The next hurricane to impact my life was Hurricane Beulah, a Cat 5 that struck in 1967. I was fourteen. Mother and Daddy had a "hurricane party." They liked to play games and had some friends over for Pinochle. I helped Mom make dips and put out chips. Everybody was excited by the storm blowing outside. When the power went out, everybody made their way home through the wind and rain. I remember the phone ringing as, one by one, the guests reported back that they had made it home. The storm came ashore at Brownsville with a twenty-foot storm surge. There was so much rain with that storm, streets and homes were flooded. In fact, the flood of record on the San Antonio River still stands from rain caused by Beulah. We got a few days off from school, which when you're fourteen, seems like a big treat. Beulah caused more beach erosion at our cabin in Rockport, and shortly afterwards, Daddy sold the place. This turned out to be a good thing because the beach where our cabin stood is now completely gone. Any building that would have been on that stretch of land would have long ago fallen into Copano Bay.
In August of 1970, a Category 3 storm named Celia came into the Gulf of Mexico. All the predictions were for it to make landfall at Galveston, but those predictions soon changed to Port O'Connor, then Rockport, moving farther down the Texas coastline, and closer to us in Corpus Christi. I remember waking up that morning to the sound of the television and my dad pacing in the den. We were not the kind of family to watch television early in the morning so just the TV being on clued me in that something was happening. At age seventeen, I had been too busy with my own oh-so important life to have paid attention to anything weather-related -- until that morning. Daddy said he had been tracking the storm through the night and he believed it was coming in for a direct hit on Corpus Christi. There had not been a direct hit on our town since the 1930s, so I was suddenly paying much closer attention. Mother put on a brave face, went to the store, bought dips and chips and came home saying we would have our own "hurricane party." At about two o'clock, I was sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter to my brother who was in the army stationed in Germany, when a big boom sounded that shook the house. The lights went out instantly. Daddy thought something had hit the front door, so he went to see what had happened. When he opened the door, the wind was so strong, it nearly took him with the door. Mother and I grabbed Daddy and helped him back inside. None of us had realized until then how strong the storm had grown.
Daddy had a long, silver, police-issue flashlight. He turned it on and we all three went upstairs. When we got into the upstairs hallway, our attention was drawn to the trap door to the attic. It was flapping around like a paper plate. Daddy reached with his flashlight and pushed on the trap door cover, and we saw the sky. Our roof was completely gone. We went into the master bedroom and the ceiling in that room looked like it was breathing, in and out. Eventually, it fell in, but we saw all that much later.
Daddy ordered us to go downstairs and get in the laundry room, which was the only one-story part of our house. I ran to my bedroom and gathered up my makeup from my bathroom (Hey-- I was seventeen!), Mother raced down to the den and gathered up the family photo albums, and Daddy grabbed a jar of peanuts out of the pantry, and a six-pack of beer from the refrigerator, and we all clambered into the laundry room. Mama threw the photo albums into the dryer and we sat on the machines, and through a crack in the boarded up window, watched the driveway fill up with lumber, most of which stayed for only a few moments before it blew off somewhere else. There were roofing shingles everywhere. A couple of times while the storm was blowing, one or the other of us had to make a dash for the half bathroom off the kitchen downstairs. We came back with reports that rain was pouring through the ceiling as if we were standing outside. While the wind was still crazy high, our next door neighbor banged on the laundry room door to check on us. We discussed what had happened, and the consensus was that a tornado must've come down our street. Later we found a rafter had stabbed, missile-like, through the roof of our garage. Luckily it hit the ground right between Mother and Daddy's cars.
Hurricane Celia literally changed my life. Not only was it a disaster for my family, but it did so much damage to the refinery where Daddy worked that the decision was made by the company to close the refinery altogether. Daddy was transferred to another refinery in Purvis, Mississippi. So instead of attending the university in San Marcos as I had planned, I went to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and eventually married a Mississippi boy, whom I would have otherwise never met.
In August of 1980, a Catergory 5 storm brewed up in the Gulf. It was named Allen. By this time, I was married with two kids and living in a brand new house in San Antonio. My parents, who had also come back to Texas, were once again living in Corpus Christi. After Celia they had sworn they would never sit out another hurricane, so they evacuated to our house in San Antonio. Allen came ashore at Port Mansfield, well to the south, but that also put us on the "dirty" side of the storm. Because of the counter-clockwide rotation of Atlantic hurricanes, the prevailing winds will swirl out from center towards the east, so when a hurricane makes landfall, you always want to be on the "clean" side, or to the west. When Hurricane Rita hit Houston in 2005, I was already living in DeWitt County, a hundred miles west of Houston. We didn't get a drop of rain. A hundred miles to the east was devastated. That's the way a hurricane works. There is a clean side and a dirty side. When Hurricane Allen came inland, he hooked up the Rio Grande River and that put San Antonio on the dirty side of the storm. Our brand new house had roof damage and our sliding door leaked to the point where the carpet had to be pulled up. When Mother and Daddy went back home to Corpus Christi, they had one tree limb broken and a board missing from their fence. Their house was completely fine. They should have stayed home!
Hurricane Claudette hit Seadrift, Texas in July of 2003. It came ashore as a weak Category 2. Since it was only July, the Gulf of Mexico wasn't warm enough to fuel a big hurricane yet. But Claudette blew hard enough and broke enough tree limbs where I lived in Yorktown to give me a big reminder of the damage a hurricane can do. I cowered in my living room, recalled that afternoon in the laundry room, and prayed the storm away. We had two massive piles of broken limbs after that storm passed.
A few weeks ago, in August, Hurricane Harvey hit Rockport as a Category 4 storm. Things have changed with our technology. Safe in my house in Yoakum, I was able to stay in touch with my loved ones in the path of the storm via text messages. And I was able (when the power wasn't out) to track the storm online. It was a torrential rainmaker. It devastated the Texas coast where it made landfall and dumped 50 inches of rain on Houston causing a Biblical flood. See what happens when you're on the "dirty" side of a hurricane. We got almost seventeen inches in Yoakum, and our little place south of us on Carancahua Bay came through with the loss of just a few roofing shingles and some palm fronds. My significant other's precious granddaughter who lives in the Caribbean just came through a Category 5 storm, Irma, in the same way, by texting with us while we monitored the storm online. It helps a lot to be able to stay in touch through these things. And the predictions are so much better than they used to be back in the olden days.
Living on this planet, near the coast, I'm sure there are more hurricanes in my future. They are, after all, just doing their job--taking the heat from the equator and redistributing it over the earth. And they're pretty efficient at doing that, oblivious to the humanity in their path. After Harvey left, the temperatures in Yoakum were ten degrees cooler than they had been before he arrived. It was noticeable, and it has stayed cooler. It's the way the world works. Now, if Mother Nature would just do something about these mosquitoes!!
Onward ...
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