Water, Water Everywhere
My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the players couldn’t make it to the legendary domed stadium, much less the fans. We didn’t know that factoid until much later. The news the next day focused, of course, on the eight lives lost and on the damage to the Texas Medical Center and several of the city’s art museums.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story starts earlier in the day, on the last leg of a four-day trip from our previous home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d spent a night each in Roanoke, Virginia, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. It was slow going in a station wagon pulling a tent trailer camper and bearing a kayak on top. The car carried two adults, six children between the ages of 15 and five, and the family dog. (I have four sisters. I think we made a potty stop about once an hour.)
On the fourth day, we were eager for the trip to be over. We’d seen some photos of our new house in the Westbury area of southwest Houston, but only Mom and Dad had been there. We would all have new schools in our new city in the fantastical state of Texas. We would have a new landscape to explore and new friends to make. I was even going to have a room of my own!
After a lunch stop, Dad turned on the radio and searched the dial for music. He stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to an enthusiastic voice preaching that Jesus lay in the tomb “for thuh-REE days and thuh-REE naaahts!” The Southern accent and the strange diction puzzled our Yankee ears as much as his confusing argument. At least three or four squeaky voices pleaded for a channel change. Next up was a weather report—severe thunderstorms in the Houston area. Someone asked, “How bad can it be?” We kept going.
By the time we reached Beaumont, we heard that the rain was starting to let up, so Dad stuck with the plan. We could expect to reach our new home by mid-afternoon! But he made an adjustment to his proposed route. He’d spent a few months in Houston, so he knew that traffic on the west side of Loop 610 could be unmanageable even in good weather. In that boom year of 1976, the city was growing up and spreading out, and the west side was a focus of expanding population, development, and traffic. So instead of taking the most direct route, we’d circle south around downtown on 610.
The storm clouds were breaking apart when we exited Interstate 10 and made the turn onto the southbound feeder road for Loop 610. The exit ramp from freeway to freeway was under construction. The feeder road ahead of us disappeared into a pool of rising floodwater that lapped over the curbs on both sides. Dad pulled into the right lane for a moment. The freeway onramp was only a couple of hundred feet ahead on our left. We watched an 18-wheeler in the left lane muscle its way through the water. When another big truck turned the corner behind us, Dad stepped on the gas and followed in its wake. Mom breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the safety of the elevated Loop.
About a minute later, all four lanes of traffic came to a complete stop in front of us.
[To be continued….]
Note: The assignment today was inspired by Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall in Louisiana this morning. The prompt: write a “storm story.”
I promise that I’ll come back and finish this soon!
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
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