Wildflower Stew

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 . . . . .

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.