A week in the life of a hurricane survivor.
I feel that I have a lot to talk about, but I fear that only a little of it is very interesting. I've been debating whether the best strategy is to start with the interesting stuff in hopes of hooking you and causing you to keep reading on afterward in hopes of finding more interesting stuff, or ending with the interesting stuff, so that you have to read all the way to the end to get there. And in the time-honored journalistic tradition of the inverted pyramid style of writing, I've decided to start with this:
So. Remember how in my last post, I decided that despite my desire to assert my independence and scoff at my parents' pleas for my evacuation from the path of Hurricane Ike, it was, in fact, prudent to go ahead and get out of the way? Right. So I did. I got to my parents' house at about 3 a.m. Thursday morning.
At about 10 p.m. Thursday night, the county my parents live in also called for a mandatory evacuation.
But this time I decided to go ahead and scoff. "We're on the very edge of the storm," I said. "It's just small-town inexperience and over precaution as a result of Rita," I said. So we stayed. And it got a little windy (actually, the descrption the NOAA forecast used for the entire length of the storm was "breezy"). And some limbs hit the top of the house, and the power went out, and there was a tornado warning, so we all went and crouched in the hall for half an hour.
But then daybreak came, and we all said, "well that wasn't so bad." It was still windy, but you could see it now, so it didn't seem like such a big deal. And it was kind of cool, riding out a hurricane. So my dad and my grandmother and my aunt all went to bed after staying up all night. It was just me and my mom still up. She was on the front porch, watching the storm, and I was standing at the back door, trying to get some pictures to illustrate how much the pine trees were swaying.
And then they weren't just swaying anymore.
Honestly, the wind never got over gust of about 50 or 60 mph. But apparently our pine trees are whimps, but because two of them sure enough keeled over on top of my parents' house.
I don't actually remember exactly how things went. My parents' house has three back doors. The picture above is taken from one of them. I was standing at another one just to the right of that farther-away tree. In between the two, basically. And I know I was really scared afterward. But I don't know what made me realize they were falling. I know there was a horrible splintering sound, and I'm told that I ran toward the front where I ran into my mom who asked me what was happening and I told her that the tree was falling. I don't remember that or the sound it made actually hitting the house. But it was loud enough that everyone who had gone to bed came running out of the bedrooms.
Still, everyone who stayed through Rita said it sounded like a bomb going off, and I remember thinking that it didn't. It was loud, but not that loud. And the really bad part was that splintering sound when it ... I guess started to up root. When the trees fell, they fell over the center of the house, so we couldn't go crouch in the hall like they tell you you're supposed to do because it's the strongest part of the house. Instead, we spent the rest of the day (it was a really LONG storm) in the kitchen, where we'd all duck between the counter and the island whenever we heard that splintering sound again. It's funny now, but ... OK, well, it was funny at the time, too, but in a hysteric kind of way.
Anyway. So that was how I spent Friday and Saturday of ... the weekend before last now? I'm having trouble keeping the days straight. Regardless, after that, we were lucky. The trees didn't actually punch through the ceiling, just the roof. So there was a leak, but the house is completely livable. Saturday night was a little scary, because these 80-foot, hundred-year-old pine trees were leaning on the house. And we didn't really know if the roof might suddenly give. Every now and then, all night, there'd be a sudden popping noise as a board in the roof or something snapped in two. And as my room is also in the center of the house, under them, I couldn't sleep in it, so I spent the night on the kitchen floor (the couch and its sofas are also in the center of the house).
But never fear! I am from a small Texas town, and our ancestors are Cowboys! My dad called the tree guys while the storm was still going, and they pulled in on Sunday to start cutting the trees off the house. This was incredibly entertaining:
For perspective, here is a full view of the trees. They are enormous. Thousands of pounds.
This is them cutting a chunk of it off. No safety glasses, no tethers. Just good ol' boys with a chainsaw. (And I mean that in (almost) the best possible way. (The absolute best possible way would be if all good ol' boys from Texas looked like the Winchester brothers.))
This is the log they cut off swinging afterward.
And this is the guy holding the other end of the rope.
Later on, after they got the tops cut off, and the two trees in the front that broke their fall this started:
I went to high school with this guy. He is straddling the tree while he saws it in half. (Later, unfortunately after my battery ran out, he took a cell phone call while doing this.)
And when he gets it most of the way sawed in half, he starts bouncing up and down on it to break off the last little bit.
But what are they going to do with these big logs that are still on top of our roof?
Why, throw them off, of course.
Anyway. They had the trees off the house in short order, and after that we even got power and cable and everything, except in the living room where the trees actually punched through the roof. So then it was just waiting to hear about my apartment in Houston.
During the storm, they were predicting up to 25-foot storm surges, and according to Google Maps, my apartment was somewhere between 20 and 25 feet in elevantion. So I was worried. After the storm, though, they said it didn't get much past 15, so I was able to relax a little. And it turned out fine. I'll probably get new carpet out of the deal, because some water blew in under the patio door. But besides that, the only problem was the smell.
See, a ... well, let's just call it awhile and not be any more specific than that ... back, I told some of the engineers at work that I would make cookies for them. They'd been doing a lot of media visits for us, which they hate, and getting us a lot of really good coverage, so I wanted to thank them. So I made up enough dough for a few dozen cookies. But the first batch I put in the oven wouldn't cook right. They were burning around the edges and not cooking in the middle. I blame my stove.
So I decided that, rather than smoke up my apartment trying to bake the rest of them, I'd just buy them kolaches in the morning instead. And I did. But the thought of trying to dig all that dough out of the bowl made me tired. And also, if I put it in the trash can, I'd have to take the trash out, because it would smell bad and attract bugs. I don't have a man to take the trash out for me (I consider that a thoroughly manly job), so I put stinky stuff in my trash as rarely as possible, so that I don't have to take it out often. Instead, I just left the dough in a bowl in the refrigerator. I hardly ever have food that's *not* expired in my refigerator, so this hadn't been a problem. Until the electricity went out and stayed out for a week.
Between the smell of the wet carpet, the smell of the ... I don't know, fermenting ... cookie dough and the fact that my work wasn't opening back up until Monday, I decided to wait out the smell at my parents house, instead. Let me reiterate that my parents live in a small town -- 8,000 people, maybe. This is the most time I've spent there since I graduated college. So what did I do with my time, you ask?
I made book sculptures!
Why you ask? Because a few weeks ago, I saw this
at Anthropologie, accompanied by this
price tag (that says $248.00, in case you can't read it), and thought, " I could do that." So I did. I made five. One was 740 pages long. They are brilliant works of art.
Also, because I had my camera out for the pictures of the trees and book sculptures, I thought to myself "you paid a lot of money for this camera because you like to take photos, however you never actually take photos." So I did something about that, too:
Sawdust on my mother's flowers.
Fig leaves.
More fig leaves.
(I found the fig leaves particularly inspiring. Sorry. I warned you that I was leading with the interesting stuff.)
A tree in the neighbor's yard. Ours uprooted; hers snapped.
Another in the neighbor's yard.
An ant crawling on a downed oak tree. (Can you see it? There on the left?)
The inside of a tree, for you city girls who haven't ever seen one.
I'll stop there. I probably should have stopped earlier, but oh well.
I'm back in my apartment now and have spent the week trying to reschedule all the interviews that didn't happen after the evacuation and write the stories that were due after the hurricane. It's been a busy week, but I'm so glad that things are returning to normal. And so glad that I still have an apartment. Mmm. Have I mentioned how much I love my apartment, and how sad sad sad I would be if it had not been here when I came back?
And as a final, least-interesting-of-all side note, my internet tabs seem to be having an identity crisis. My hotmail e-mail account is coming up sporting a little Yahoo Y! symbol, and all the fanfiction.net pages are marked with the Television Without Pity Tubey sign. It may or may not be a sign of the apocolypse.
Ooooh! Speaking of! I had a miracle in the aftermath of the storm! Like I said, we had cable pretty much immediately, but (horror of horrors) the local CW affiliate apparently had trouble getting back on the air. And Thursday rolled around, and I was beginning to despair. My sister in Austin couldn't tape it for me because she doesn't have a VCR anymore. My brother in Waco doesn't get the CW at all. My one friend who lived near enough by and had satellite (and so would have other CW sources than the local one) had DVR, but didn't know how to burn it to a DVD. And my mom's friend who has satellite swore up and down that for some reason her satellite didn't come with the CW. I was panicking. And then, magically!, right at 8 p.m., just as I had resigned myself to watching it via non-lip-synced iTunes, the local CW flickered to life! It was amazing! And sooooo good! I know I'm a little late to the party, but let me just join you all for a quick squee!
OK. That's really it, I think.