Hey, all, it’s mid-September, and you know what that means: pumpkin-flavored
edibles, back-to-school, football, and also, um, the hurricane season. Or rather, the downhill
slide into the end of it. I live in Texas, grew up in Houston, and hurricanes
are kind of baked into who I am. Actually, they’re part of my whole family. As
a young man, my dad was one of those crazy dudes who drove against the evacuation
traffic down to the Galveston seawall to watch Carla come in. As this was
before I was born, I’m so very pleased he survived to pass along the crazy genes.
Thanks, Dad.
My kids made Sharpie marks on the storm glass barometer as Harvey was coming in. It's kind of a family tradition. |
I remember being a little kid and learning about barometric
pressure and watching our little pressure gauge on the wall in the living room
when the scratchy-sounding weather radio gave the update on the storm coordinates.
My sister and I routinely placed bets on whether we’d get a direct hit. I
cleaned up in frosted Pop-Tarts and near misses.
When Hurricane Alicia roared through in ’83, we had the funnest
ever almost-like-camping party in the bathroom. The whole family squished in
there for hours listening to the weather band while the storm wrenched
the metal carport outside until it screamed like a B-horror slasher victim. Alicia
went right over us, and I remember zipping out on my bike, up and down the block
during the ceasefire of the hurricane’s eye, collecting a zillion pine cones
and stacking them in the plastic basket on my handlebars. Doubtless I had big
plans for crafts that I never got around to doing.
Momma hollered down the road for me to come back in, and I
wondered why but went anyhow. And then the back half of Alicia blew in, and we
retreated to the bathroom fortress, to stare at the mattress Dad had pressed up
against the lone window and hope none of the giant pecan trees fell on our house.
In Austin, about four hours inland of where Harvey made landfall, we got 4.5 inches of rain in around 15 hours. |
Most of my childhood hurricane memories are washed in sepia
tones of anticipation and school-free days and time spent with my family. In
short, good times, good memories. Even evacuating out of Galveston as an adult with Ike on our tail was kind of fun, in that wow-that’s-a-lot-of-traffic way.
What happened recently in Texas and the Caribbean and
Florida and Mexico wasn’t fun.
Not even to me.
Most of my family still lives in Houston, and texting with
them through Harvey and the days of rain afterward was terrifying and frustrating, worse this time because I
was hours away and had no way of getting there to help. All I could do was monitor
the weather service and thumb-type feverishly and...donate.
So I donated a lot. And it felt like I was actually, you
know doing something. If you also have
felt helpless watching strangers on television who have lost everything they
own and look sort of shell-shocked, here are the places I liked enough to send money to (my research into these places was not super in-depth, but they all
offer updates on how the money is being used, which I appreciate):
J.J. Watt’s OneCaring Houston Flood Relief Fund: https://www.youcaring.com/victimsofhurricaneharvey-915053
Austin Pets Alive! (a no-kill animal shelter in Austin that took
in hundreds of displaced pets from the Gulf Coast): https://www.austinpetsalive.org/
Tim Duncan’s US Virgin Islands Hurricane Relief YouCaring
fund: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/tim-duncan-hurricane-irma-us-virgin-islands/
GlobalGiving Fund for Hurricane Irma relief in Florida: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/hurricane-irma-relief-fund/
Comments
Post a Comment