But I suspect the angry winds of September also reminded a few million more of us how simple life was when we were practicing Flower Children who burned bras and draft cards and didn't trust the government and didn't have all these wordly goods that needed saving. Somehow we became possessions-bound people just like the parents we swore we would never become, and we even passed the disease on to our children.
Anybody interested in a nice four bedroom home in Houston? I promise to have it decluttered by sale date. Anybody got a good RV they want to unload cheap?
Nelson Collier, Head King of the Timber Guys Book Club and a partners in the historic Calvert Hotel, now has autographed copies of the books of Texas authors who attended the November 6 Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Literacy Awareness Event on sale in his Salon at the hotel. If you're traveling Texas Hill Country over the holidays, you'll want to stop in for a great meal at the historic hotel's restaurant and then visit Nelson's charming salon for beauty and books.
