Now that everyone has power again, I’m taking a break from writing about the Al Andalus Project to reflect for a bit about Ike. Here’s my story, and here are my post-Ike thoughts.
I live in Montrose with my partner Tom Yeager in a nearly hundred-year-old house. Tom had just spent two years restoring the original storm shutters; we used them, and they worked. There were still many shutter-less windows and our wood supply was short, so Tom got creative and used ladders and whatever we had to block as much glass from our pecan trees as possible. We came through unscathed…no broken glass, antique or new. Our papaya tree is now a headless stick in the yard and the pecan tree was brutally pruned, but our hundred-year-old Canary Island Palm is still standing tall.
It was a scary night in a noisy house, and we kept getting up and running up and downstairs checking out the bangs and clangs, never really sleeping. Our final power loss came at 5:30am.
The next morning, we walked through the drizzling mist to see teams of neighbors moving foliage debris out of a neighbor’s yard and out of the sewer. Streets were un-passable due to the mass of tree limbs and scattered branches, just like all the streets in Ike’s path. There were those uprooted trees lying in yards and streets or resting on a crushed fence or part of a roof, scenes that we all saw. But the people I encountered were smiling. We were alive. One couple was distraught that, although they had fine coffee beans, they could not use the grinder without power; they suffered from custom coffee withdrawal. Tom and I – non-coffee drinkers – were amused and amazed.
Living without electricity put us on a dawn-to-dusk schedule and wondering what to do in the evenings without our usual activity crutches and demands. We ended up having a jam session on our piano and percussion instruments, something we had not indulged in for years. I spent another evening drafting an essay by candle light…by hand with a pen, like back in the old days. It made me wonder how much more creative I might be if our community were power-free every night, unable to work at the computer or watch television.
In those days of refrigerator self-defrosting, Tom and I cooked up large batches of food on our gas stove and propane-fueled backyard grill, and packed it up in our car along with plates, napkins and plastic-ware. I thought we would drive to the bridge where homeless people live, but we never made it out of Montrose. Whenever we saw someone walking or sitting on their porch who looked hungry, we stopped and asked. Then we opened up the back of the car and served up a plate. We returned home without any leftovers. There were plenty of hungry people here in Montrose those days.
Like many others, our best way of getting the news was to make a cell phone call to someone out of town. We didn’t want to waste our radio batteries listening to the many hours of other people’s hurricane stories that were airing, but regular scheduling was suspended for those stations that were still in business, so we didn’t know when to tune in for the news. It was quite frustrating. We had no idea what was happening in the rest of the country or the world.
We were among the luckiest: no house damage, minimal foliage loss, and our power came back on that first Monday evening. But many of our neighbors remained in the dark for weeks. So one neighbor spent much of each day at our house on his laptop and powering up in the air conditioning, and a college student moved in for a couple of weeks. When the power first came on and we were able to see the news, the sad scenes of Galveston and Boliver were shocking and grief-inducing.
With electricity restored, I lurched into action at my computer. And that is when I discovered that it didn’t really matter that I now had electricity because so many other people didn’t, and so many businesses were closed, that I couldn’t really accomplish anything anyway. Couldn’t re-set postponed performances and rehearsals. Couldn’t find out if certain people were okay. Couldn’t plan meetings or set calendar dates. Couldn’t effectively work on fundraising. Couldn’t teach classes at studios without power. Couldn’t get students to come to classes at studios with power. It was so weird. Everything was back to normal at my house, but it was like living in a twilight zone.
As a member of Houston’s dance community I grieved that Dance Source Houston’s two annual weekends of dance at Miller Outdoor Theatre were cancelled. But many other performing groups were set back as well, including Dancepatheatre. On the heels of Ike came the tremors of the national – now global – economic disaster, never good news for the arts which feel the effects of such conditions sooner, deeper and longer than most segments of society. Performing arts are ethereal…here for a moment, gone forever. In uncertain economic times, people find security in things tangible and seemingly stable.
During the final week of the power restoration process for Houston, I left on a long-planned trip with family members to North Carolina and Vermont. It felt awkward and naughty…everyone was about to get reconnected and I would have my chance to forge ahead in getting Dancepatheatre back on track, but I would be off on a relaxing trip instead. (I actually ended up doing some work from my brother’s computer.)
But there’s something about walking through the woods in rural Vermont when the trees are in their finest fall colors; when red, orange and florescent yellow leaves rain down on you and your leaf-covered path as a breeze shakes the branches; that sets your head straight. The smells of the cool, misty woods wash away the urgency of urban profaneness, and remind you that you are one of the human animal species expressing yourself as human animals do on the glorious planet Earth.
The storm came to Houston and changed our lives, for some more than for others. Now a different kind of storm is spreading across the globe and will change our lives further, for some more than for others. For us artists, it’s an opportunity to stretch our creativity to the max as we surf the waves that we can’t predict in detail but know are coming. To be sure, many artists will give up and find other ways to support themselves. Others will alter the course of their careers in ways they could never have imagined, for better or for worse. Large, established performing companies may only have to downsize for a few years, while others will go under.
But whatever happens, I like to remember what I remembered walking in the Vermont woods: that we are human animals, living on the planet Earth. And this makes me happy. Like the other animals, it is exquisitely good to joyfully play while we’re in our bodies on the planet. Everything else is culture that human animals make up, and it’s best not to get too bogged down in the little details of that or to give it so much importance that we forget that we are animals on the planet.
Creating art and enjoying art are ways of playing, ways of connecting to our animal-on-the-Earth selves. I don’t know what form the changes that I will choose will take as the global situation unfolds, but I find my commitment renewed to continue finding ways to create, perform, enjoy and play. Solutions to crises lie somewhere in remembering our identity as joyful animals – who posses the amazing gift of being able to re-invent culture - on this wondrous planet Earth.
