I have a lot of wonderful memories of a lot of good times spent on Galveston Island. The island is in the territory covered by the office I used to work at in Houston, so I've spent a lot of time there and I know the place pretty well. I had yesterday off, so I decided to spend part of the day looking around, and the memory I'm left with is...the smell of garbage. There are mountains of it everywhere...on Seawall Boulevard, on the Strand, on Broadway, and in virtually every residential neighborhood. I quickly came to understand why Galveston's mayor suggested that resident bring rat bait with them when they returned home...because for the next few weeks, they only real night life on the island will be the rats having the run of the place. Needless to say, I'm not about to be on the island after dark. I. HATE. RATS. And I'm not about to tempt fate (and my irrational fear) by spending any time at all in their world.
The damage within the city of Galveston is impossible to describe in a way that would do it justice. It's not just the sailboats blown up against the concrete barriers lining the southbound lanes of I-45 as it comes off the causeway. It's not just the war-zone like appearance of the Strand and the city's business district. It's not just the piles of garbage that are everywhere. It's not even just the damage along Seawall Blvd. It's the totality of the damage that mere words and pictures can't begin to adequately capture. What pictures also can't convey is the smell of garbages, which hangs over the entire city.
I love Galveston. There are only two places in Texas I'd be willing to live: Austin and Galveston. I'd make a pretty good Parrothead, and it's pretty easy to live that sort of lifestyle in Galveston. Sure, the beaches aren't exactly the prettiest you'll find, but the lifestyle and pace of life on the island is...well, like living on island time. Given where I live now, the odds of me returning to live in Galveston on a permanent basis is somewhere between slim and none, but I do miss being able to go to Galveston on a regular basis.
The island I fondly remember is not the city I experienced yesterday. Galveston will come back, of course. It always has. Hurricanes are a fact of life on the island. Some businesses won't reopen, and some homes will be lost, but others will spring up to replace them. In time, life on Galveston Island will return to something close to what it was prior to Hurricane Ike. It may take months or years; Lord knows just picking up the garbage will easily take weeks, perhaps even months. Still, Galveston has been in similar positions before, and the city and the island have always managed to bounce back, some would say better than it was before. This time may take a little bit longer because of the sorry state of the economy and the lending environment, but in time- be it months or years- life on the island will once again come back. Same as it ever was.
For now, though, it's going to take a long, long time to erase the smell of garbage from my memory.
(After the jump, the photographic evidence....)
