washed away

This is a house left over from the hurricane that ravaged Galveston, TX, in September 1900. I just finished reading Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson that details that few days before and after the storm, and, more specifically, the doings (and not-doings) of Galveston's weather official, Isaac Cline. (Larson also wrote Devil in the White City about serial killers and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago--this is the book that inspired my song "1893: A Girl at the World's Fair" from my 2005 storytelling album Years.) The book was slow for me...I felt distracted by the way it jumped around....but maybe that was intentional. Reading with 21st Century eyes...and now that we have satellites and other ways of seeing these things coming and can pretend that we can prevent massive loss of life and property, it seems that Cline was a huge fool that cost the city 6,000 lives. The book makes it seem also that his pride cost him the loss of his wife and unborn child and furthered his estrangement from his brother, Joseph.

The part of the book that most interested me and moved the most swiftly (maybe it was intentional) was Larson's descriptions of the night of the storm, as it ripped mother from child, husband from wife, and buildings from the ground. I was nervous and sad, reflecting on how it must have felt to want to survive and yet, also, to want to die knowing that your companions on this earth would have been swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. I felt the same sickness watching the first violent death scene in Children of Men.

I lived in New Orleans and left well before Katrina made her visit, but I still don't understand why we continue to believe that it's wise to build our cities on the lip of geographical bathtubs. It seems so completely stupid. I write this and take a moment to look out my office window. 10 miles from here is the inner harbor of Baltimore city and that's connected to the Chesapeake Bay, which gets its water from the Atlantic Ocean which will be rising and rising as the world's glaciers and polar ice caps keep melting and supplying it. I look up at the drywall on my walls. Behind them are cement blocks and bricks. Would it survive a wall of water? I know how to swim, but for how long? Makes one ponder a move to higher ground.....