As a Houstonian that lived through Ike, hurricanes are
actually pretty fun. If you haven't
lived through one, don't bash it till you try it.
In my experience it went something like this:
THE DAY BEFORE LANDFALL: The city was empty; you could hear
the echo of a hammer as someone in the neighborhood put up the last ply wood
window covering. Everyone else has
already fled (and missed all the fun!).
My boyfriend (Rick), his family, and my immediate family decided to
hunker down and ride it out, as well as a few of my friends. We all called each other to find out who
needed help getting out of town, or who we should check on the next day to make
sure they survived.
At my boyfriend's house, the windows were boarded shut; it
was so dark in there even though it was noon.
His whole family was huddled in the house playing video games, watching
movies, eating snacks and basically just having a bad ass party. His sister and her 4 kids were staying there,
as well as his grandma, aunt, 2 cousins, his brother, and his parents- 13
people total! Too many people for one
house if you ask me; so he decided to ride it out with my family.
My family is smaller, and more adventurous, so we opted to
just put tape on the windows (makes it easier to clean up if they break), and
explored the empty city and went down to the water to see the high waves and
rising tide. That was awesome btw.
A group of my friends that were still in town got together
and drove down to Kemah (if you know where that is) to help a friend of ours
evacuate, but then had some fun with the high tide and took some pictures, and
had some fun hanging out in a completely flooded park. It was just an all-around fun day, lots of
hanging out with friends, no school or work, no crowds... what's not to love?!
LANDFALL: Ike hit
land at dusk, and we sat on the front porch and watched it come. We had a great view of the wind and rain and
clouds, but the wind was coming from the other side of my house, so we were
protected where we were sitting. We sat
there and just watched nature's powers unfold.
It was amazing. As it got
stronger and stronger, we started hearing transformers blow (which if you've
ever heard it once, it's eerie, but hearing one blow every couple of minutes is
scary), and it got darker as the power went out around the neighborhood. Finally, our transformer blew. It was LOUD (since it was right behind our
house), and made a really weird green glow in the sky. It got dark... really dark. We heard a huge branch getting weaker and
weaker, and then it fell somewhere across the street, but we couldn't tell
which tree, or if the branch hit anything.
We then heard a branch failing behind OUR house, but there was nothing
we could do but hope it didn't hit the house.
It fell, and missed us somehow, but we couldn't see it. The wind made a crazy sound, I can't even put
it into words, but it was magnificent. I
think it was actually scarier being IN the house then sitting outside
watching.
The eye of the storm finally went overhead, and the wind
starting hitting us from the opposite direction... I had fallen asleep on the
porch with my dad and boyfriend, but we woke up when the rain started hitting
us in the face for the first time. We
went inside and passed out.
DAY 1: When we woke up, the world was different. That tree that had missed us in the night was
right between our fence and house, didn't hit either (lucky!), but the thing
was HUGE! We had no power, so my mom got
out the grill and grilled us some breakfast.
Rick and I decided we wanted to explore the damage, so we took his truck
around to the hardest hit areas and surveyed the damage. Its weird being in a
place that you have known for years, but every bit of it is different. Signs in the middle of roads, sides of brick
walls on the floor, trees in the middle of cars, just everything was
different. Leaves EVERYWHERE!!
We stopped by his house, and his family was up, and using
their generator for the fridge and the TV, we watched the coverage unsure if
his aunt's house in Galveston was still standing (it wasn't), and getting the
news on every building that didn't survive.
The video was really surreal. His
family stayed glued to the TV, but we were still in explore mode, so we went
out and gathered info from cops, and from anyone on the street if they knew
about anything interesting that went down, or if anyone needed help getting a
tree of their car (through the whole ordeal, we helped out about 15 people move
branches and stuff so they could get to their cars or in one case get out of
their house).
Not many folks were around, but all my neighbors that stuck
around were out enjoying the day with the grills going and a friendly "oh
man, did you hear about Hooter's in Galveston?!" (Yes, out of everything we lost, for some
reason they were all so concerned about that one Hooter’s).
FIRST FEW DAYS: Well, if you've ever been through something
like this, you'll find people form "clans", and they all sort of
assume a role. My boyfriend and I were
the ones going out and getting info, and food, and supplies, whatever we
needed. My mom and sister became the
cooks, and general defenders of the house.
My dad was the leader obviously, but he was the kind of leader that
helped every other clan around. My
brother-in-law... well he sat on his butt playing his Gameboy and complaining
about the heat and missing WOW.
As the things in the fridge started to melt, my mom found
ways to cook it all on a grill (plenty of wood around, her and my sister got
good at drying it.. put those Girl Scout skills to the test) she even figured
out how to grill a frozen pizza, but the sad truth was that food was getting
low. That's when FEMA came to the rescue. They had set up these things called "Points
of Distribution" or simply PODs. My
boyfriend and I heard it on the radio during our daily excursions, so we
decided to check it out. It was true,
they were giving out MREs, water, and sometimes fruit. We would go to every POD we heard about, gather
as much as we could (being of different ethnicity, they rarely thought we were
together, so we would each get some) and take it back to our families. My dad passed the days by volunteering at the
PODs, and my buddy Korey did this in an attempt to pick up chicks.
The first few days we went to PODs, it was orderly, everyone
was friendly and nice, but as time went on, people started getting meaner... a
cut in line would be cause for a group beating.
We had to play it safe, especially when the PODs were in rougher
neighborhoods. Each POD was different,
and in a different spot. We started
bringing food to folks in the neighborhoods we knew couldn't make it to those
rough and tumble PODs, but we mostly kept to our own clans. Rick actually started being ostracized from
his own clan.. his brother didn't want him there as their jobs overlapped, and
it became a contest to bring back the best food to the clan to please their
dad. It was a bit Mad Max-ish.
The radio and TV announced marshal law, and they set a
curfew pretty early on.. It was 6pm?!
Fuck that. I went over to my
friend's house early in the afternoons, we'd play magic or board games by lamp
light, and then head home. At the border
of every city there were cops... they wanted to know what you were doing out
past curfew, where you were going, where you were coming from, and all that
lame stuff. We had to cross 3 city
borders to get from my buddies house in the city of South Houston, to my house
on the border of Houston and Pasadena.
So, first one was the SOHO cop- he was cool, just asked us the mandatory
questions and let us go. The second one,
the Houston cop- same thing, no big deal.
The third one, the Pasadena cop- they were DICKS! He asked us all the same questions, but with
the most smug attitude ever. He had
pulled us over right in front of my brother-in-law's apartment complex (we were
trying to drop him off at his place).
They claimed it wasn't safe there, and when my boyfriend tried to answer
a question they barked "I WASN'T TALKING TO YOU BOY" and then went on
to interrogate me. I told them we were
just going to drop off my brother-in-law, at his apartment, which they could
see from the street if they wanted to, but they wouldn't let me drive down
there... they said "we could arrest you for being out this
late!" (it was 9pm), "I know
officer, I'm sorry, we lost track of time", "well you're buddy here
is just going to have to walk home, but if he gets raped or murdered, it's on
YOUR hands!" (Not their hands, even though they were within ear shot of
him at their post)... the whole ordeal was pretty lame, but funny as hell. Of course, my brother-in-law, the wise ass
made sure to scream all the way to his apartment "NOBODY RAPE ME!! I DON'T WANT MY SISTER-IN-LAW TO TAKE THE
BLAME" over and over.
TOWARD THE END: Power was back on in most places, but not my
family's block, so my parents went to stay at my sister’s place for some
AC. I stayed at my parent's house partly
just so I could stay in bed with my boyfriend.
Gas was now THE hot commodity. We decided to help our friend that lives in
Kemah clean up her house, but when we got to the city limit, they told us they
wouldn't let non-residents in yet. We
were bummed, but right as we started to drive off, a gas station opened
up. This was a freaking miracle! We were first in line at one of the first gas
stations to open in the area... so we filled up his truck, and about 4 gas cans
we had in the back. We were kings among
men that day.
For whatever reason, we were all craving beef super bad after
this thing... and fast food joints were starting to open again, so we decided
to get some food that didn't come from an MRE or grilled over my mom's bbq pit
for the first time in a week. We pulled
up, and ordered the biggest burgers they had.... "I'm sorry, but we are
out food for today". It was the
saddest and hungriest I'd been for a burger in my life. As we drove through, there was a little girl
in the window eating the last burger in the joint. She taunted us with it, taking a big, slow
deliberate bite of it while staring us down the whole time; it was
excruciating.
Word got out that one of our favorite Italian joints was
opened again, so our friend and I went on over... they were out of most things
(anything that involved ricotta cheese) and we were pretty sure it was risky to
eat there since I was pretty sure all the food had been sitting in that fridge
for a week, but we went for it anyways.
We ordered 2 big pizzas and pigged out.
It was incredible. Our first real
meal since the storm hit.
After that, life slowly got back to normal. School started up, work got going again, and
life started trucking on. A few weeks
later we found out my sister was pregnant (guess my brother-in-law found a way
to cure that boredom after all), we found a puppy, and pawned it off on my
boyfriend, and power came on at our house a whole week and a half after the
storm. My boyfriend had to go back to
work using nothing by generators and fans for another week. And my sister didn't get her AC back on for
another 5 whole months (the apartment complex sucked, and their excuse was
"winter is coming soon, you won't need it for long" which is a bold
faced lie in Texas).
Honestly, I had a blast during that storm, and now that I'm
living in Austin, I get a ton of weird looks when I tell them how fun they
are... but meh, you'll never know till you live through one.
**tl;dr** hurricanes are awesome, it's like a
camping/Apocalypse party, what's not to love?!
