I of the Storm
Living in Galveston meant having a personal relationship with the Gulf—and with the many hurricanes that changed the course of the city’s history. To say nothing of my own.
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Several storms brushed by the Island while I was growing up, but none was a direct hit. All of my youthful encounters with hurricanes involved squalls rather than the center of the storm; even so, the relentless power of wind and rain was enough to provide all the experience with hurricanes that I ever hope to have. Before my mother gave in and got outside storm blinds, wind-propelled rain coming in horizontally had an unobstructed shot at the windows. It probed for an opening between the bottom of a window and the sill, in wood that had become warped by years of exposure to the humid ocean air. We pressed towels against the bottom of the window to absorb the rain that managed to get through. It was amazing how quickly a towel would become soaked. I would wring out the water into one dishpan, toss the soggy towel into another, and start over with a dry towel. When a dishpan filled up, I took it into the nearest bathroom and emptied it into the sink. The main problem was that there were more windows than there were Burkas. Finally, the squall would weaken, and we would turn on a portable radio, get the latest weather report, and wait for the next squall. This could go on for hours.
At the end of the summer of 1961, Carla, a giant of a storm in both size and ferocity, approached the coast south of Galveston. I was already back at Rice University, waiting for the semester to begin, when my mother decided to leave the Island. She had gone to Houston to shop, and on the way home she saw that water from the marsh had crept alarmingly close to the level of the inbound roadway. The hurricane was still more than two hundred miles away. The possibility that egress could be cut off by rising water overcame her sense of loyalty, and she packed a suitcase and brought my sister right back to Houston. She wasn’t alone; Carla was the first time Galvestonians left in large numbers (almost a third of the population of 65,000). When she returned home, her decision was validated by the presence of dead fish in the front yard.
On my first visit to Galveston that fall, several weeks later, I was appalled by what I saw. The beach in front of the seawall was almost gone, lost to erosion. The buildings fared little better. Almost nothing was destroyed, but almost everything was damaged. Among the casualties was Ursuline Academy, one of the great works of Nicholas Clayton, the foremost Texas architect of the late nineteenth century and, of course, a Galvestonian. People said later that it could have been salvaged, but no one cared to try. Out with the old! It was razed and replaced with a bland building of no character. Doomed too was the massive Galveston County courthouse; it likewise was supplanted by a structure of little interest. To the civic leaders of the era, Galveston did not need reminders of what it had been but was no more.
What these people wanted—and I knew some of them—was progress. They regarded the aging but still imposing nineteenth-century buildings on the Strand, most of them cavernous and empty, as eyesores. They cringed when the novelist Edna Ferber likened their city to Miss Havisham, the abandoned bride in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Because they had always seen Galveston’s history as an impediment to progress, they couldn’t imagine that it could be a boon. It took Houstonians, coming from a town with ample progress but little tangible history, to see Galveston for what it was. In 1966 Houston architect Howard Barnstone published The Galveston That Was, with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ezra Stoller, that put on display the lost glory of Galveston. The photographs captured the old homes and commercial buildings teetering between grandeur and decay. Even Galveston could not ignore its powerful, if unspoken, message: Having lost its greatness once, Galveston was about to compound its mistake by allowing history to repeat itself. Instead, the book spurred a historical preservation movement that saved Galveston’s soul.
It has even brought a little progress. Today, people come to Galveston for more than the beach, which—forgive the disloyalty, or maybe it’s just an old prejudice—isn’t much to look at anyway. The sand is more than several shades removed from white, and the water is an opaque green. They come to look at the grand old homes along Broadway and in the East End Historical District and to shop on the Strand, where the buildings that looked so dilapidated in The Galveston That Was have been restored. Pier 25, where my father ran a plant that made burlap bags for the cotton industry, is now a terminal for cruise ships. In the seventies and eighties, Houston oilman George Mitchell brought streetcars and Mardi Gras back to town, opened several new hotels, spearheaded many of the restorations, and—most important of all, for those of us who are “born on the Island”—affirmed his Galveston roots by drinking coffee in the morning with the old-timers. The biggest change has come on the west end of the island, where wealthy Houstonians have built million-dollar weekend homes. For the first time in 105 years, Galveston has a tax base.
But between the beach and the bay, Galveston resists change. It remains a city of frame houses, most of them raised on stilts for the hurricane everyone knows is coming and still in need of a coat of paint. In a way, I feel most at home in this part of Galveston, where the tourists seldom venture. I am fond of Austin, where I reside, and I have learned to respect and appreciate Houston, but they are large, complex, diverse cities that long ago separated themselves from their pasts. What I love about Galveston is that its past is neither out of sight nor out of mind. Galveston taught me that history is alive, that it has meaning, that it is something to be passionate about.
It has never stopped teaching. On the eve of the centennial anniversary of the great storm—September 7, 2000—history brought me back to Galveston. The occasion was a forum about the storm at the restored Grand 1894 Opera House, and from the stage I could not see an empty seat. I was one of six panelists, all of whom had written about Galveston—magazine articles in my case, books by the others. Each of us was to talk about our work and our assessment of the storm a hundred years later. I have no recollection what five of the panelists said, including myself, but I do remember Erik Larson’s presentation about Isaac’s Storm. Cline, the weather bureau chief, is still regarded as a hero among meteorologists because he had told his superiors in Washington that he had gone down to the beach on the morning of the storm and warned people watching the encroaching tide that a major storm was coming and to seek shelter. Cline reported that this had saved many lives. In his research, however, Larson had been unable to find any confirmation for this story; despite the many accounts of survivors, not one mentioned Cline’s role, and Larson believes Cline made it up to assuage his guilt over underestimating the severity of the storm and the terrible loss of life, including his wife.
After Larson’s presentation, questioners rose out of their seats and approached the stage, shouting angrily at him. How can you say such a thing? How can you impugn this great man’s reputation? They were Isaac’s descendants, coming to defend his honor. “I knew they would be here,” Larson told me backstage. “Whenever I speak, they always show up.” Don’t tell me that history isn’t alive.
The next morning, I walked across the boulevard from my hotel and down some stairs to the beach. It was nine o’clock, the time of Isaac Cline’s disputed journey a century before. I rolled up my pants, took off my shoes and socks, and waded into the surf. I stood there for a few minutes, wriggling my toes into the wet sand and trying to imagine the unimaginable. But the Gulf was at low tide. It just lapped at my feet, so placid, so treacherous.
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