The roads to Houston were just beginning to open up when I drove down on August 30. The Colorado River was well over its banks, and the sodden fields under the heavy sky appeared unnaturally lush, like an Irish landscape. Some of the access roads were still flooded. I saw an eighteen-wheeler trapped under an overpass; only the top of its cab was above the waterline. I wondered what had happened to the driver. There were only a few cars on the interstate, including some freelance rescuers towing swamp boats. Nathan Rott, a reporter for NPR, ran into a bunch of guys with oversized four-wheel-drive pickups who were forming up in Columbus, seventy miles from Houston. One of them told Rott, “It’s moments like these—and only moments like these—that America truly appreciates its rednecks.”
When disaster strikes Texas, one of the most effective first responders is a local chain of grocery stores, H-E-B, which dispatches a convoy of fifteen vehicles, including mobile kitchens that can produce 2,500 meals an hour, fuel tankers, portable generators, and Disaster Relief Units that contain pharmacies, ATMs, and business services equipment. By the time Harvey made landfall in South Texas, the convoy was already on the way to Victoria and Rockport. Over the next several days, various units headed to Houston. On Thursday, August 31, the Beaumont emergency management coordinator called H-E-B to say that the city was marooned. There was no water pressure. No supplies were getting in. And the state wasn’t able to help in a timely fashion. The H-E-B convoy charged through. That’s my idea of enlightened Texas capitalism.
As soon as I got into Houston, I went over to the theater. It’s on Texas Avenue, in the heart of the Theater District, only three blocks from Buffalo Bayou, which marks the northern edge of downtown. I had seen photos and videos that cast members had sent me during the storm. Texas Avenue had essentially merged into the bayou. The water was five feet deep in front of the theater. When I arrived, the streets were mostly dry, with jumpable puddles along the curb. The storm had moved off to Beaumont, but the wind was still gusting through the canyon of skyscrapers. I was prepared for the worst, I thought.
The Alley had its first performance in 1947, in an unheated (and certainly uncooled) dance studio on Main Street that accommodated eighty-seven people. A sycamore tree grew through the roof. A high-school drama teacher named Nina Vance was the founder. That same year, director Margo Jones created America’s first nonprofit resident theater in Dallas. Until then, theater outside New York was largely made up of touring Broadway productions, but it is because of visionaries like Vance and Jones that the flow reversed. Most original works—such as Cleo—now start in regional theaters, where they can be developed and find an audience.
The Alley opened in its current, brutalist-style building in 1968. It looks to me like a fifteenth-century Venetian fortress, with turrets that have also been compared to anti-aircraft emplacements. It’s not the kind of building to concern itself with hurricane winds. On the street in front of the theater was a vacuum truck, a sort of tanker that is used in the oil fields to suck fluids and slurry out of fracked wells. It had been going for twenty-four hours, the driver told me, but so far had only gotten two feet of water out of the theater.
I followed the suction line inside, where the chief engineer, Daniel Naranjo, greeted me. Daniel’s regular flashlight was out of batteries, so we relied on my iPhone. Upstairs was the recently renovated 774-seat Hubbard Theatre, where Cleo was intended to be staged; it was untouched. We could have put on the play that afternoon, except for the fact that the utilities were all drowned.
We headed down a spiral staircase toward the little theater below, but we only got a few steps before the water greeted us. The Alley had been flooded before. The previous high-water mark came from Tropical Storm Allison, in 2001—the worst rainstorm to hit an American city until that time. Harvey eclipsed that mark by a solid two feet. Below the submerged stage was a basement, which contained the dressing rooms, restrooms, laundry, wardrobe department, and about a hundred thousand props from the seventy years of the Alley’s existence, all of it buried under millions of gallons of water like a sunken ship.
It would take ten days to drain the theater before the demolition could begin. The main problem, Daniel explained, was the electrical panels, which were custom made, and would require at least six weeks if not several months to replace. Cleo was supposed to begin performances in three weeks.
One had to wonder at the wisdom of rebuilding. Initially, it was thought that the water had gotten in through the subterranean tunnel system that underlies downtown Houston, as had happened during Allison. Since then, submarine doors had been installed, which worked during Harvey. This time, the floodwaters rose high enough to enter through an air vent the size of a sewer drain and blew out the reinforced concrete wall leading to the power vault. That sheared off a sprinkler head, which added another million gallons of water to the gusher coming in from the street.
Hanging over our rehearsal was the obvious question of whether we would actually have a production. Alternative venues were either damaged or booked. Bob Balaban was stuck in New York since the Houston airports remained closed. We were waiting for the ax to fall.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, I walked over to the George R. Brown Convention Center, where eight thousand refugees had taken shelter.
The initial chaos of the first days of Harvey had subsided into an impressive sense of order and gentility. The giant halls of the convention center were divided into dormitories for families, families with animals, single men, and single women. There was food in every aisle. I spoke to Scott Toncray, an official with the Red Cross. “I did Katrina with FEMA,” he said. “This one is a whole lot calmer.”
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans in 2005, was estimated to be over 1,800 people, but no final tally has been made, since 135 people are still listed as missing. Looters took over the streets. The New Orleans police disgraced themselves with their civil rights violations. Doctors at one hospital became so desperate as they waited for rescue that they intentionally hastened the deaths of their patients. FEMA was unequal to the urgency and scale of the disaster. In one of Governor Rick Perry’s finest moments, he opened Texas to the refugees, and a quarter million of them came to Houston. As many as forty thousand of them became Houston citizens, aided by a multimillion-dollar resettlement program the city put in place.
I walked past a line of people waiting to file claims with the dozens of FEMA counselors. Volunteers were sorting mountains of donated clothing. Actors in Disney costumes (The Lion King, Frozen) wandered around, looking for children. There were phone-charging stations, a table full of consuls from South and Central America, massage therapists, face painters, and yoga instructors. It was almost like a street fair.
Rhonda Wilson, a Houston police officer, observed that, when she first got to the center during the storm, “it was a sea of helpless, desolate victims.” Seventy-seven people had died, but that was a fraction of those who had been lost in Katrina and even less than the figure for Rita. “There are still people being evacuated, and the rivers keep rising. I’m living my life in twelve-hour shifts,” Wilson said. The night before she had finally gotten a chance to turn on the television, and she had broken down. Like other police officers, her badge was masked, in memory of their colleague Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned in the flood while trying to report for duty.
* * *
“THIS CITY SPRAWLS over six hundred square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously,” Manny Fernandez, the Houston bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote on Sunday, September 3, when the city was still partly submerged. “The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than ten thousand square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.” Eighty-five percent of homeowners had no flood insurance.
Harvey calls into question the future of Houston. It has endured more
flooding over the last forty years than any other city in America, and yet it continues to grow by four hundred people a day, building forty thousand houses a year to accommodate the influx, many of them in the floodplain, and continually paving over the grassland prairie that sponged up the deluges of the past. Harvey made the cost of the absence of zoning shockingly clear.
“Everybody got hit,” Judge Ed Emmett told me when I visited him again, this time in his county office in downtown Houston. “Geographically, demographically—it doesn’t matter whether you were rich or poor. If we’re going to continue to have this large urban area on the Gulf Coast, we’re going to have to deal with flooding.”
Houston had come into its own after the Great Storm of 1900 wiped out Galveston, then the major seaport in the state. “The Ellis Island of the West” was the point of entry for tens of thousands of immigrants, especially European and Russian Jews. Wealthy and complacent, Galveston refused to address the hazards of its location—for instance, by building a seawall. The city was only eight feet above sea level at its highest point. The weather bureau did not heed the warnings from Cuba that a major hurricane was on its way. When the storm arrived, it brought a surge fifteen feet high, drowning the island and wiping out the city almost entirely. The death toll was estimated between six thousand and eight thousand people. It is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The survivors rebuilt the city with great determination, raising it seventeen feet higher, but chastened investors wanted a safer port.
They turned to Houston.
The seeds of a great city had already been planted. Houston had streetcars and a railroad connection to New Orleans. A philanthropist named George Hermann gave a tract of land for a charity hospital, which would eventually become the foundation of the Texas Medical Center. The bayou had already been dredged to facilitate the lumber trade, but that work quickly expanded when Spindletop came in the year after the Great Storm. President Woodrow Wilson officially opened the Houston Ship Channel in November 1914 by pushing a button on his desk in the White House that was supposedly connected to a cannon in Houston.
But Houston had to face its own destiny in 1935, when downtown flooded. “That’s what got everybody spurred into action,” Judge Emmett told me. A flood-control district was established. Two large reservoirs were built to contain floodwaters; at the time, they were twenty miles from downtown. “They were out in the middle of nowhere,” Emmett said. Since then, some fourteen thousand houses have actually been built inside those catchments, a fact that may not have been disclosed to the homeowners. Those reservoirs were now filled to the brim, many houses within were flooded, and the Army Corps of Engineers was releasing water to keep the levees from breaching, adding to the flooding of the hundreds of homes that had been built around them.
“I’m not a hydrologist, I’m not an engineer, but something didn’t work,” Emmett said.
I asked Emmett, a Republican, if he was a climate-change skeptic. “The seas are rising, we have to deal with it,” he said. “I’m more concerned if we’re at a new normal. We’ve had three five-hundred-year floods in less than a three-year period, so our definition of a five-hundred-year flood is probably wrong. Either that, or we get fifteen hundred years off.”
Emmett laid part of the blame on his own party for being anti-intellectual and failing to take climate change seriously. “We’ve got too many people in our party who believe that the earth is less than ten thousand years old,” he said. “Some of the political leaders are so afraid of this extreme element in the party. Periodically, just for fun, I go back and watch the movie Inherit the Wind”—about the Clarence Darrow–William Jennings Bryan “monkey trial,” which featured a debate about the biblical account of creation versus the science of evolution. “I can’t believe we haven’t gone any further than that.”
* * *
GREG BOYD FINALLY ASKED to speak to me and the cast about the fate of Cleo. The pain in his face reflected the bad news he was carrying. The lower part of his theater was being demolished at that moment. There were dumpsters lined up outside, crammed with drywall, moldering carpet, props, and rows of theater seats. Several of the city landfills were flooded and there was no place to put the debris. Similar piles of rubbish were all over town, where homeowners had stripped their houses of furniture and floors and had taken the walls down to the studs. I was touched by their determination to rebuild as soon as possible, but I also took note of the number of For Sale by Owner signs that had sprung up in neighborhoods like Meyerland, a predominately Jewish section, which had been badly hit once again. Members of the Alley staff had also lost their homes or suffered significant damage. (Greg would step down after the turn of the year amid charges of abuse. It’s been quite a rocky season for the venerable old theater.)
It wasn’t a surprise when he said he had to cancel the production.
I admit that my involvement in the theater world is tangential. I am a nonfiction journalist, deeply curious about the world outside but not so much affected by the interior landscape. Actors are a little mysterious to me. Their emotionality, their expressiveness, their intuitive genius—all of this is about as far from who I am as nuclear engineers or trapeze artists. When I’m with them, I feel like I’m visiting a foreign country—a friendly place, but one with unfamiliar folkways. I once made the mistake of uttering the word “Macbeth” during a rehearsal in New York, and the actors marched me outside on a cold winter day, made me turn around three times on a crowded sidewalk, and then beg for readmittance. The Scottish play, you are supposed to say.
When Greg delivered the news, the cast nodded, then one of them spoke up, saying, “Yes, well, we just want to keep rehearsing.” They all agreed. It was totally unrealistic. There was no venue for us. The Alley was facing millions of dollars in damage. Even when the theater got back on its feet, there was no room in what remained of the season. Greg began to weep. The next day, the Alley staff somehow managed to find space for Cleo the following spring.
Shortly before I returned to Austin, there was an ad in The Houston Chronicle. “To our friends in Texas,” it began:
Twelve years ago, you took in hundreds of thousands of us. You opened your homes, closets, and kitchens. You found schools for our kids and jobs to tide us over. Some of us are still there. And when the rest of the world told us not to rebuild, you told us not to listen. Keep our city and traditions alive…
The way of life you love the most will carry on. You taught us that. Your courage and care continues to inspire our whole city. We couldn’t be more proud to call you our neighbors, our friends, and our family. Texas forever.
We’re with you.
It was signed, “New Orleans.”
FOUR
Culture, Explained
Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. It is in the sound of our voices, the flavors of our food, the rhythms of our music. Whether through the visual arts, literature, theater, architecture, music, dance, or cuisine, culture is a mirror of a million facets reflecting the society it contains. Primitive cultures reflect nothing more than that. Unauthentic, phony cultures mainly reflect societies other than their own. A great culture is aware of the world beyond but is constantly turning back on itself, searching for its roots, examining its direction, criticizing and talking to itself—in short, taking itself seriously.
From my lifelong field studies spent among Texans, I have formulated a theory of cultural development. Despite the legendary qualities of boorishness, braggadocio, greed, and overall tackiness associated with my state, there is a lot to love about the traditional elements of our culture. If Texas is ever to approach cultural greatness, it will be because of the juice we get from the basic stuff we recognize as Texan. We might call this Level One of Texas culture. It is the bedrock, the foundation that supports everything to come.
Level One is aggressive, innovative,
and self-assured. It erupts from the instinctive human reaction to circumstance. The paisano presses his tortilla, the slave mixes his corn bread, the cattleman rubs prairie sage on the roasting steer, and a cuisine is irrepressibly born from the converging streams of traditions and available flavors. Spanish priests mortar limestone rocks with river mud; bankrupt Georgia farmers, remembering the verandas of their plantation empire and mindful of the withering sun, build high-ceilinged houses with broad, shaded porches; thus a native architecture arises. In scores of county seats laid out in the 1880s, the Virginian idea of the central courthouse square meets the Spanish idea of the town plaza and the Victorian idea of wedding-cake masonry, creating an idiom of civic democracy. The imagination chases after memories of cattle drives and Indian wars and the mighty geysers of oil spewing depreciable assets out of the ground, and from these come the stories that power our mythology and inform our literature. The whine of the wind across the plains finds an echo in the nasal twang of our speech and the bending guitar strings, and so even today our songs holler back to the once empty spaces where suburbs now sprawl. All of our culture overlays this primitive template, just as the Houston freeways inscribe the same routes once traced by ox wagons headed for Market Square.
The persistence of Level One in Texas is what makes it unique. You can still find the Tex-Mex Regular Dinner on the menu, and there are steak houses that haven’t changed since the introduction of bacon bits on the baked potato. Pickup trucks are as common on the city streets as yellow cabs in Manhattan. (One-fourth of all vehicle sales in Texas are pickups; we buy more than any other state, more than California, Florida, and Oklahoma combined, and nearly every manufacturer has a special Texas edition.) When people think of Texas, these things inevitably come to mind.
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