Disaster Tourism

It begins very soon after the winds die down and the rain stops. You get in your car that you may not have remembered to fill with gas before the storm and drive around your neighborhood looking for what Harvey, or Ike, or Beryl, or the unnamed derecho has wrought. When you first started to do this, maybe 15 years and 10 major storms ago, you called it “damage assessment,” as if this were the first step in doing something about it. Now you know it under less self-aggrandizing names. Voyeurism. Nosiness. Schadenfreude, the guilty (and fleeting) pleasure of seeing that some people are worse off than you are. The phrase “Curiosity Crawl” that so aptly describes the people who cause traffic jams on one side of the road when there has been an accident on the other. Over the years, you have settled on “Disaster Tourism.”

Your motives are perhaps not completely contemptible. If you are one of the lucky ones with power, or a generator, or someone on whose house a giant tree has not fallen, you do this in (small) part to remind yourself of your own comparative privilege, and to stop whining because the slow internet does not let you watch your favorite shows without commercials. It is both embarrassing and reassuring to see that you are not alone in this impulse to stare at damage, to marvel over a fallen tree, a crushed car, a bayou or highway turned into a river. People from the neighborhood come by as if out for a walk. Some use dogs as their alibis; disaster sites fill with poodles, labs, and doodles who pee on debris but seem otherwise uninterested. People in cars and trucks negotiate streets blocked by fallen tree limbs, broken glass and pieces of lumber, stopping only when they come upon something bad enough to stare at.

Your first instance of disaster tourism was during Ike, or perhaps the Memorial or Tax Day floods.( In Houston, folks often structure their mental calendars around specific disasters, but after a while they begin to blur). You were living near the bayou that would flood your house  during Harvey. You walked to Braes Bayou with your husband and small children to see that it had transformed itself into a different body of water. For years, as you crossed it, you thought how ugly it was: a shallow runnel of water at the bottom of a concrete tube designed without any thought of beauty by the Army Corps of Engineers as flood control. On the day after Ike (or the Memorial or Tax Day floods) the bayou looked much more like what you imagined a bayou to be before you came to Houston, inspired by listening to Linda Ronstadt sing “Blue Bayou.” While the post-disaster bayou wasn’t exactly blue, it was full of moving water puddling up around the roots of trees and looking more like Louisiana than Houston. Later you would learn that concrete flood control channels actually made urban flooding worse.

While you have been a disaster tourist too many times, you have also been the subject (or is it object?) of disaster tourism. When your house flooded and cracked down the middle, people drove down your street as soon as it was passable to gaze at the growing pile of sodden household goods as they formed on the curbs of your house and many of you neighbors’. Some people stopped to help. People you knew of course: friends, colleagues, a team of students from the university where you taught. But there were also strangers. A high school girls’ soccer team with their coach. A couple who asked if they could pray for you and you said yes because you had suddenly learned to ask for help. Mostly though, people in cars or on foot stopped to take in the spectacle and moved on to the next bigger trash pile, the next cracked house, the next street. Some took pictures with their phones. Some waved or honked or said some version of “bless you” into the humid air. You only minded when they took pictures.

You do not take pictures of other people’s disasters unless you have been asked specifically to record (or, as in the title picture, the space is public) damage by a friend. This probably counts as friendship, not tourism.  But ever since the day, long before your own disaster, that you drove after tropical storm Allison to the edge of Interstate 45 and saw it filled with water, roofs of trucks barely breaching the surface, you have indulged in looking at other people’s disasters. You were compelled to climb down the steep bank, compelled by the transformation of the landscape and the city. “Come down to the river,” you said to your husband without noticing that your own language of place had changed.

Only yesterday, after Beryl came over Houston with hurricane force winds, you went out with your husband and a friend who was sheltering with you. You could have used the excuse that you were checking on the house of another friend who was out of the country. And you did check.  But then you went on to find the intersection that made it on to the news (which you saw because your generator finally turned on after your husband went out to fix it in the wind and rain). You gawked at White Oak Bayou, in your new neighborshood, that like Braies before it, and like I-45 before that,  had turned into a river. You looked at the Katy Freeway, now a desert empty of cars. You gaped at elms, and water oaks and at a lot of poplars with their roots ten feet wide, exposed to the air that was fresh with the recent rain.

Like all tourists, those who tour disasters look for novelty and spectacle. After (you think) four hurricanes and four major floods, you are somewhat jaded. After a while you notice only the biggest fallen tree, or the ones that were otherwise exceptional, like the crepe myrtle in full bloom, its flowers the color of blood pooling on the ground where it fell. You compare this storm, this wreckage, to past disasters. You note to your friend that this time there are “only” three cars floating under the Studewood overpass.

 You see fences twisted away and do not avert your gaze from the exposed yards and houses.  You remember your own house turned inside out and how other people drove by it with, you imagine, various combinations of smugness and compassion, generosity and withdrawal. The truck from which you gaze over, and perhaps down to, the fallen trees and damaged houses was bought precisely because its high ground clearance and all-wheel drive makes it a great flood vehicle. You turn around and go home to the noisy and comforting sound of the generator that calls to you as you turn the corner to your street.