Wildflower Stew

I have had the experience of losing everything. Not in a hurricane but in a fire. You never know what it is really like until it happens to you. The things you don’t expect - how it takes away your sense of yourself for all your clothes to suddenly disappear, the fabric that kept you warm, folded to your shape, held your scent, identified you to your neighbors across the way. (I knew you by your red quilted jacket.)

And the things that are always at hand, your cookbook, your scissors, your hairbrush - gone. Your hand reaches out and there’s nothing there. Then there are the big things - the pictures that can never be replaced, your history ripped away from you leaving you rootless and abandoned, your children without memories. The things you love, the things that make you who you are; not the big expensive things but the little personal things that make you who you are. Gone, all gone. Multiplied by a whole community. All that is left is what we carry in our hearts. We can write and sing about it but we can never touch it again in real life. It is like when someone you love dies.

What do we, as a society, do when a whole community loses everything? Is it not relevant to look at how we deal with loss and grief?

When the word went out that Ike was going to hit Galveston, the community was divided into the haves and the have nots - have a car or have not a car (or gas money for car). The ones with the cars were directed to all available motel rooms. The ones without were herded onto buses without being told where they were going. They were taken to shelters like the convention center and the smaller community centers and high school gyms in Austin and other towns in central Texas. They were not told to bring bedding. When they got here, there were no cots, no blankets, nothing to sleep on but the hard concrete floors. A representative of the Red Cross actually said on television that first night that they did not supply cots because they didn’t want people to stay too long. This was quickly swept under the rug before the full effect of that statement sunk in and some city official said they were getting cots out to the people, which mostly they never did and then after a couple of days they turned around and kicked people out of most of the shelters (even though there were road blocks preventing them from getting back home - or what was left of it) because money-making events were scheduled and, of course, could not be cancelled. Money would be lost.

The first few days people were just dumped into these places, no bedding, no food and sometimes very little water, and definitely no adequate restrooms. There was a complete media blackout. The Austin media interviewed a couple of carefully selected evacuees but were never allowed to interview people at random or go inside the shelters. Reporter Sara Foley was assigned by her editor to board a bus taking people with special needs to Austin when a mandatory evacuation was ordered for Galveston Island. She filed news stories and blogs about the experience until she was thrown out of the shelter. This really happened. This is really scarey stuff. Read about her experiences here. Meanwhile, down in Galveston, the mayor ordered a media blackout and ordered city employees not to talk to any media. The publisher of the Galveston County Daily News said: “A news blackout will cause those people, helpless evacuees, to suffer longer. Not knowing the full story is the worst pain they face, and the city has helped prolong and make that pain greater by blocking access to news.” You can read the full story here.
I talked with some people who were staying in a small community center across the street from where I live and that is how I found out what was really happening.

As word got out, the people of Austin responded overwhelmingly through the food bank with half a million dollars and half a million pounds of food - in just two days. It’s not that the people didn’t care. It’s that the government system is set up to assert maximum control over people for the least possible expenditure of money and resources. I got the feeling that the bureaucracy has just two ways of dealing with events like this - ignore them or treat people like a prison population.

I read a Norweigan newspaper every week just to get a different perspective. The attitude of the government toward the people in Norway is totally different than it is here. Norway is a social democracy. There is an ethic of fairness built in to the system. There are instances of corruption but they are bumps in the road compared to the mountains of disdain that this government dishes out to its citizens. It is possible to have a fair, respectful government. I think I read the Norweigan newspaper just to remind myself of this.

But the Norweigan government got that way because it reflects the will of the people and at this point in our national history we have a chance to change the tune that has had so many people dancing like marionettes on the string of buy-more, consume-more, screw your neighbor. Katrina changed more than many people realize. In Texas, thousands of people opened their homes to strangers, literally. Total strangers from another culture and another place. They spontaneously brought them into their personal space and fed them and comforted them and helped them in every way they could.

Thousands more went to New Orleans to help, just as they have gone to Galveston, just as my great-grandmother did in 1900. People are basically herd animals and we will take care of our own. Our government does not reflect this. This is the change it’s time for. We can influence this change by our actions. The new path our country takes will be built by us, from the grassroots UP this time.

The least we can do for people who have lost everything is to let them know they have not lost their place in the fabric of life.

The “news” these days is all about the horse race for president and the wild rollercoaster ride on Wall Street but for those of us, the majority of the voting, buying participants in the American elections and economy, who have neither 401ks nor stock options, who live paycheck to paycheck if we’re lucky enough to have a steady paycheck or eke out a meager existence on “fixed” incomes (that’s “fixed” as in stabbing a pin through the butterfly so it won’t fly away fixed), the reality is way different. Here in Texas, thousands of people have suffered a major trauma and heartbreaking loss. It is not old news; it’s current heartache that is going to be going on for a long time. It’s part of my life and so I intend to tell the real story, the real news, about what is going on here now, what came before and what we can do to help.

The Saga of Ike

Another full circle in my life. When I was growing up on the coast of Texas in the ’40s and ’50s my grandmother used to tell me stories of her mother taking her four young daughters and a big tent and going down to Galveston to feed the survivors of the hurricane of 1900, the one that killed 6,000 people, this country’s worst ever natural disaster. That was my grandmother’s first memory; she was three years old. They spent two months in the steamy aftermath of a storm that no one had any way to anticipate.

I’ve weathered a few hurricanes in my day and they are scarey. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But the game has changed a lot since my grandmother’s day. For one thing, we can anticipate the storms. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that there are so many more people living on the coast that getting out of the way is very problematical. The pictures of the gridlock on the highways before Rita hit Houston, the burned-out bus full of old people - that image is burned in my mind.

And the way we build on the coasts. When I was a child living near Padre Island, no one built big fancy homes or hotels right on the water. Duh. There were beach houses - simple wooden structures, maybe on stilts, palm-thatched cabanas, fishing shacks. If they blew away, oh well. Pick up the wood and build something else.

And the wetlands, the marshes and tidal bays, teeming with life, where I watched the Aransas Wildlife Refuge come together and where I would go each winter to spy on the recovering tribe of Whooping Cranes we had saved there.

And we would walk the sands of the barrier island, the hundred mile long island of white sand dunes and waving sea grasses, for miles with no sign of humans, no footprints, no plastic - no plastic! It was a National Seashore, like a National Forest - protected.

The storms were a natural phenomenon then. The natural protections of the wetlands diffused the destructive power of wind and wave and common sense diffused the impulse to build up every square foot of land. Some places rightfully belong in their natural state.

And then there is the fact that the hurricanes are much bigger and badder because of our arrogance, too. So it is with this background that I look at the Saga of Ike.

To be continued . . . . .

As I was sitting under my
usual morning tree
The one by my bedroom window
my year round companion

I was wondering about the leaves
turning brown and falling
so early
While it’s still hot here
& wondering how much of it
is the drought

Then as I turned to go
lost in my pondering
A leaf hits me - tap!
right on the head

So I turn right back around
and look up
And the tree distinctly says
to me (in tree):
“Aren’t you going to thank me?”

“Oh!” I say, “I’m sorry. Of course.”

I thank the tree for blessing me
with all that oxygen
all summer long
And for filtering out so much CO2
from the suffocating cloud
of stale city air -

I stop and just sit awhile
in a swirl of falling down leaves

Thanking the tree
just me & the tree
Breathing in & breathing out
in harmony

R Swan
9/28/08