Behind the Lines: Podcast 
Hurricane Ike: Slide Show 
Behind the Lines
I Don’t Like Ike
For Houstonians, the hurricane was not a disaster, just an enormous inconvenience. That didn’t keep us from griping about it for three weeks.
patrice says: Since I live in THE IKE ZONE I can't really find an article about someone whining about the loss of electricity funny. My parents (in their 70's) lost their home and it's contents - so it's not very funny to us. 95% of Bridge City, 80% of LaBelle/Fannette, 98% of Sabine Pass, 98% of the Boliver Peninsula is gone and you were whining about 3 weeks of no electricity and the lack of restaurants? Geez - IF only that's all that had happened here. Why not report on the lack of true help from FEMA and our State for the victims? How the insurance companies aren't paying up in a timely manner (if they pay at all). How about Jefferson County officials who can't decide IF or WHEN or HOW HIGH a person has to rebuild their home? We have officials from the federal, state, and county telling people to raise their home 6-8 feet - how in the world do you raise a brick home on a slab? DUH Come tell the world what a huge cluster the recovery effort is when you throw in government officials without a clue! That's real reporting. (October 30th, 2008 at 7:44am)
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No power meant no Internet, TV, or cordless phone. (“Don’t we have a better-looking one?” Sam had asked when I pulled my antediluvian phone—the one with a cord—from under the bed.) It was hard to believe that the rest of the world was going on as before—“Can’t you just use the Wi-Fi at a Starbucks?” a friend living elsewhere wondered—when for us, time had nearly stopped. As many would later note, there was time to contemplate, time to read a book, and time to chat with friends and family, which was a wonderful thing for, maybe, the first few hours after the storm. The rumor that power would not be restored for a minimum of three weeks, however, soon became a major topic of conversation on the street. “Perhaps they are just managing expectations,” my neighbor Linda suggested. I hoped she was right: I was starting to tremble from e-mail withdrawal, while Sam, unaware that school would not be starting for more than a week, began to worry about his homework. “My Beowulf essay is stuck in the computer!” he cried.
In the late afternoon we decided to ignore official requests that we stay off the roads and set off for more sightseeing and to accept a dinner invitation from a friend who had moved in with her parents during the storm. (“They have power!” she explained.) The streets were virtually empty of cars but full of debris, and the rare stores that were open were mostly operating without electricity, selling goods that didn’t require refrigeration. In Montrose, the lines of people waiting to buy anything looked like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath crossed with a scene from Blade Runner. Every once in a while we hit an intersection with power—as opposed to an intersection with a traffic light swaying like a noose from a loose wire—which meant that an adjacent restaurant might be open too. The few that were lucky enough to be functioning, even those with historically horrible food, had small mobs clamoring to get in.
We were lucky too. In the middle of dinner my husband called to say that a neighbor two blocks away had reported that her lights were on. We beat a hasty retreat through ink-black streets, past somber silhouettes of high-rise condos and shadowy human forms, anxious to get home before the 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew went into effect. Police cars, their lights flashing, sealed off some downtown streets. “It looks like the apocalypse,” Sam said.
Our street was dark when we turned onto it, but a few blocks ahead, we spied a rosy glow that grew brighter as we approached. It was true. Our block was radiant with everything the twenty-first century had to offer: lights, air-conditioning, TV, Facebook. At the time, I didn’t feel inordinately blessed; I figured everyone would have power by noon the next day.
I was wrong. As the workweek began, on September 15, about 80 percent of the population of Harris County was without. Having power, I soon saw, was not only a convenience but a metaphorical exercise, giving me great insights into how the rich and, well, powerful view the rest of us. While most people were forced to use coolers as refrigerators and burn untold amounts of gasoline in vain attempts to find ice, I was annoyed that more restaurants weren’t open. Oh, right—they didn’t have power. We had access to hot showers and air-conditioning—a safe, cool night’s sleep—why did everyone else look so tatty? Poor things—they didn’t have power. Maybe, I thought, I should offer our house to a few friends and share our power—but not too many of course, because then our power might be diminished. Secretly, I began to fear that something might happen, and our power might be switched off again. Then where would we be? Powerless, just like everyone else.
To assuage my guilt, I went down the street on Monday to volunteer at my local POD (point of distribution, in FEMA-speak), where I handed out ice, water, and food, courtesy of the U.S. government. It was the storm’s biggest cliché that this city of individualists pulled together during such a troubled time, but it did, just as it had in the aftermath of Katrina. When it was reported that the sommelier at Brennan’s, James Koonce, and his four-year-old daughter, Katharine, had been badly burned in the restaurant’s fire, fundraising events sprouted as soon as other restaurateurs could open their doors. Any neighbor with a chain saw seemed ready and willing to loan it out or cut down a damaged tree (that is, if the roving bands of truck-driving chain saw entrepreneurs didn’t get there first; this was, after all, Houston). And, at the POD, I saw the whole of my neighborhood—soccer moms, gangbangers, retired oil-company workers, Sam’s best friends from elementary school now grown into tall young men—helping to distribute water, ice, and MREs, the same packaged, self-heating, ready-to-eat meals now being served in Baghdad, from chicken with salsa to vegetarian manicotti.
My neighbor Dave was nominally in charge of civilian volunteers one day, having taken a civil defense course during a period when he was laid off from work. He wore an interesting uniform that included a yellow vest, yellow gimme cap, and authoritative reflector sunglasses. People in customized “I helped too” T-shirts arrived from the mayor’s office. As the days wore on, similarly garbed workers appeared, representing institutions ranging from Exxon to Lakewood Church. (“Is Reverend Osteen here?” one of the women accepting an MRE asked hopefully.) Using orange cones in a church parking lot, we set up a makeshift drive-through, with rumbling refrigeration trucks in the middle, along with seven-foot-tall stacks of ice bags and twelve-packs of bottled water. Before we opened for business, at 9 a.m., car lines and people lines stretched for blocks in two directions: Land Rovers and junkers, babies and the elderly, even a handlebar-mustached veteran on a motorcycle, who balanced an ice bag and water bottles on his lap as he sped off. The scene was both heartening and frightening, the former because anyone could see government working right there on the micro level and frightening because most of us now have a collective memory of other modern disasters—9/11, Katrina—that underscored the feeling that Ike would not be the last, natural or otherwise.
Over the next few weeks, the city came back to life gradually, which meant that immediate danger passed and massive inconvenience set in. Crews were still searching for bodies down along the coast, but in Houston the talk was of which businesses were open. Kroger! Central Market! Society hairstylist Cerón’s salon! The news passed via word of mouth, in exuberant tones. The ingenuity that is so much a part of life here resumed: Some people started filching ice from the POD and selling it for $6 a bag a block away; owners of houses with power strung extension cords to those who didn’t. A neighbor whose best friend worked for a phone company invited him to come over to watch a football game—provided he bring his command center RV with the (functioning) big-screen TV. People surreptitiously used plugs at Target to charge their cell phones. There was a lot of drinking, most of it friendly, maybe because there was a lot of boredom. My house was taken over by teenagers who lacked power at home; they read David Sedaris out loud to one another and, on “hurrication” for an average of ten school days, ate a breathtaking amount. There was something very twentieth century about it all—we watched network TV (no cable, even if you had power) and read the Chronicle. The newspaper, beset by budget cuts and layoffs, outdid itself with storm news and survival tips; the only thing people were happier to see than their paper was a CenterPoint Energy truck. When one came around, you could hear cheers from blocks away.
I knew we were getting back to normal when our big-city irascibility returned. Local pols used Ike to advance themselves, claiming credit or assigning blame. A woman in West Houston posted a yard sign declaring “Hot Housewife seeks Lineman, 13 days without,” while a power-starved if history-challenged resident of my neighborhood compared CenterPoint to Hitler, Osama, and Enron (in that order) on a large banner on his fence. The financial crisis on Wall Street was accompanied here by the predictable plaint that Houston’s problems were being ignored.
Well, they were. Houston was wounded, not vanquished. We knew the difference between what had happened to us and what had happened on the coast. The worst-hit here lost a few weeks of normal life; those in Ike’s direct path lost their homes, jobs, and maybe, when the death toll is finalized, even their loved ones. We went back to work, accepted invitations to rescheduled events, made kids do their makeup homework, and planted new trees that would never replace the ones that were lost. I added my packages of Ike MREs to the Alicia stockpile of canned limas. I put the flashlights, lanterns, and crank radio someplace I will soon forget. I will probably buy a $50 five-day cooler and probably not buy a $3,500 generator, which will be a mistake. I know I’ll regret it when the next one hits.
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