by Eric Larson -- a bit overwritten, but still I can't put it down. And while reading it memories of my own hurricane story keep creeping into my mind. Mine was not the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the one this book is focused on, but a much smaller one that came into Corpus Christi in 1970. If you've ever experienced a hurricane, then that will be your storm, and it will be the one that makes the big impression on you.I was 17 years old, still in high school. My brother was in the Army, stationed in Germany, and I was writing him a letter, sitting at the kitchen table, while Mother was putting together some snacks. Daddy had been watching the weather on television since before daylight. I remember so well getting up to the sound of the weathermen. We were not in the habit of turning on the television first thing in the morning like so many people do today. The weathermen were predicting that the storm would turn northwards and head to Galveston, but Daddy insisted that it was coming into Corpus. He kept insisting this because our barometric pressure was dropping.
Mother was nonplussed by his predictions. Excited by the dust-colored sky outside, by the rain that kept falling intermittently, by the wind whooshing up our breezeway, she was determined to make this fun. She had been preparing dips all morning, and had chips out in a bowl. She wished she had thought to invite friends over for cards. She had the dominoes out.
In the middle of this, Mom making snacks and me writing my letter to my brother, the lights went out. No big deal. It was mid-day. We could certainly still see, even though the sky was heavy and dark. Daddy got out his long, patrolman's flashlight. He'd already put in new batteries. Mother went for candles, and matches. We didn't light them, but put them around in handy places, just in case. We'd been through hurricanes before. The lights could stay off for hours. Sometimes even for a few days.
The phone rang. It was my aunt and uncle who lived about two miles from us. Mother talked animatedly to them about the lights going out, about the dark sky, the wind, the rain. Thunder cracked. Lightning lit the room. And then a loud BANG! shook the house. Mother hung up the phone, said "What was that?" I abandoned the letter I had still been trying to write and followed my parents to the front door, which was the direction the bang had come from. Daddy thought maybe a tree had fallen against the door. He opened it, and the wind nearly took the door off its hinges, and him with it. Mother and I both had to help him get back inside the house, and pull the door closed. Once he was safely back in the foyer, we all looked at each other, a little frightened now.
Daddy started up the stairs, and Mother and I stayed close behind him. The narrow upstairs hall was dark. The flashlight beam was our only light. The trap door to the attic was flapping loose in its hole, as if the wind were about to fly off with it. Using his long flashlight like a rod, Daddy pushed at the attic trap, raising it a couple of inches. And we saw the sky.
"Oh, my God," Mother said.
"Our roof's gone," Daddy said. "We better get back downstairs."
But we were too excited, too caught up in the scary circumstances, and it wasn't really registering yet how dire the situation. Mother ran to their bedroom. I went behind her. The ceiling in that room was breathing up and down, ready to cave in at any moment. She raced to the closet for the photo albums. I ran back to my room, peered out the window through the crosshatch of masking tape we had put on to keep the windows from breaking. Roof material lay scattered all over the front lawn. I grabbed my makeup. MY MAKEUP! Not my high school annuals. Not the diamond earrings I had just gotten on my 17th birthday. My makeup. Well, I was just 17. A shallow teenager. What can I say?
The three of us went down to the laundry room (the only one-story part of the house) to sit on the machines and watch the storm take down our home. It was my mother's dream house. She had sat with an architect for hours three years before, planning out the rooms, the direction the doors would open, the placement of light switches and electric plugs. It must've been devastating to her to see the boards lying on the driveway out the taped-up laundry room window. We watched heavy roofing beams turn a complete 360-degrees as the eye of the storm came by us. A time or two I had to hurry in to the little bathroom off the kitchen. Rain poured through the downstairs ceiling by then, as if the whole house was being absorbed by the storm. My letter to my brother was a soggy, smeared, undecipherable glob of paper on the table, beside the dip and chip bowls overflowing with Sheetrock-infused rain water.
That storm changed all of our lives. Profoundly. The plant where my dad worked was damaged in the millions of dollars. Eventually, he was transferred to a newly acquired plant in Mississippi. My old boyfriend, whom I hadn't seen in months -- indeed he had broken up with me when he got drafted by a major league's Triple-A baseball team and moved to Florida -- came home to check on his family. He and I had an intense, emotional reunion that resulted in a shotgun wedding a few months later. And eventually, when that teenage marriage failed, I joined my parents in Mississippi along with my newborn son. I attended university there and met the man who would become my second husband. I have always said that I got my eldest son out of that hurricane, or the aftermath of it anyway. So good can come out of catastrophe, though it doesn't usually seem so at the time.
Onward ....
No comments:
Post a Comment