Harvey: Home for Christmas

It is mid-December in Houston and the winter evening is falling slowly. At Rice, it is the end of the semester. The lights are on in the classroom buildings as I rush past them in the gloaming. Despite having taught at Rice for almost 30 years, despite being on familiar ground, I am not sure where I am going. The crumpled flyer in my hand tells me that the performance of “A Climate Christmas,” an eco-critical version of Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol will take place in “Solar Studios/Juice Boxes/Storage Containers Across from Herring Hall.” I have never noticed these studios, these containers, these juice boxes, although Herring Hall is my office building. Stumbling a little as I cross the campus road into an open field, I stop suddenly, confronted by an outsize image projected on the outside wall of a building I don’t remember having seen before.

What I see is a Christmas scene, a giant Christmas close-up. A gloved hand reaches out to place an ornament on a tree branch. For a moment, the ornament hangs in space, catching the light and absorbing my attention. The camera moves back to reveal the figure to whom the hand belongs, then the tree, then the floor, then the room. The figure wears a hazmat suit; the tree is bare and stunted; the wooden floor is buckled and covered with grey dust; there are no walls.  The room is—or was—my living room six months after my house was flooded during Hurricane Harvey on August 28, 2017.

There is a sense in which I knew what I was running toward. I had given Joseph Carson, a graduate student in my department and director-producer-author of “A Climate Christmas”, permission to film in the house that stood rotting on our old lot. I had even provided images of destroyed furniture and clothing originally sent to the insurance adjuster. Nothing, however, had prepared me for what was playing out, larger than life, on the wall of a shipping container. Joe had placed the tree almost exactly where our own Christmas trees had stood, season after season: by the living room window where they faced both inward to the family and outward to the street, beckoning us in from what even in Houston feels like the cold. As I stared at the projection, chills ran up and down my body.

Sigmund Freud came up with the linked concepts of the “Heimlich” and the “Unheimlich,” probably inadequately translated as the “homely” and the “unhomely” or the “homely” and the “uncanny.” They are not opposites. The homely always contains an element of the uncanny, of what has been excluded by walls, doors, locks, family systems, ideas of privacy. Even as we celebrate home—say by decorating a Christmas tree—we do it in the face of what is outside. As I stood there in a December warmed by climate change, I realized in a new way that my home had always contained its opposite. My Christmas tree had in some way always contained the potential to become that other bare and skeletal tree. My Christmas tree had always been haunted by other possibilities carried in, as it turned out, by the floodwaters of Braes Bayou that blurred the inside and the outside, home and everything else. 

            The projection of the interior of my home into a public space via the film, was only at that point only the most recent instance of that house being turned inside out. After the water breeched the walls bringing the outside in, my husband, my older son, and I-- accompanied by a large group of friends and helpers-- carefully brought everything that was inside the house outside on the driveway, one damp and bloated piece of furniture, one undamaged cup and saucer, one scrap of moldy clothing at a time. Our goal, in the blazing sun of the week post-Harvey, was to sort into three piles: throw away, repair, and pack for some undefined future place where what the Victorians called “household gods” might reign again. The “throw away” pile grew steadily on the curb: here were the couches whose foam cushions could never be made completely dry; the tables whose legs fell of as we lifted them; the electronics that would never turn on again. As our pile grew, so did those of many of our neighbors, many of whom had never seen the inside of our house nor we theirs. I was reminded of photographs of the London Blitz or more recent ones of Lebanon, which show bombed houses cross-sectioned to the gaze of others, a house surprised into public spectacle. In some ways, the throw-out pile was the least upsetting; when something, however loved, is turned into trash it at least has a place. I took to exaggerating the act of throwing away, slinging furniture to the top of the pile, making a game of it. The second pile, the repair-and-restore pile, was harder to manage, in part because I had to confront what seemed like an exhausting amount of future work, but in part because I had to do the work of imagining that work in the first place. What would it be like for my mother’s cocktail napkins, each embroidered with a tiny rooster, to come back to normal? Since I had never used them before, could I imagine using them afterwards? Did “using” really mean the act of restoring and putting away, even more carefully, and in a higher place?

            The film, as it showed the exposed walls exposed also a feeling and an orientation that was all about height or perhaps depth. We were told by the rumors and the manuals to which we turned post-Harvey to strip the walls of sheet rock to a height four feet (sheet rock comes in 4-foot panels). Moving through the house the first day, one of the first things we saw was the waterline, 28 inches high. The water had eft its mark with the precision of a painter; the lines of dampness and degree echoed oddly our most ambitious attempt oat home décor: a horizontally blocked painting scheme in watery greens and blue. Below and parallel to the line we had worked so hard to achieve, Harvey had repainted. Even though the water was gone by the time we reentered the house—Braes Bayou, it turns out, drains almost as quickly as it overflows--moving through the rooms felt like wading.

            Wading in a flood is a form of measurement. As we evacuated on the night of the 25thwith our cats, our dogs, and our medicines, we stopped repeatedly to ask ourselves how deep the water was between our house and the home of our friends, who had kindly invited us to shelter there. Sometimes that meant my stepping out of the Jeep into dark, rushing water above my thighs. My body was our guide; if there was water above my knees, my husband would turn the car around. If it was only at our knees, he would plow through, swamping stalled and parked cars with dirty waves. My body became a measuring stick, our house another.

            There would, of course, be other measurements, as we worked with contractors and insurance companies to see if we could salvage the house. After one visit of men and women with tape measures and cameras, two weeks after Harvey, our front door came off the hinges. The only thing protecting what was still inside were the swollen floorboards blocking the entrance. For a while, I still cared that strangers could enter my home, even though there was nothing worth stealing, and I would in fact have been grateful to any thief who removed any object for any reason. By the time Joe asked for the key to the house so he could film, I had lost all sense of inside and outside of which the unnecessary keys had been the sign. I thought I had let go of another more profound and vaporous sense that the house was still ours until I saw it projected on a public walls, its rituals parodied by climate.