Prologue to "A Buzz Kill Named Harvey"
(Or, how life can change in an instant)
I was off vacationing in Norway when I first realized the shit was hitting the fan back home. While I was planning to take a glorious hike up one of the most iconic landmarks in the country, back in Rockport, Texas, my friends were in full-bore panic mode: boarding up windows, stockpiling food and water, and filling gas tanks. Just in case.
Notifications on my iPhone confirmed the worst: the hurricane watch had turned into a hurricane warning, meaning this bugger was for real and headed their way. Mandatory evacuations were issued. Category 4 Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Rockport-Fulton on August 25, 2017, wiped out most of the town’s infrastructure (including cell towers and electricity), and then moved up the coast to cause catastrophic flooding in Houston. My stay in Norway was extended by a week because all area airports were closed.
My sweet friend Anita from the Master Gardeners program, who lived in nearby Portland, Texas, texted me that she was still evacuated but hadn’t lost power at her house. She very generously sent me the digital code to get into her home and told me I could stay as long as I needed until power was restored in Rockport. So that’s where I headed on September 1 after landing at the Corpus Christi airport: to Anita’s place. After a fitful night’s sleep, the next morning I headed for Rockport. Another friend had already driven by my house and texted me that it was still standing, but that’s all I knew.
Well, first things first. Getting home wasn’t quite so easy. Even though I’d lived in the area for more than 10 years, I missed my Market Street exit off Highway 35 entirely because all the highway signs were gone—they were either ripped away by the winds, or in a gnarled, twisted mess on the side of the road. All my familiar landmarks along the road were so altered they were unrecognizable: that clump of trees, that business, that farm. They were either gone or a pile of rubble.
It was unsettling to realize I’d gone too far on the highway and had to make a U-turn, try again for my exit. It was unsettling to drive a road I’d driven for a decade, and not recognize anything along the way.
I missed the damn exit coming back southbound too. I ended up going as far south as the Highway 188 intersection, where I finally recognized where I was. I exited on 188 and dropped down to Business Highway 35 (which parallels the main freeway) and could head back up north again. I’d only been gone 3 weeks but you’d think it had been 3 years—why the hell did everything look so different?
For those of you who know about my questionable sense of direction, who know I can get lost in my own back yard, and are shaking your head right now, I will just say: be kind. I was jet lagged, exhausted, had been worried sick for 2 weeks, and felt very alone. I had no idea what I would find.
My first inkling of how bad it was going to get was when I passed the Cove Harbor Boat Barn. Cove Harbor Marina was about 3 miles south of Rockport. The Boat Barn was a huge storage facility where people placed their boats in dry dock. The roof and all sides of it were stripped off, exposing the multiple levels for boat storage that now showed a complete catastrophe: the upper levels collapsed onto the lower levels, twisted metal supports, and piles of small fishing boats all around crushed, upside down, standing on end. I could see right through the structure and out the other side.
I pulled off to the side of the road and stared at that building, dumbfounded. I’d never seen anything like that in my life. It looked like hundreds of boats had been in there when the hurricane hit.
I pulled back onto the highway and kept driving. As I got closer to Rockport, I seemed to be looking at an unfamiliar, surreal moonscape. No, it looked like a bomb had gone off. I was driving onto an apocalyptic, sci-fi movie set, the kind of movie I never watch.
Ripped-apart trailers and recreational vehicles were strewn by the side of the road, their household contents scattered everywhere. Clothing. Children’s toys and bicycles. Mattresses. Broken furniture. Cars and trucks at crazy angles or upside down.
It was the first week in September, yet all the leaves had been stripped off the trees, making it look like the middle of winter. Some trees were in crooked, bizarre shapes or leaning at 45-degree angles; the more rigid ones had snapped like twigs and lay flat on the ground. Palm trees stood tall with no palm fronds at the top.
As I pulled into town, the damage became even more pronounced. I passed by our county tax office and saw an incongruous sight: the front brick wall was gone, yet framed photos hung undisturbed on the interior walls. My neighborhood laundromat was a disaster: the roof and walls were gone, and the washers and dryers were just standing there gleaming in the morning sunshine.
I made a quick loop through downtown before going home; it was only three blocks from my house. I just had to see it because downtown directly backed up to the waterfront and we had no protective seawall. On either end of our downtown strip, whole buildings had vanished or were piles of rubble. Stand-alone buildings, such as the one that housed the Sazón Gallery, were also destroyed.
Electrical trucks were everywhere, already frantically working to get our electricity back on. The US National Guard trucks and troops were everywhere. The whole town looked militarized as food, water, and supplies distribution was already underway. I’d heard on the news that we had no operating gas station, grocery store, or hardware store. Nothing was functioning in the city.
Passing through some residential neighborhoods, I saw: rubble rubble rubble HOME rubble rubble HOME rubble rubble. It was difficult to process why some homes seemed untouched and others, right next door, were demolished.
I pulled into my own driveway, and thought, Oh thank God, there’s my house, it is still there. A friend had boarded up the downstairs windows as he’d promised, but I saw that two of the upstairs windows in the front had blown out—the curtains were blowing wildly in the wind. It was my master closet up there, and I wondered how much rain that room had taken on and how many of my clothes were ruined.
Most of my shingles were stripped off the roof. All my fences were either gone or laying flat on the ground. Piles of debris were everywhere.
I couldn’t get into my front door because it was boarded shut, so I went around to the back. I was stunned at the unbelievable disaster in my back yard. The wind direction had been from the southwest, from the front of the house. So everything the wind carried got dumped in the back of the house, trapped by my large trees and other buildings behind me. I had about a 5-foot-high debris pile of someone else’s roof, twisted metal siding from a neighbor’s building, tree branches, my ruined patio furniture, broken glass, and smashed pots and plants—just a tangled, colossal nightmare. My own giant American Elm tree in the back had lost a huge limb that was now laying on top of everything else.
I gingerly tiptoed my way through it all to my back door, especially wary of those palm fronds. I don’t know if you’ve ever picked a fight with a palm frond, but they are as treacherous as cactus or a rose bush: they have wicked thorns all along the stems and have no problem slicing through a thick pair of gardening gloves. I was in shorts that day and sorely unprepared to wade through a sea of palm fronds.
Luckily my friend hadn’t boarded my back door shut, so I unlocked the door and went inside. I was about to find out how much water damage I was facing on the inside.
I called out to my kitties…
Up Next: Chapter 1. 10 Years Earlier…Making My House Habitable
To catch up on the backstory of A Buzz Kill Named Harvey, read Art and Artifice: A Memoir—A Story of Love, Deception, and Healing on the Texas Gulf Coast
Looking forward to reading your recollections of this storm, Gail. There have been so many since I moved to Houston in 1987, they blur together...whether tropical storm, hurricane, ice storms, floods...you name it. And before that, the blizzards and ice storms of 37 years in Buffalo.