A friend writes in email:

Hizzle ma homerizzle post-hurricizzle?

After running this message through a Snoop Dog to Englishizzle translator, I determined that he was asking after my well-being.

Anyway. It goes like this: I spent the last how ever many days sitting inside a tiny house with my parents. It was too hot to go outside, (record heat for this time of year in the hill country), and our neighbor had volunteered to pirate his cable to us so we could keep up with the news, so we watched way too much TV.

The first thirty episodes of Law and Order are fun, BUT…. After a while it’s time to switch to the Firefly marathon over on SciFi, and some family members aren’t as happy with Joss Wedon as others.

There was a fierce (read: not fierce at all) half-hour of 20 mph winds and some rain, but really no big deal. Just too damn hot. Average highs in San Antonio (30 miles to the southwest) were in the 80s, and we were topping a hundred at least every day.

My parents’ house didn’t have any problems. No floods, no nuthin. We even missed the 200-mile-long traffic jam along I-10, by leaving the day before it happened.

I was supposed to go back to Seattle tomorrow, but I decided to stay here a little longer. I’m going to help my parents get their valuables packed safely, and we’re headed to the hill country, what with hurricane Rita expected to be a category 4 by the time it slams up against the coast. It’s pretty well certain that Houston will flood, if not actually get destroyed by the 125mph winds.

The hill country, by the way, is actually called ‘the hill country.’ It’s an area between, say, Waco and San Antonio. The problem with going there is that the house there is in a river valley that often floods, itself, as a result of being within the landform that causes many tropical storms to finally peter out. So who knows? We could be walking into an Irwin Allen disaster movie. ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ except with my mom instead of Shelly Winters.

Bush’s Crawford ranch, by the way, is also located in the hill country. It’s at the northern extremes, but it’s still the hill country. Sure hope his house doesn’t flood…

So send some more money to the Red Cross. The Texas coast will need it.

Lovely Rita, meter maid… (Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Galveston before.)

I might have to stay over in TX, to help my family move their stuff. With this string of luck, I’ll get back to Seattle to discover an earthquake has set off a volcanic eruption of Mt. Rainier.

‘America Supports You Freedom Walk‘

Note that it’s not ‘America supports YOUR freedom TO walk.’

It doesn’t pay to read the political ‘blogs. It’s just one tragedy after another…

The Republicans are blocking, among other things: Expanded Medicaid coverage for Katrina survivors and minimum wage requirements for relief and reconstruction workers. They’re also trying to rescind a law which bans segregation of homeless children.

‘Compassionate Conservatism’ was a nice idea, but never really meant much. Ever.

I’ve been in Houston since Friday. I got in after a really long flight, with basically no sleep since the previous morning.

My first offical act of volunteerism was to accompany my dad on a trip up to the Methodist conference center in the piney woods of east Texas, near Crockett if you want to look on a map. The conference center is hosting about 150 evacuees, around 80 of whom have severe mental or physical disability. The rest are family of, or caretakers for, those with the disability.

We went up there because they needed an electric wheelchair charger, and we were able to deliver one. This was on Saturday. Three hours up, three hours back, dinner with my sister and her husband in Conroe, which was along the way.

Sunday was blow-off day. I could have gone down to the Astrodome area and volunteered, but instead I spent Sunday and much of Monday morning freaking out in a slow-burn Aspie kind of way. I did get some nice pictures of the Edith L. Moore nature sanctuary…

Monday afternoon, however, I ended up at Reliant Center. My dad went through the volunteer orientation process with me, as a kind of hand-holding, I think, and also because he was curious to see the process and the realities.

I was ostensibly there to help people use the computers to locate loved ones and friends and so forth. I showed up and the guy in charge said, “Can you be flexible and work with kids?” So I spent the next two hours helping kids from about age 6 upwards use computers.

Finally the kids’ computer section closed down and I got to help some adults find people. One couple might have found their kid at Texas Children’s Hospital. I say ‘might have,’ because the way the databases are set up it’s hard to be sure, and it wasn’t appropriate for someone in my position to help them follow through with that information. But they were appreciative anyway.

Other folks weren’t so fortunate, and we couldn’t find anything for them. If anyone out there really wants to help out, you can volunteer to do some data entry for the Katrina PeopleFinder project. This effort is scouring the message boards and putting the info into a central searchable database. The more data in the database, the easier it will be to find. Google has indexed this database.

I was hoping to be back down there today, but I’ve managed to get a really late start. I’ll only get a few hours in before I have to pick up my dad at work, since I have his car. Ah well.

Go to flickr and see SlightClutter’s pictures from the Astrodome. Very, very good.

Also: In order to register for aid from FEMA, you have to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or better. This is like saying that in order to get food stamps you have to be right-handed.

From the FEMA web site:

Does Internet Explorer to Register for Assistance Online?

Yes

Currently to complete your application online you must be using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. We are in the process of modifying the application so that it will be available to additional browsers.

NerdTV.

Today, I had to stop thinking about the things I was thinking about. So I loaded up the camera and went to Black River Riparian Forest, a project of the city of Renton, WA. There’s a sort of ‘friends of Black River’ group called Herons Forever. And there’s also the Rainier Audobon Society Chapter.

Here it is on google maps. And here on wikipedia.

It’s a huge heronry for Great Blue Herons. There are at least a hundred nests, now abandoned while the birds migrate. I was hoping to see a few very confused stragglers, but I missed out. And anyway, the point was to get away from thinking for a while.

The trail through the forest goes under a bridge and when you come back up, you’re at the entrance to an artificial wetland which is an adjunct to the sewage treatment plant. It’s a nice artificial wetland, too. Many species of plants, lots of bugs, a few birds. It’s a series of ponds capped with healthy green algae. Yum.

The pictures are over at my flickr account, though they don’t really convey the place.

I have to apologize beforehand. Writing cures my insanity, but might add to yours. This is a story about a guy who is drowning in a house. Ask yourself if you really want to read it right now.

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“This is my last breath.”

That’s what I was thinking. I was about to go under. I was about to drown. The house had collapsed. The flood waters were rising; had been rising for days. I was trapped in the attic, and this would be my last breath.

I said it aloud, too. I was alone and there was no one to hear, but somehow I thought my next-to-last exhalation should be spoken. I said, “This is my last breath,” and then took in what remained in the pocket at the top of the roof.

My lips scraped the wood. Pine. Splinters. Treated. Rough. My nose, too. Scrape.

Then I was. In the water. Nothing else. A kind of stillness. I was long past panicking. Just a kind of of-the-moment detachment. For about three seconds, which seemed like a year, I was just standing there on the ceiling of my house and under the roof, in a soup of fiberglass insulation and old furniture and a million other things and some things I’d rather not think about. And I just was. A small backwash of current gently pushed me a few inches. A gentle sort of swaying, my clothes riffling against my skin. Suspended. Buoyant.

Then my body started to panic again. It wanted to breathe. It was desperate. It wanted to open the mouth, the throat, the nose, to pull in on the lungs. It wanted. Wanted. I don’t know how I resisted. I did, somehow. There was some kind of clarity; I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t explain it. I felt this overpowering urge to suck in some air, and I managed not to act on it. Something within me knew not to, though it would have been easy. Easy.

And then I noticed the pocket of air. The tiny growing pocket of air under the roof. Tiny, tiny bubbles pulling through the shingles. Like a soda water. I was ecstatic, but I dared not allow myself to get excited. I might whoop for joy and drown. I waited. I nearly passed out. I couldn’t take it….

Tiny bubbles, and finally the end vents cleared and with a whoosh, there was air. Enough to raise my mouth up and kiss the roof again. And breathe breaths I had to control so I wouldn’t use it all up. It might run out again. Would it run out again?

The water continued to fall. Soon I was standing in my wrecked house instead of drowning in it. And only then did I look to the other end of the attic. Only then did I look at her body again and cry.