A Burgher’s Testament: Why We Live in Houston and Visit(ed) New Orleans

1. Tuesday was our regular pick-up day for garbage and heavy trash, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that both were retrieved right on time---which occasionally doesn’t happen during a non-post-hurricane week. Our part of town may have been first in line when service resumed, but we figured the pick-up would be stalled for a while, given all the Rita-related branches and limbs awaiting disposal, along with the various non-storm related trash set out by residents (such as us) who used the post-Rita reordering of the garage and patio as a chance to do some early spring cleaning. (But that did cause us to recall how the current mayor, shortly after taking office, wanted to explore making heavy trash pick-up a by-request service …)

2. On the Friday afternoon before the far edge of Rita wheezed though Houston, we joined a neighbor in battening down some of the detritus---abandoned rebar, busted 2x4s, etc.---left by the bankrupt contractor that quit in the middle of installing a new water pipe below one of the two streets that make our neighborhood accessible to the larger world. We also diligently stowed away or weighted down the rubber “work zone” barricades (or “non-work zone,” in this case) and the tall one-way signs the city has put up on the long-closed eastern half of the street. People were rightly worried about all of this loose crap being flung about in a 100 mph breeze. No sooner had we finished and there coming down the street was a city truck with a work crew poised to perform the very same battening-down. We weren’t angry at all---in fact, we were more than pleasantly surprised that the city even bothered, given everything that was going on that day (not that there was much work left to do). Obviously, someone in Public Works---possibly having been nudged by one of our crankier, more activist-type neighbors---was on the ball. To paraphrase our hero and inspiration Larry King, “City of Houston, we salute you!”

3. From the New York Times, September 28, 2005: “[then-New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass’] unorthodox management style was evident two weeks after the hurricane when he stopped while visiting various police districts for a pedicure, a massage and a haircut. It was, he said, all part of visiting his ‘troops.’ ”

COMING NEXT WEEK: Slampo's Place introduces its new "reader representative."

Kinky: One More Victim of Katrina ’n’ Rita?

We feel relatively confident in predicting that the combined psychological wallop of the two hurricanes has pretty much shot to shit Kinky Friedman’s chances of getting on the ballot and/or being elected governor. We’ve always figured that it would be difficult for Friedman to round up the required signatures of 45,000 non-primary registered voters he needs to be voter-accessible in the November 2006 general election, but post-Katrina/Rita we suspect Texans are in a decidedly sober mood and probably even less inclined to cast their civic lot with a comedian (that is, someone who’s paid to be funny, as opposed to the inadvertent comedians who constitute the greater percentage of Texas politicians).

There’s a slight chance we could be wrong, though. Maybe Friedman has come up with some good one-liners about hurricane preparedness and emergency response. Lord knows we could use some. We still may save ourselves for Friedman---why (the hell) not?---and of course haven’t totally ruled out throwing the full editorial weight of Slampo’s Place behind his candidacy.

Otherwise, the hurricanes don’t seem to have altered the Texas political landscape, although we sense a small and potentially widening opening for someone. Gov. Rick Perry has some blame to share with local officials for the clogged evacuation (and shouldn’t coordinating mass movements on city, county, state and federal roadways be the ultimate responsibility of the governor, even if just to give him [or her] something to do in between failing to come up with politically and legally workable school finance plans?), but overall, like Houston Mayor Bill White and Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, Perry managed to project an air of calm normalcy, and got plenty of TV face-time doing so. These boys weren’t about to be “Nagin-ized,” or, in Perry’s case, “Blanco-ized.” But luck---the hurricane’s late tacking away from Galveston-Houston---played a big part in that (not that it did much for Beaumont-Port Arthur and Lufkin and Jasper).

Which leaves the action in the GOP primary. White’s profile, and maybe his star, rose, but we still don’t see a Democrat as electable statewide in 2006, even if he or she has $40 million of his or her own to blow. White, though, is certainly a comer, although we can’t remember any mayor of Houston ascending to high statewide office (if we recall correctly, Perry’s GOP primary opponent, the Semi-Tough Grandma, did serve as Austin’s mayor, several surnames ago).

We thought Kay Bailey Hutchison came off best of all. We’ve warmed to Hutchison over the years, primarily because of her disinclination to always strap herself to ideological mast of the Republican National Committee’s talking points and her willingness to show the occasional visible streak of independence. She sounded thoughtful and reasonable, before and after Rita.

And what about Lyda Ann Thomas, the mayor of Galveston? We don’t know whether she’s a Democrat, Republican or Rosicrucian, but if that ruler-wielding schoolmarm had told us to evacuate, we wouldn’t have wasted time asking when or where to. (Love the way she softened “the look” when she appeared on Larry King Live, and Larry seemed smitten, too: “We salute you, Madam Mayor!”) We were so taken we wrote her a Beach Boys song: "Lyda A-a-ann/Take my ha-a-and/And lead me from this/Doomed i(s)--la-a-and/Oh, Lyda Ann ... "

Correction Corner/Appended Fulsome Tirade: In our initial unrevised posting of Sept. 25, 2005, Slampo’s Place misstated the dates of some selected postings of the Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy blogger: Due to organic brain damage and a copy editor’s error, we wrongly listed some of his Thursday postings as coming on Friday and some of his Wednesday postings as appearing on Thursday. (Lately the days all kinda blur together, y’know.) Which does not detract from our point: that before Chronicle columnist Ken Hoffman starts goosing the local television news operations for supposedly needlessly whipping Houston-Galveston area residents into a Katrina-driven Rita frenzy, he should double-check the products of his own employer. Not to pick on this SciGuy---his stuff was just the most readily available---but he did raise the specter of a “truly horrific” outcome for the Houston area unless the hurricane adjusted track, and said forecast appeared after the freeway exodus had commenced. Which wasn’t necessarily “wrong” or even “bad.” However, we watched quite a bit of TV as the storm approached, in between boarding windows and storing away the seemingly endless amount of shit in our yard (like hundreds of thousands of other locals, we weren’t spending a whole lot of time reading blogs), and we don’t recall anyone---even Neil Frank at his most wound-up---proclaiming a possible “truly horrific” event.

We thought we’d leave the entire issue alone, but then we read the editorial in today’s (Sept. 27) Chronicle, which also claims with an apparently straight face that “television reports … added to Houstonians’ anxiety” (no specific examples offered). Then, about halfway through the long slog---check this out, if you haven’t--- the editorial breaks for commercial word on behalf of (tad da!) the paper’s very own SciGuy by quoting at length from a laudatory email about the blogger from an unnamed reader in Washington D.C. (was it Michael Brown?) … All this was from the same Chronicle editorial page that a little more than a week ago listed the No. 1 Katrina-taught “lesson” for Houston to be that local leaders should “presume the worst-case scenario.” Oh well. We don’t ask for consistency. Or logic. Or even facts …

And oh yeah: Slampo’s Place regrets the error.

Cinderella, Sweeping Up

So you stayed home for Rita, with the thermostat dialed to 60, lying on the couch and watching it all on TV, congratulating yourself on your prescience and laughing at the suckers stuck on the freeway traveling four miles in eight hours in a 100-degree wool blanket?

Well, bully for you. Now shut up.

Or you got out on the freeway and it took you 20 hours to get to that Burger King parking lot in that town whose name you never knew, where your SUV carrying just the two other family members finally ran out of gas, and now you can’t stop whining and cursing “the media” and the politicians and vowing that you’ll never do that again …

Well, we feel ya, but for now would you please shut up?

Or maybe you’re a member of the media---non-credentialed “citizen journalist” or card-carrying word-and-image warrior in full-dress uniform---and you’ve mustered the gall to blame television for “hyping” the dangers of Hurricane Rita and causing people to needlessly flee and the clog the roads.

Well you---especially you---should shut up.

As we noted here in several postings (sorry to keep repeating ourself), the question of “go or stay” doesn’t bring forth an easy answer. Most Houston-area residents, we think, ran through some quick calculations (factoring in their own past experiences with hurricanes and their locations and particular situations), took into full consideration Katrina and what the media were saying about Rita, gauged the lengthening gas lines on Wednesday and their own pocketbooks and patience, and made their decisions accordingly.

If we lived on or near the coast we sure as hell would have beat a hasty retreat. But we live up in southwest Houston, equidistant from U.S. 59 and the Loop, a half-mile or so north of Brays Bayou. Flooding was a concern, but not a major one, since we came out OK in Allison. What worried us about Rita was the prospect of unprecedented high winds raking through Houston and ripping off the roof of our modest abode, with a secondary concern being the durability of the four large trees in our yard and the towering pine in the yard behind us. (When it first appeared that Rita might run straight through Galveston, we thought we might head up toward Jasper and camp on family property near there. That certainly would have worked out well.)

A small adjustment in the storm’s route and all those people who waited it out on the freeway and got somewhere they thought was safe might have been down on their knees thanking whatever supernatural being they pay obeisance to, while we could have been standing (if we were lucky) out in the front yard of our devastated house cursing the same supernatural entity. Man has yet to totally subdue nature, we've heard, and even inside that large cone of uncertainty that appeared to be making Neil Frank even punchier than normal, there’s no foolproof way to pinpoint exactly where a hurricane will fall on land until it’s pretty much too late to load up and roll out. So there was no “right” or “wrong” decision.

Which bring us to the question Banjo Jones has posed for polling: Did television news operations overhype the dangers Rita posed to the Houston-Galveston area?

Sure they did. They overhype a two-car fender-bender on the feeder road, so overhyping a potentially massively lethal hurricane was as easy as donning a rain slicker and getting blown about the beach.

We didn’t find the local television coverage to be any better or worse in tone than on a typical Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Sure, it left us bilious, but that’s because it was like watching a 60-hour non-stop variety show from the 1960s, with anchors Jerome and Dominque and Bill and Shern-Min and Shara (and it was good to see you again, babe, but that fire engine-red outfit you sported on Thursday was screaming Code 3; muted earth tones are preferred for hurricane panic) filling the Ed Sullivan role and all the reporters in the field----Wayne and Ted and Jessica and Deborah and Mark and Phil and Whoever and Whomever etc.---being brought on stage for brief turns in the wind as Topio Gigio, the Little Italian Mouse, or comedian Alan King.

But was that bad? Irresponsible? Funnyboy Ken Hoffman of the Houston Chronicle, in a rare appearance in the paper’s front section on Sunday, avers that the television stations should be “investigated” (by a presidential commission? Congressional committee? HPD? Oh … that was a joke? Right!) for setting the viewing area needlessly on edge. He should spend more time reading his own paper and its non-paper products. As the storm approached, the Chronicle's much-promoted SciGuy blogger wrote (emphasis added):

... with Rita due to make landfall some 75 miles east of Galveston. The bad news? I don't think there's a whole lot of confidence in the track. We may wake up with the storm shifted back over Galveston Bay, and it might be at the Texas/Louisiana border. Good luck trying to sleep tonight.

The official forecast track has slipped slightly northward again, but Houston remains in a very dangerous position. Unless the storm turns south or north in the next 24 to 48 hours we are set up for a truly horrific event. I am not going to sugar-coast this, my friends. If the storm comes ashore as forecast, it would essentially be the worst-case scenario ... As a Houston resident and property owner, I am truly mortified right now. If you are under a mandatory evacuation order, you should heed it.

Greater Houston is not a bowl, but has many more coastal communities and housing developments than the upper Gulf coast. These people absolutely must leave, their homes are likely to be flattened.

... it's looking more and more definite that we'll be hit by an extremely powerful storm in our own backyard. Let's do the best we can.

With all due respect to this SciGuy, who's a smart writer, are these momentarily definitive judgments any different than what the television stations were saying/doing, minus the valedictory pronouncements? (Blogging being the closet written product to round-the-clock television and radio coverage when it comes to rapidly shifting developments, as opposed to the old, tired, frozen-in-time newspaper, which somehow never even made it to our house on Friday and didn't show up on Saturday till late afternoon.)

Actually, when it came to Hurricane Rita, we found one media outlet we could count on, again and again, without fail, to strike just the right balance of hard-eyed skepticism and bug-eyed hysteria, of fact and fiction, of the sacred and the profane.

Yes, that was us. But that’s the way we roll here at Slampo’s Place: all-seeing, all-knowing and “right” 100 percent of the time!

Now we’ll shut up.

Outside the Cone of Certainty

A little rain (very little). Some tree-bending (barely) wind. Smallish branches down. Electricity on all night. Air conditioning, although Rita’s certainly cooled things off.

Houston’s good dumb luck apparently will be the Golden Triangle’s (and New Orleans’) loss. Amazingly, we got through by phone at 7:30 a.m. to our mother on the far “dirty side” of the storm. She slept with her dog on the floor of her bathroom Friday night. Lost the cable, but not the electricity. It was still “bad” on Saturday morning, she reported, with 60-70 mph winds and driving rain. She’s anxiously watching the trees in the neighbors’ yards.

We had scoffed at 9 o’clock or so Friday night when we heard Frank Billingsley make what we thought was the premature declaration that the Houston area already had seen the worst of Rita. “I wanted to be the first to tell you,” he said. It’s still not outside the zone of certainty that Rita-spawned rains could dump 20 inches in our front yard, but at present it looks as if the Channel 2 weatherman was on the mark (first to tell you or not).

Waiting on Wobblin’ Wita (And the Waiting is the Hardest Part, We Hope)

Just one question, one that subsumes all other questions at the moment (such as, Why was there no gasoline? and Why wasn’t there better coordination between the local, county, state and federal governments to ensure a more expeditious flow of traffic?): Is there truly any safe, efficient and fast way to evacuate an overly car-dependent metropolitan area of 5 million or so people? I mean, besides suggesting that people start hitting the highways five or six days in advance, when a storm would be mostly a gleam in Neil Frank’s eye and the landfall is anyone’s guess?

Back in World War II America had way to move masses of citizens quickly and safely. It was called a train system. We understand train technology has been refined quite a bit since then. In Europe and Asia.

But later for that sort of ax-grinding. We also understand some Pakistanis who own a bakery near our house are open and serving hot plate lunches. We’re going to get a couple to go and try to relax and breathe deeply for a while. One good thing about all this yoga we’ve been doing for years: We’re capable of literally kissing our own ass good-bye, if necessary.

“The Cone of Uncertainty Will Narrow …

… and the probability will increase,” Dr. Neil declared at mid-afternoon, meaning, we think, that the closer Wobblin’ Wita gets to land the better idea we’ll have of exactly where it will come ashore.

Meteorology is complicated, no?

Our own cone of certainty has closed to zero and the probability stands at 100 percent that we’ll be staying home in southwest Houston. The gridlock made up our mind for us (it’s been pretty much as we imagined).

We’re on our own now: the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market called it a day about noon, Foodarama and Belden’s shuttered later. No Starbuck’s. No Blockbuster (and it’s the end of late fees!). No gas, although at late afternoon motorists had parked their vehicles in front of the bagged pumps, apparently believing that the tankers were on the way (later we noticed cops and constables shooing them away). No nothing, except for Rio Liquors (not interested at the moment) and Los Variedades El Salvador (ditto).

It looks as if about three-quarters of the residents on our block are staying, although we suspect a few may try to steal away in the night. We’re boarded up and iced down. Bring it on, as our president would say.

On somewhere else.

From the Cone of Uncertainty …

That’s what Channel 11’s Neil Frank is calling it, the broad swath of Texas coastline on which Rita could potentially come ashore Friday night/Saturday morning. His counterpart at Channel 2, Frank Billingsley (sans Radar the Weather Dog, who we understand was put down in advance of the hurricane) is taking more of a half-full approach, referring to the same broad swath as the “cone of opportunity.” Or maybe it’s the “zone of opportunity” (apparently the opportunity is the hurricane's, not yours). Either way, these guys are confirming financier Bernard Baruch’s adage that “one [weather] man’s uncertainty is another [weather] man’s opportunity.”

Being the pessimistic sort, we’re going with Neil. He’s got that crazy mad gleam in his eye, the one he gets anytime a hurricane or tropical storm even feints toward the Texas coast. He’s keeping our spirits up, too, by repeatedly calling the hurricane that decimated New Orleans and the Mississippi coast “kre-TINA.” Kretina, you’ll recall, was a bit player in the early Little Rascals episodes.

Besides, we’re in our own cone of uncertainty, still dithering after several inconclusive family counsels over whether to lie or hie. But we’ll say this for the hurricane: if nothing else it’s opened up a cone of social opportunities. Folks are battening down but they’re also gabbing and neighboring like there’s no tomorrow. We haven’t spoken to so many of our fellow subdivision dwellers in southwest Houston since Allison washed through. We walked our dog a couple of hours ago and must have crossed paths on the street with 10 people, only a couple of whom we knew. Instead of passing silently in the night, as we would on a normal Wednesday, we---they and us---spontaneously started conversing with the question of the moment: Are you staying or are you going? Right now our informal poll shows about 40 percent staying, 20 percent going, and the rest, as the pollsters say, are undecided.

We wish we had more time to think about this.

In the meantime we're headed back to our 24-hour Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market. If it’s closed, we’ll take that as a sign from God to join the movement of the people. If it’s open, we’re sure we can find something to buy. Or someone to talk to.