evacuation

A soft light pours into the kitchen window, filtered only by trees, the air so much cleaner that it is at home. I take the snapshot, "sunrise from my daughters porch" I name it in my mind, in an effort to combine the seen with the thought. I remember that my favorite poet has determined to simply not seek publication anymore, because it robs the joy of the words from her, and I understand that.

My back aches, the mattress that we sleep on is new and unbroken, it doesn't yield to the curve of my spine or my hip and I find my sleep restless. I want to go home, not because I am not happy here or because I am concerned. I can't decide, really, where home even is.

The trip: It will help you to understand that I am in Clear Lake, zone C of the mandatory evacuation area…which means that a category 4 or 5 direct hit could send coastal waters to flood this far into the city. We are about half way between Johnson Space Center and Ellington field, if you know the city. Tuesday night, the news announced the mandatory evacuation of all the zones, and gave times for when they were effective. Noon Thursday was the time we were given.

Houston is a freeway city. There are two loops around the downtown core. The outer loop is a toll road; ordinarily it costs $3.75 to get from my house on the southeast side to interstate10 on the west side, which is the fastest road to Austin, where my daughters have a condo and enough space for my husband and I, my son and the pets. (Two cats, and Scout, none of them welcome in hotels.) We considered going north to the cottage in Michigan, but my spouse needed to stay close to his office.


8:15 Wednesday night.

The alternate route out of town, (state road 90) which my husband wanted to take, has a 9 car pile-up on it. They've announced that there are no resources… i.e. police or ambulances, to service roads that are not designated evacuation routes. State road 90 is not an evacuation route. I 45 between Galveston and Houston was taking 5 hours for motorists to complete the normally 35 minute drive. We acknowledge that if it were just the two of us, we'd stay here. Instead, we decide to open a bottle of wine and relax tonight, get up early and go in the morning. The neighborhood is empty already, except for Matt across the street who is putting painters tape across the lead glass of his front door. We didn't board windows or tape them up or move the furniture to the second floor, as our neighbors have done. Nothing we own is that special. Instead, we move the lawn furniture to the empty garage, wrap the boxes and boxes of photographs in plastic and put them high on shelves in our closet, the most hurricane proof room in the house. The house was only built in 2000, and is built to withstand 135 mph winds. The storm at this point is gusting to the 180's. We are glad that we shared pictures with our parents in the Midwest all those years, so all will not be lost even if our makeshift efforts don't work. We are hanging out tonight, will go in the morning. Car is packed, all but computers and toothbrushes... and we have nothing else to do but sit in the car tomorrow.

Some people are just getting rooms in Houston. I could see us doing that. The girls are excited to have us come. They are a little more afraid of the storm than we are, so we will go.


12:51pm, Thursday

Have been on the road 7 hrs. Not to 59 (southwest freeway) yet. Decided to try J's shortcut anyway, all freeways are nearly stopped, and we figure we have a better chance on the state roads. 103 degrees. Many cars already on the side of the road, out of gas. There is none to buy. I'm glad we chose to only bring one car.

1:38 p.m. The radio keeps announcing that there are refuel trucks on the roads to help motorists. We've seen nothing. We are down to half a tank, still plenty to get to Austin.

3pm We'd be fine if we could just drive! We are all the way to Sugarland. (Suburb on the southwest corner of Houston. Normally a 40 minute drive from home.)

4:18 pm. They just turned all I10 lanes westbound headed to Austin. The radio says the entrance is at highway 6, and that traffic is moving. We are just east of highway 6, decide to give it a try. Besides, we have to pee and need to get out of gridlock to find a place to go. The car thermometer says 115 degrees.

Highway 6 is moving well (northbound from 90 to 10.) There was a convenience store opened, but no gas. No problem, we will just use the restrooms. They tell us they have no water so they won't let people use the facilities. A lady in the parking lot says they do, they are just closed to evacuees. At this point, I don't get it. The boys pee in the grass behind the car wash. I wait. I'm a woman, no big deal.

7:04 The mayor has just announced that if you are in zone C and haven't evacuated yet, that it is too late, given the freeway situation. He says that storm appears to have changed its target and zone C should be okay. We consider turning back as we are still not out of metro Houston and it's been over 12 hours. We call the girls, who are adamant that we keep going. We figure they know more than we do, so agree.

8:17 the real problem is that nothing is open-no food or bathrooms. I wonder for the first time why there aren't Red Cross stations set up along the evac route. 10mph and we are finally at Katy… west suburb of Houston. I know of a truck stop here, surely they will be open.

We stop at the truck stop. It is …frightening. Evacuees are parked everywhere: the parking lot, the gas pumps (empty) the lawn, all along the road. Trash strewn all over as well… as though there are no receptacles or people don't know better. Of course the place is closed. Mob mentality is taking over, and we don't even want to let the dog out of the car here. We've already been warned to take a gun with us, but we wouldn't even if we owned one. I've never been actually afraid of a crowd before. This one scares me.

A note about the contra flow. The radio keeps announcing that I 10 contra flow lanes are opened and that traffic is breezing along. No doubt those announcements add to the mess. Reality is that they are open, but the only place to get ON to the contra flow lanes (the eastbound interstate lanes turned to accommodate westbound traffic) is in Downtown Houston. There are concrete barriers… movable barriers, between the east and westbound lanes. No one has moved any of them. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles are trapped in the westbound lanes, people who joined the line sometime after the entrance to the fast lanes. Our frustration grows as we see an occasional car zipping by in the eastbound lanes at 80 mph. I'm guessing the ratio to be 1:1000 or so. Some drivers have exited and are driving across medians in construction zones for access. We can't believe they won't open another legal entrance… there are at least two places it could be easily done.

Neither one is open.

11:46 Friday. My friend emailed that the cams show the highways are clear on TV. The cams must be from another day. The roads have not changed. Cars all over the place are out of gas... everything gridlocked. At least where we are.

At 3 am, we gave up on I 10 and decided we should have stuck to our original instincts and take the farm to market roads. We aren't city people; we know how to use them. And we know that sooner or later we will find an empty one and I will be able to pee. Only I'm still such a girl, I feel like the bugs are watching and can't even relieve myself in the darkness. The boys are fine, the animals too, and I'll just deal with it.

Only there were a number of others with the same idea and for the first time, we are at dead stop. People have set up camp in lawns along the way, it is like a mass tailgate party in the country. The traffic moves so desperately slow that I can walk the dog alongside the car faster than it moves. We judge how low our gas tank is getting and know we have to go to an "approved" route, if there is any hope of refueling at all. A policeman stationed to block off a road off the state highway that would let cars into town, says there is gas at the next city, on 290. Another 15 miles. Our computer says we have 40 miles of gas left. Austin is still about 70 away.

We ran out of gas and I ran out of phone battery to at 4:30 am, in not the next town, but the one after that, Giddings, and so we stopped at a restaurant parking lot. J passed out; he would never give up the wheel. I tried to sleep, the windows down to the night air but also to the noise and mosquitoes. I realized that now I was an evacuee, and understood a bit of what kept police and National Guard holding "them" at bay in New Orleans. The mindset was not so much of survival, but of lawlessness… there was no camaraderie, but I suppose that I felt that partly because I was a minority for really the first time in my life. I didn't see another white face for hours. I am bothered by the fact that I know that, I am not usually a person that does.

The restaurant opened at 5:30 and at last we were able to use real bathrooms and have breakfast. The people there could not have been nicer. The waitress called around town and said that she'd not been able to find gas yet, but her friend Bucky was going to call her as soon as his station got some. We ate from a Texas buffet: grits and biscuits and milk gravy. Behind us, a couple who'd left from Santa Fe, a suburb in zone b, at 9:30 pm the night before we left. We had arrived at the same place. Their trek took them ten more hours… so perhaps the shortcuts were in fact shorter. A co worker of my husbands, known for his fussiness and conservatism, left town on Tuesday, with two cars for he and his wife. Their trip took 40 hours.

None of us saw fuel trucks. None of us saw National Guard. None of us saw the Red Cross. I'm not saying they weren't there. But that on three different routes out of town, I saw none. TV news shows them on the broadcasts, some people interviewed apparently were helped. I am learning to be skeptical of what I see now.

By the time we'd had coffee, there a few stations were opening and actually had gas in Giddings. We put in half a tank… we only had 57 miles to go and knew what was behind us. It only took five hours to travel the last 57 miles.

By then it was mid afternoon on Friday. Austin was Austin… open and friendly and good. The announcers on the local radio listed things for evacuees to do while there, and asked that we please be more careful with our litter. A caller reported that he'd seen someone throw a whole bag of garbage into the river.

Then the vigil of watching the storm, until my daughters boyfriend came over with DVD's and insisted we pull ourselves away from TV. We watched two seasons of Northern Exposure, and slept off and on. I woke up at 4 am, Saturday, and watched the newsmen blown by the wind and rain. I wonder what makes them think their reports are more credible outside?

The next two days were spent being good refugees. We refinished the wood floor at my daughter's condo, and took them shopping for things they needed and hadn't gotten to yet. They are both very busy, almost never home. School, work, internships, boyfriends, and even a social life. I'm jealous.

We came home to trees down in the neighborhood, one on top of a house. Our home was spared damage, just junk in the pool. The security alarms were blaring, but I assume that was because we turned off the power before we left. They announced an orderly return to the city, but they partitioned it off so that people who were never in harms way returned first. Those of us who were evacuated from the southeast side still show as "pending" on the map of when to come back. Pending? We left Austin a little before ten, and were home in 4 hours. Seems most people followed Judge Willy's advice, from the county just south of us, instead of the wishy-washy ineffectiveness of the Mayor who had the audacity to announce early last week that Houston was the most prepared city in the country, and that we would handle this. I'm sorry to those who want to believe they did the best they could, but if less time had been spent on photo ops telling us that the "plan was almost ready" and simply doing the work, there would be less anger and resentment in the city today.

I don't mind being told "I don't know." I do mind being told, we are ready, when clearly, we were not. We are too smart for this. All of us.