Godless Mom in the Bible Belt

Sept 24, 2005

There is beauty in the power of nature. As I walked out onto my back porch this morning, coffee in hand, I looked into a crystal blue sky completely devoid of pollution. I breathed in air that was fresh with the smell of rain and wet vegetation and watched the doves lazily mill about my lawn looking for fallen seeds.

If I didn't know better I would think I was standing on top of a mountain in Montana or laying on my back in the red sands of my beloved desert, so clear was the air and so blue was the sky. But I'm not in Montana nor am I in Utah. I'm in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest city in the United States.

Over the course of 72 hours the city had undergone a massive change. A huge percentage of the vehicles which normally crowd it's streets had been driven off to parts unknown and the winds and rain of Rita had come through like a freight train, blowing away the pollution, washing clean the stench and sending the human population scurrying into their closets. Mother nature had done in two days what the Department of transportation and the EPA have been trying to do for decades...Reduce the amount of traffic on the streets and clean up the air.

As hurricanes go, Houston was very lucky. Most of us had to deal with fallen branches and power outages, I'm going to have to replace the gate into my backyard, but these things are easy to deal with and seem less than trivial when compared to the massive damage done just east of our city. I've seen different maps breaking down the intensity of the storm, but it seems that my area of town had sustained winds between 50 and 75 mph. We had very little rain, a fact that truly surprised me.

By far the most disastrous thing to happen to Houston was the evacuation. I live less than a mile from one of the main highways out of Houston, Interstate 290. It was a parking lot from Wednesday at 3:00 pm until Friday afternoon. During the peak of the exodus it was taking almost 30 hours to drive from Houston to Austin, normally a 3-4 hour trip.

We had originally planned on sheltering a family of five in our home. However, as it became apparent that many people wouldn't be able to get out of town before the storm hit the population in our house grew, we directed family and friends to our house and made up beds on couches and floors. By the time the storm hit we had thirteen people in our home, all of us waiting and watching. Each time a new report would surface regarding the projected path of the storm it became more and more apparent that our decision to stay put had been a good one and by midnight everyone had gone to sleep.

Everyone but me that is. I knew the storm wasn't going to hit hurricane levels near our home, but the wind was incredible. It was coming from all directions, battering our trees and whistling around the roof and between the house and garage. I stayed awake all night, ready to raise the alarm should the storm grow to dangerous levels. (truth be told, I'm a really light sleeper and couldn't have slept through the noise anyway.) Fortunately I didn't need to awaken anyone and as the sun came up on Saturday morning I breathed a sigh of relief, made a pot of coffee for my guests and went to bed.

The stores are still closed, the gas stations are still out of gas and Liz won't go back to school until Tuesday. Other than that, all is well and Interstate 290 is once again crowded with people coming back into town. I'm sure the pollution will be back by this evening.