Harvey: Gone
My husband sends me an email while I am out of town, subject line “Gone.” I’ve just woken up, foggy and surrounded by fog in a University of California, Santa Cruz dorm room where I am attending, as I do every year, the weeklong Dickens Conference. I wait and wonder as the attachment very slowly downloads. Despite its location near Silicon Valley, UCSC has only intermittent wifi and often no cell service. There is always time for speculation when you get a message at the Dickens conference, always time, in my case, to anticipate the worst. So many things, so many people, are or could be “gone.” We depend, however, on the shaky wifi because It is difficult to talk by phone; between the time difference and the crowded schedule, there is only one sliver in a given day when I can talk to my family, that fog-shrouded half hour between, say 6 and 6:30 California time, when the redwoods and deer have not yet emerged from the mist and I am still in my narrow dorm room bed with the plastic mattress and the slippery sheets. Although I love the Dickens conference with all my heart, I never feel, elsewhere, so far from home.
Even once the attachment unloads, it takes me a while to place the image. I have once again misplaced my glasses in this room without a nightstand. The photograph that emerges almost pixel by pixel reveals something that looks like a construction site, with a large truck in the middle. None of the landmarks seem familiar. Is Scott reporting on the progress in the backyard of our new house where we are installing a pool with the money from selling our previous home? I look more closely: on the left-hand side of the picture is part of a two-story yellow building, my erstwhile neighbor’s house; shorn of the fence between our houses, the yellow house reveals itself from an angle I have never seen before. This is not the new lot but the old one; Scott is writing to tell me the house, which generated so many unoriginal names from “Hell House” to “Albatross”, is gone.
It is hard to say as I drink in the bareness of the lot, whether this is a moment of mourning or rejoicing. Part of the problem is that I have declared the house “gone” so many times. First, when we returned through the receding water to find it cracked down the middle, then on innumerable forms where we testified over and over to “a total loss,” then more recently when we sold the lot, the collapsing house still on it. To bid it farewell yet again becomes both harder and easier with practice.
I have talked, in my earlier posts, about a series of losses and recoveries associated with the house formerly on Merrick St. The stories I have so far been able to tell are about smallish objects, those signs of life and living that insurance companies (and their point of view is all-too relevant) call “content.” I have not talked much about the house itself, the “structure” as FEMA calls it. Perhaps this is because it is easier for me to think at a certain scale, about a world of things that can be contained in boxes, brought out, touched, and put away. Perhaps it is because the objects, even as they become contents, have an intimate history that includes stories of those who gave these things to me and those who helped me to preserve them or throw them away. Contents, as they become objects, are bound to people and to family. But of course, structures are as well. They lend themselves to tours of family history: this is where my sons played basketball on the driveway; this is the dining room where we ate so many dinners with friends and the kitchen where we cooked those dinners; this is the shaded area the garden where our pets are buried; this is the bedroom where my son recovered from cancer treatments; this is the head-shaped dent in the wall that records the time he fainted on the way to his room. This is the garage door where my younger son’s name, created by his brother out of loops of silly string, survived against all odds the storm and the years until the garage, like the house, was finally and truly “gone.”
Perhaps my failure to talk about the house is simpler than scales and history. I have talked mostly about what I love and the fact is, I did not love the house on Merrick. Not while I lived in it, and not after it was destroyed when I felt something like nostalgia, something like emptiness, discombobulation, even dismemberment. The love I do feel for the house, is, I believe, my children’s, a secondhand love, a love of my children. My younger son would return to the destroyed house at night just to be there, outside it, in the driveway by the basketball hoop, that was for him and his brother so central to their sense of identity.
Although I don’t want to belabor an analogy between relationships with houses and relationships with people, I believe what I felt for the house on Merrick when I first saw it was attraction to what was most glamorous about it. When my husband and I looked at the house for the first time, we saw two things: the kitchen and the pool, indeed the pool from the kitchen. We stood at the center of this 1950’s ranch house, with a stunningly equipped kitchen behind us, and saw a planned garden bordering a pool shaped like a pond and encircled by rocks. The water was not the one-dimensional turquoise of most outside pools, but deeper, changing color as the water circulated through a series of little fountains. I am transfixed by water, even the Gulf on the days when it is a muddy brown. To own this house would be to immerse myself in the beautiful water—pool, pond, and fountains. I had never even hoped to be able to live in a house with a pool. Growing up in apartments, I thought I would never get to live in a house, to be able to step outside into greenness. And how, here were greens, and blues, and all the colors of water to be had, to be swum in. My children would love it; perhaps I would even have a swimming dog.
If the pool had not been enough to persuade me, the kitchen would have done it. And here I confess to all sorts of ugly feelings. While a pool was something outside even my fantasies of fantasies, I had long desired a great kitchen—even felt that our family, all enthusiastic cooks, “deserved” such a thing. Others have written eloquently and honestly about the perils of “house envy”; all I can say is that before I lived on Merrick street I would go to other people’s houses and match their kitchens (if splendid) to their interest in cooking. All those fancy hoods and power burners, all those cunningly shaped drawers, gone, I felt, to waste.
So, the pool and the kitchen, the pool as seen from the kitchen, sealed the deal. We ignored the fact that the bedrooms and bathrooms were cramped, and that the “master bedroom,” slightly bigger, jutted out onto the street. We decided to put the obvious foundation issues on the back burner (so to speak); this was Houston after all. What we did not ignore, because it never crossed out minds, is that Houston in general, and this neighborhood in particular, with its sleepy Bayou sealed in concrete thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers, would repeatedly be flooded or almost flooded throughout our years there. In the first 21 years we lived in Houston, we experienced, I think, two named storms, neither of them terrifying. Coming to the area in 1990, we missed Alicia in 1983, and lived beside what we now know was the unusual quiet of the Gulf until, in 2001, Allison—a mere tropical storm that just would not leave—got our attention. In this calculus of names and dates, Allison was a “hundred-year event.” It is true that the house on Merrick street had been flooded in Allison, but so had many other houses. In fact, from the point of view of real-estate shopping, it was the flooded houses that were the most attractive; FEMA had paid to have destroyed kitchen and flooring redone. You could tell when a house you were looking at had been “Allisoned” by the perfection of the wooden flooring, the updating that came with recovery. And so, in 2005, we bought the house on Merrick street, and moved in days before Rita followed Katrina west along the Gulf coast. Waiting for Rita, we joked--because what else was there to do--that we were lucky: our most valuable possessions were still in plastic tubs. We imagined them floating about the house, bumping gently into the new sheetrock. We were a little surprised that the hundred years turned out to be four, but like so many others we relied on a calculus of desire, a magical statistical thinking: if there were two big storms in four years, there would be almost none in the next 96.
Rita largely missed Houston, although it caused death and injury to those trying to evacuate the city. In the years after Rita and before Harvey, we began to realize that storms did not have to have anthropomorphic names to cause damage. The scariest events for us, besides Hurricane Ike, which was more of what I now know to call “a wind event,” were named after dates: The Tax Day Flood, the Memorial Day Flood. “Flood” in fact had crept into the names. I learned to turn to the “minute-by-minute” app, which told you what the weather was doing at your exact address, especially useful if you had evacuated, as we did for the Memorial Day Storm with our children, medicine, pets, and three foster kittens, and wanted to know what was going on in the neighborhood you had left. I learned how to check the Bayou sensors on my phone, mentally splitting the difference between the sensor just to our East on Main Street (better since the retaining pond under the Medical Center), and just to our West on Stella Link Road (usually worse news). We learned to take our valuables to our offices at Rice a few days before the storm, or to distribute them among friends who lived on higher ground. We learned to live as if hundred-year floods were going to happen twice a year, usually, but not always, in the spring. We learned twice what it felt back to walk (and occasionally swim) through dirty water to see if your house was OK. Once it was, and once, after Harvey, it wasn’t..
I admit to feeling sorry for the house as it cracked, rotted, and was ultimately razed. But that too is anthropomorphizing, and pity is not love. The house gave me great things—my children’s childhoods, a succession of pets, a changing but core group of friends and festivities. Christmases and Thanksgivings. More than anything, after the Memorial Day flood, I wanted out. I imagined lying in bed in some unspecified house high off the ground, listening to the rain without a choking terror; I imagined not checking my phone minute by minute for short green gaps between torrents. I was almost able to imagine thinking, “it’s still raining,” perhaps saying it out loud to a sleepy husband, and turning over to invite the rain into my dreams without terror.
I cannot say the terror is completely gone, but the house on Merrick is. It has been recently replaced by an almost completed million-dollar home of astonishing luxury and ugliness. As per code, it is built high to withstand future flooding; the steps up to the front door are so steep that, as my husband said when we first saw the house forming, impossibly big on its lot, it is impossible to imagine carrying groceries or a stroller up them. On several occasions as the house was being built we tried to see if the pool was still there. For a long time, it seemed to be: we could see the familiar rock outline from the street. But now there is a flyer, and no mention of the pool on it, although the list of amenities includes a “workout room” and a “movie room” and a “large back balcony.” We don’t know what folks on the balcony will see now that the pool is gone. We could, of course, find out, attend an “open house,” follow the inevitable signs and balloons to our old address: the numbers and street name that the two houses, the big and the little, the front-pacing and turned, share across time. It is hard to not to think that our house still lives inside the bigger, newer one--that it is not gone but, like grandma inside the big bad wolf, somehow preserved by what swallowed it.