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JANUARY 2006 | VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP ALUMNI NEWSLETTER

This account, by Stuart Larson, of his hurricane Rita experience was too long for the newsletter, but we wanted to share it with you. Happily Stuart and Angela are back to their home-- intact minus a few Bannana trees.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rita
By Stuart Larson Part 1:

The Great Plywood Panic

My wife and I live(d) in Houston Texas. It is still 24 hours before Hurricane Rita is scheduled to hit, and I thought I would share some experiences. I will start with the Hurricane preparations.

On Monday (T-Minus 5 days), all the plywood was gone from all the stores. People were driving 60 miles to get plywood at stores that were limiting the total number of sheets available. On Tuesday, a scheduled truck of plywood was met by so many people, that if you were not already in line, you did not have a hope of getting any. Lines at the hardware stores were over an hour and a half wait to buy other supplies. People were buying any board or plank they could find. People were buying expensive cabinetry wood in order to board up their windows.

The sense of scale disappears when panic comes in. I met one man on monday who was buying 45 sheets of plywood for a 9 window house. On Tuesday, I met a man who was so desperate that he was buying sheet-rock to board up his windows! To put this in perspective, this would be as effective in a hurricane as a wet Kleenex would be in a conker-fight.

I tell ya, panic is addictive. There is nothing like seeing an order-less mob of cars at the gas station to put the fear in you. On Tuesday, the city officials said we should watch the storm with an open mind. I thought there was plenty of time, but when I left work, there were more people at the gas stations than gallons of gas left. I must admit this put the panic in me, as the truck was on empty.

I drove around looking for an open station. The problem is that these stations don't turn off their lights when they run out of gas. I guess they think enough people will come in for week-out hot-dogs that they can stay open. So people were driving up and forming big lines at stations that were completely empty. Some people were even putting their cards in the machines before they figured it out.

I finally found a station, waited in line for 45 minutes to get gas. While I was in line, I went in to see what the reserves looked like. The attendant said there was no way to tell how many gallons were in the main tanks! The other problem, when the man ahead of me was done pumping his gas, he pulled out 5 3-gallon tanks and started filling those too (of course, there were none of these left in any of the stores either).

And the lines. One gas station I stopped at only had 1 island with 4 pumps (2 pumps on the left side, and 2 pumps on the right). There were 2 long lines, with about 12 cars waiting for the left side, and another 12 for the right. Well, what do you do when the car at the front pump finishes before the car at the back pump? Someone cuts in line, of course! So someone who has not waited in line heads in facing the wrong direction.

And the lines. The line at the bank was unreal. Since the cash machines were out before they opened on wednesday, the only thing to do was wait in line. I refused to wait in my car, as I did not want to burn the gas. I waited over an hour to cash a small check. Luckily the bank was limiting withdrawals to $500. One man from Nasa had the sliver lining in the bank line, he was meeting all sorts of friends and coworkers who he did not realize banked at his bank. "Always look on bright side", he said. One woman was waiting behind me for about 45 minutes, when I heard her say on her phone that she just needed to replace her cash card that had expired. I told her to run in and ask at the booth, since we were in the teller line. She was out in about 10 minutes, and I was there for another 45.

Now its time to talk food. On Tuesday night (T-Minus 4 days), I went to our large grocery store. It was amazing to see what was gone. Some aisles, like the water, were completely gone without a single bottle on the shelf, while some aisles, like baking supplies, were untouched. That makes sense, but listen to this: All the cereal was gone, all the breakfast bars, pop-tarts, and little-debbie snack cakes were all gone. But, the produce was completely untouched. I was buying apples, bananas, oranges, lettuce, but apparently everyone else was buying microwave cup a soups. In the soup aisle, all the chicken soups were gone gone gone, but right beside, the tomato were completely untouched. In the canned aisle, all the canned peaches were gone, but the canned pineapple had not be touched.

We already had lots of specialty food, due to our specific allergies, so the food thing was easy for us. But I just can't imagine these people chowing down on pop-tarts and sunny-d, like this was some late night house-party. The one thing that would have killed our evacuation, would be dehydrating on high-fructose corn syrup. It is the state of our society that we buy junk food as staples instead of fruits and vegetables.

Part 2: The Looter, the Homeowner, the Wife and her Cat

Lets talk about boarding up the house. One of the biggest obstacles to boarding up the house is actually realizing that your house is doomed. Part of me just wanted to take my wife, her cat and the truck and get out of dodge. After my Tuesday night scare, I thought we should split at 2am Tuesday. But the practical side won over and I stayed to make a half attempt at protecting the house. Since all the boarding materials (including drywall) were gone by noon on Tuesday, I had nothing to board up with.

Some neighbors thought that any little think you could do should be done. One neighbor put plastic sheeting on the outside, in order to provide a small barrier from the small debris. One neighbor taped X's on the outside of the windows with painters tape, and an hour after they had gone, half the tape had already fallen off. Other neighbors made elaborate plywood setups on the windows. Since most of the houses in the neighborhood are brick, the choices were either plyloc clips or mortar bolts.

One problem is that the insurance companies in Houston will not give you flood insurance. Our contractor neighbor said that if the roof is pulled off we are covered, but if the waters slowly rise, than we are SOL. Another neighbor just renewed his insurance. His wife read the policy and discovered that all wind damage and tree damage is not covered under his policy. Apparently after Katrina, they found yet another loophole to avoid paying on claims. I am starting to wonder why we even have insurance. I am sure my policy has snow damage.

So we spent the day moving all 26 of our outdoor potted plants into our neighbors garage - along with any other of our things that could be projectiles. We never did do anything with our windows. Two windows on the street side really worry me. They are large and unprotected by bushes. Since we live on a corner lot, we are more unprotected than our neighbors. The smart thing to do in this situation is to knock out some of the boards of the wooden fence and use those to board up the windows. This way, the fence is not a big sail waiting to fly off and the window is covered too.

But all the neighborhood was gone or going, and the dead air of an abandoned street really intensifies your growing sense of dread. So we packed as much as we could as fast as we could. It is amazing what runs through your mind when you are trying to save parts of your life. Angela had the sense that anything we left would be gone forever. The three most important things are easy. The Wife, the Cat and the Truck (yee haw). Well, four important things if you count me too. After that, what do you do? I had already backed up all my computer files and throwing 8 external hard drives in a box was real easy.

Luckily we are expert campers. Getting our supplies was easy. We got our tents and blankets, camping stove and dishes all ready to go and I just threw them in the truck. We had installed a reverse osmosis water system last month, so we filled up our camping jugs and now have 16 galloons (like doubloons but more valuable) of clean water. I got the most important rough and tumble clothes. But then what? When you are leaving your house, knowing that you may loose everything left behind, it is just easier to forget it all. I ran though and grabbed random things. I grabbed some hand woven rugs from my Grandma, and my Lain Box DVD set. I thought about grabbing the Hello Kitty Pan Flute that Eric sent from Japan, and also a hundred other little knickknacks that other people had given me. But eventually I just took the main staples.

One thing that you have to do in this situation is to not think about the shoulda. Regret will ruin your life if you keep thinking about, "I should have taken this" or "Oh, I left that behind". We called the utility companies. They said to leave the Gas on, because if the empty lines fill with water, we will be in more danger. The electric company said to turn the main breakers off. We turned off the water lines and that was the last sad moment. When we drove off, it really was like we knew we would come back to nothing but a hole in the ground. Except for our banana trees. I am sure, a hurricane could level the entire city of Houston, and our banana trees would be sitting unscathed all by themselves with a nice colony of palmetto bugs.

Part 3:
The Fellowship of the Rita

One of the strange sites I saw Wednesday at noon was the Mexican Day Laborers mowing the lawns. These people do such a wonderful job and have such loyalty that they are out there mowing lawns for people who have already evacuated. I'm thinking, get the heck out of dodge, and they are taking care of the neighborhood. I also felt for the gas station attendants and the bank tellers, here they are watching the world panic, while they are stuck at work. If anyone needs to be airlifted out of the city, it is the gas station attendants. When you are in fear of breaking down and having your car with all your belongs in tow, you realize how important this black goop really is.

Wednesday at 4:00pm our long trek began. Angela has relatives in New Braunfels, in the hill-country between Austin and San Antonio. This is north and west of Clear Lake, our small suburb of Houston. Normally this would be a 3 or 4 hour drive, but it took us 14.5 hours, non-stop. I suppose we were some of the lucky ones - as you will read later. We were some of the last people to leave our neighborhood. We were lucky to find a station with gas near the highway. So we had two cars with full tanks, and a cooler full of water and apples each. I never intended our small coolers to be our only food, but as you will read, we did not have the luxury of a rest-stop.

Our drive out of Clear-Lake was uneventful. It was traffic like normal - even less. We drove north a half-mile to the toll road (Beltway 8) that circles around the city and took the onramp to go west. You can only imagine what evacuating the fourth largest metropolitan area in the US looks like. Clear Lake is halfway between Galveston and Houston. Galveston (35 miles south of Clear Lake) had been mandatory evacuated at 6am and we got on the Highway at 4:30 pm. The beltway was a parking lot. It took us 30 minutes to get though the onramp. Two hours later we had moved less than a mile. Thank-Goodness for cell-phones and talk radio. This is one good reason to break up the clear-chanel monopoly. I don't have a cell phone, but thousands of other people were calling in reporting traffic conditions to this one small independent radio station.

By 6:30 we had driven two hours and only moved a mile. One woman who called into the Radio Station, left Galveston at 11am and by 6:30 pm was only about 1 mile ahead of us, and she was down to a quarter tank of gas, and all the stations along the highway were dry dry dry. This traffic jam was the jam of all time. 9 hours later, we had only gone 14 miles and were still on the Beltway.

But lets talk about that 9 hours. Angela & the kitty drove first in the wagon, and I followed in the truck. We had walkie talkies so we could stay in touch. The heat and humidity were out in full force. We started to worry about gas and overheating. We would turn the air-conditioning off until we could not stand it any more and then we would have to turn it back on. And it was hot and the gas fumes were horrible. Thank Goodness my new truck is an automatic. I just kept my foot on the break. When traffic moved, I would take my food (er...I mean foot) off the break and move slowly forward. For parts of the drive I would even lean my seat all the way back and steer with my knees. That is how fast we were moving.

It was bad. The only way I survived was listening to my cd's of Ekhart Tolle speeches. He teaches you how to ignore thoughts that you don't want. The only way I made it was to ignore the impending doom of my house and stuff. The only thing I worried about was the drive - the long surreal drive.

There were two really problematic areas. The first major problem was the big toll-booth. When we got close, all the traffic on the right started flying past. After a few minutes, the temptation was too strong, and against my better judgment, off we went to join them in the fast lane. It was heavenly for about 3 minutes, flying a fast 20mph past all the other lanes. Then we went through the gate, and 15 lanes of traffic merged back into three lanes in an all out mad-dash free for all. There was one particular truck I named "the jerk" because you would have thought he was driving a (real) hummer through the desert.

So after 45 minutes we get merged back into three lanes. Then we inch along and finally we see the sign to merge onto the main Hiway I-10 west. Then 45 minutes later we have only moved 12 feet. And that was enough. We radioed back and forth and decided to take the side street. We got off the highway and were quickly going west on back streets. Looking back over the highway we could see the world tallest on-ramp going from the beltway to I-10. It was backed up and not moving one inch. I can only feel for those people who were stuck not moving on the up side, with their foot on the break.

So we moved fast after that. I don't know how we got where we were but we managed to get to a good small farm road going west. We had a few areas of traffic jams. But it was wonderful. We were out in the fresh open air, in the middle of fields in a long slow traffic jam. We had no diesel fumes, no big semi's and only one lane of traffic. Well, we did have this dude who kept jumping out to push his car. He was wearing only a pair of boxers - no shirt, no shoes, just boxers. He would jump out and push, then get back in the car, then literally one second later, he would jump out again. And there was this one time a group of about 5 cars went zooming past down the wrong lane, but before I could get too mad, a cop came and busted them.

The small towns were actually fun, there were groups of kids hanging out in the streets at 4am just watching the traffic go by (and warning us to turn on our lights, because the cops up ahead would give us tickets). I could have stayed on those small roads for days. But I do not know how I drove that far. Part of the time I could not see straight. Part of the time I took 20 second naps between stop and go's.

So apparently, we were the lucky ones. Our secret route turned out to be highway 529. And by Thursday morning it was jam packed, everyone was taking that as an alternate to I-10. What we found as 2 small half mile lines had turned into 45 mile long lines. We were lucky to leave when we did. And we were lucky not to have gone north to Dallas. I-45 to Dallas was stopped dead still for two hundred miles. People were getting out and going to the bathroom in the middle of the traffic jam - and why not? I would have if I had to. We have friends who got onto I-10 from the beltway at 7am and were still not in Austin by 2pm. And to make things worse, at about noon, Texas opened up both lanes of I-10 to go west, except the people who had been on the proper side of the highway for 5-10 hours had no way to get to the new side. It is like at the grocery store, when they open a new line, then need to call the next person in line, not the people from the back of the line.

Part 4:
My Day Friday

So here we are on Friday in the Texas HIll Country in a beautiful house that overlooks a breathtaking gorge. I had no idea Texas could be so beautiful. Last night, we watched a clear bright sunset from a porch that hangs over the tops of trees. Today we are going to a county parade in a historic town where we will sit by a quaint old bakery and take pictures. From the outside, it would look like a pretty good vacation, and not the day we expect our entire collection of earthly possessions to wash away under a violent surging wall of water and wind.