HARVEY: Brays Bayou

I'm goin' back some day, come what may, to blue bayou
Where you sleep all day and the catfish play on blue bayou
All those fishin' boats with their sails afloat, if I could only see
That familiar sunrise through sleepy eyes how happy I'd be.

(Roy Orbison, Joe Melson)

I am writing this at the very beginning of a long-planned project on Brays (or, sometimes Braes) Bayou, the not-very-blue body of water that flooded my home during Hurricane Harvey, the Medical Center during tropical Allison, and the old Jewish neighborhood of Meyerland four times in the last few years. In my mind, this has always been a project that required walking the bayou with a map, photographing it from its origin at Barker Reservoir, following it as it meanders east through neighborhoods rich and poor but always urban, until it joins, 31 miles later, with Buffalo Bayou emptying into the Ship Channel at the town of Harrisburg. It has been two years since I had this idea, and there has been, as yet, no walking the Bayou. Last year, the idea was to wait until the fall when the weather was cooler; this year, during COVID, I have been slow to figure out the logistics of walking with the various companions who have promised to accompany me on manageable chunks of the journey. . These are good reasons for delay, but they are primarily, if I may make the distinction so popular on sports talk shows, excuses. I have put off walking because, unlike Linda Ronstadt as she wails “Blue Bayou,” I do not want to go back. 

And isn't it ironic, don't you think?

It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
And who would've thought?

(Alanis Morissette)

The last time I saw the Bayou up close it was on my street, having left its traces on my walls and furniture. The time before that—the day before Harvey—was during a walk with my husband along the north bank of what is technically a “slow-moving river.”  My husband and I put on rain jackets to keep out the light but persistent rain and walked about two miles south towards Meyerland. This last walk marked the first time we became acquainted with the motto of the Project Brays, an organization whose mission is the transformation of Brays Bayou into a safe and attractive recreational space. “Reduce the Risk. Rediscover the Beauty,” said the sign. I had my last thought about teaching for a while as I added the sign and its probable destruction to my examples of irony for undergrads. Irony, it turns out, is quite hard to define, especially when your students get their examples from Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” “No,” I say, “rain on your wedding day” is not ironic, unless, for example, you have moved the date repeatedly just so the weather will be good.

We walked the Bayou that day in part because we knew we would be stuck inside—probably in someone else’s house—for a while, but also because we knew the very ground we were walking on would likely change in character. Our footsteps marked the Bayou as it was; our walk somehow conceded it to an unknown future. Perhaps the neighborhood would be wiped out entirely; perhaps the beauty of the Bayou would be discovered. Perhaps both would happen, and the neighborhood would become parkland. We turned our backs to the rain that was coming down a little harder now, and headed for home knowing that we would not be coming back.

Let me stop here for a moment to tell you what Brays Bayou was before the storm, at least in the neighborhoods I have walked in the ordinary course of things. I first heard the name from the real estate agent we contacted before moving to Houston. “You might like to live along the Bayou,” she said. And then “You can drive along the Bayou to work.”  Delighted to be moving South and hearing the echoes of the music written from warm places, I heard the strains of “Blue Bayou.” Having spent a semester in New Orleans taking daytrips to festivals in the Louisiana countryside almost every weekend, I thought of grass waving over wetlands, of marsh birds, and flat-bottomed boats, of alligators and nutria. What I saw from the real-estate agent’s car was a drainage ditch, a concrete tube with sides so prohibitively steep there was no accessing the (then) brown puddles of water at the bottom. Concrete sides, concrete bottom, concrete bridges, all, I soon learned, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District. I did see a heron, and something in the shape of a fish floating downstream, along with Styrofoam cups and water bottles.

Our life in Houston, in three different houses, did unfold along the Bayou. I did not drive to work along Brays because it was more scenic inland. We did take walks, long and short along the banks of the Bayou; over time, there were more herons who would sometimes come at night to land on our lawn. An urban myth about Brays Bayou suggested it was a home for escaped pet birds; we heard many stories of exotically colored escapees roosting in the trees along the banks, but I never saw any. Slowly, the north bank became a running trail, and then the south. Someone—presumably Project Brays—added exercise stations. On weekends, bicyclists would skirt the bayou on designated paths; I shuddered to think what would happen if they missed a turn and tumbled down those precipitous sides into the shallow water below. 

And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been madeDriven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me; weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'Well I've been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in, but I'm still on my feet
And I'm still, willin'

(Lowell George)

After a big rain, the bayou would swell and turn either bluer or browner. You could see the current moving east, connecting our neighborhood to the Medical Center, to the University of Houston, to the Ship Channel. We would receive water from the town of Katy, where much of the Katy Prairie was in the process of being concreted over; dirty water would be pushed from Katy to Meyerland. I have always liked lists of place names, especially in country songs like Lowell George’s “Willin’”, where they are magical. But even before Harvey, before Allison, I dreaded the connections the Bayou described. As with the towns strung out along the Mississippi, barriers that get erected to prevent flooding in one place only pass on the water to another, downstream. 

Since Harvey I have crossed the Bayou many times, usually on Main Street or Kirby Boulevard. The area south of the Bayou there is a strange place, a place, mostly, of outposts. Although there are box stores there that have endured for many years, many of the buildings on the south side belong to the Medical Center on the North. This is where we went for my son’s experimental proton cancer therapy. Other medical services at least partly independent of the Med Center have string up to offer dialysis, skin care, imaging of various types. Around these buildings are long-stay lodgings, or “residential hotels,” designed for patients during treatment. The signs outside promise full kitchens and a home-like atmosphere. We were always grateful, driving north from proton therapy that we did not, as so many other patients did, have to stop for the night on that side of Braes Bayou. 

Another feature of the area are self-storage enterprises, boasting of air-conditioning and security for overflowing household or business goods—like the residential hotels an odd and unheimlich approximation of home. One of the first things we did after our house flooded was to rent two extra units; by the next day there were none left and there were long lines in the parking lot as people looked for a safe place to put what Harvey had spared. It took two years to whittle the number of storage units down to one; for a long time if we needed a tool or piece of equipment we had not used since Harvey, we would drive south across the Bayou that had made the trip necessary. When we moved into our house, we continued on this time- consuming and gas-guzzling approach for far too long: the windowless storage unties with their piles of stuff became a kind of bank from which we made regular withdrawals—perhaps even a windowless parody of a second or third home. The area south of the Bayou is for me, a collection of boxes large and small: the box stores, of course, but also the square and instrumental blocks that you enter to get treatment or to store other boxes. The Bayou, in my own emotional landscape, forms a dividing line between daily living and instrumental life: it is the place to go if you need something that you are not sure you really want or desire—a place to enter and leave quickly. Of course, for me, and for other residents of the neighborhoods touched by the bayou flood, Brays also dives before from after, past from present. While most people chose to stay where they were, to clean up, to rebuild, to restore, they too are surrounded by the changes the bayou made.

 I can finally say I have started my own Brays Bayou Project. I do love beginnings, especially those moments when you map out a journey whose first steps you have yet to take. The blog trails me a little—only a very little—along a trails of books, maps, and shuttered archives with a slow river running through them.