“The Boat” is a Texan restaurant chain best known for the fact that all its restaurants are shaped like boats, as opposed to being shaped like restaurants. They dot the landscape and offer shrimp and solace to all in need. In fact, they do just about everything except float, which is very unfortunate, because nobody except Noah is more in need of a sea-worthy vessel in the middle of the plains than a south Texan.
I have experienced probably six real, biblical-style floods in my life (seven if you count Hurricane Diana, for which I was present in-utero), and I loved every single one. I was only six for my first flood, during which we received over 20 inches of rain between the beginning and the middle of the school day. I was in a private school at the time, and they kept us there all day because they didn’t really have a better idea of what to do with us. By the time school ended, the water was more than two feet deep in most places. The rain was falling so heavily that you could hardly see past the edges of the carport when someone’s parent finally made it through the storm to pick up his kid. I watched in disbelief as a man beached his canoe on the small rise of concrete driveway under the carport, tossed his son a yellow slicker and a paddle, and paddled off down the street and out of sight.
A lot of the streets in Houston are designed to hold the water, especially on the south side; it helps keep the houses from flooding as much as they would otherwise. The southwest freeway in particular is like a huge drain; it is built in a 30 foot deep ditch and sucks water from the surrounding area, becoming a 10-lane canal during big floods. After tropical storm Allison, a whole jumble of unlucky 18-wheelers was found after having been completely submerged for nearly a day.
In October of my fourth grade year, we got a whole week off of school because of flooding from Hurricane Rosa. I was living in a neighborhood called Mystic Lake at the time, and the water was so high that we kids couldn’t tell where Mystic shore ended and Mystic Lake began. Thus the the tragic loss of my friend’s bicycle and my own precious set of Pogs, as well as a daring rubber raft rescue ensued.
I understand that the hippopotamus is the multiple-ton, ferocious mammal most commonly associated with shallow water, but the keynote event of the flood of ‘94 was a rhinocerous hunt through the streets of suburbia. Though my neighborhood was iron-fisted in its zoning restrictions, the same could not be said of the surrounding area. This allowed many strange businesses to crop up, one of which happened to be African Safari World.
As a rather low-budget operation, it’s not surprising that their facilities were ill-equipped for high floodwaters and debris, but the escape of the rhinocerous into the neighborhood was somewhat unexpected. Given its low-budget and Texan, vigilante attitude, Safari World offered $1,000 reward for the live return of its valuable tenant, since Animal Control was under orders to shoot to kill.
Of course, no sane adult would even consider this offer. Nevertheless, with this news the children of the neighborhood split into groups dictated by natural law: those whose parents would not let them out of the house and those tearing through the neighborhood on bikes and canoes in search of rhinoceri and easy money. I wanted a new Nintendo and adventure in my life, and so I was part of the latter group. It was rather disappointing, though entirely expected, when the one aging veteran with a high-powered tranquilizer rifle hanging in his RV’s gun rack found the runaway and nabbed the reward.
A few years later, in my teenage years, there was a bulletin from the Houston Police Department, addressing all of the horse stables in the area. This was after tropical storm Allison in 2001, and search parties were needed that could easily cover a lot of ground. They were needed in order to find some lost children. My family has been into horses since I was a baby, and my mother was in charge of a foray into a marshy bayou runoff behind a trailer park just south of the beltway. My parents left at 10:00 a.m. and finally got back to the stable just as night was falling.
The mud line on her horse was past its haunches at least four feet up, and its tail was tangled with bits of garbage; it was clear that they had been practically swimming. Mom said that the mud was so deep that even the horses were getting sucked down; they barely made it out. They never found the children that they were sent to find. The water and the mud were just too deep.
Other rescue attempts didn’t usually fare much better. The local Hummer dealer sent its brand-new vehicles to help the relief effort, but the conditions were so bad that even the Hummers were bogged down and waterlogged.
I always had great fun when it flooded, but 47 people died in the storm of 2001. While I was lamenting the loss of my Pogs, 23 people died in the storm of 1994. People’s homes and lives are destroyed in these events. After my Mom came home that night, I no longer prayed for flood days. I’ve learned about many things as I’ve gotten older, and a natural disaster is truly a disaster-an “act of God”as the insurance company would say-and it strikes down the unlucky and their loved ones. It’s not a game.
