September 25, 2005 avant Rita Wednesday, the 21st: Sitting at my desk, I am trying to cram an .swf program into html (haplessly, as is my wont), enjoying the usual 8mile learning curve. I am also vaguely listening to noise trickling in from a cluster of star/cells near my midbrain, something about danger water comin', honey. I push back from the sticky surface of the website and shake my eyes a bit loose. Next thing I know I've picked up the phone, dialing my usual car rental places: Ya'll got any van-size wheels I can drive out today? It's a good time to hit the drawl, pour it on. Six sympathetic 'no-ma'ams' later I'm starting to get the drift of this queer little caprice. Images of a dreamstate I had last February are pouring through the breach. Hooboy, here we go... Yahoo has now broken into my half-trance, announcing that Rita has moved from a Cat3 to 4 hurricane - in less than 4 hours, and there is a good 700 miles of Gulf to pick up more english on her spin. I push things up a notch, calling everyone I know with Big Cars. The whyfore is only coming into focus as I make the calls: we have a studio full of art, propped under a southeastern window that extends the length of one wall. Twenty-five years of work (and oh so much more). I find someone who forgives my foulmouthing their SUVs long enough to lend me one; and I finally comprehend what goosed the first exploratory calls. One eye on the weather news, I call the Houston Contingent as Rita is nudging Cat5. I'm starting to take smaller sips of breath, try to measure them into longer, more persuasive sounds when Jerry comes on the line: "I'm coming to get the paintings." "No, you're not." "Then you are going to move them?" Long silence. "Do you have any idea how crazy it is here?" "'deed, I do." "Then you know I can't." "But I can." "No." "I've already borrowed a Jeep; and 'no' is not an option. You are currently entered in more than a dozen competitions. Best case scenario is that the studio is spared, but locked down and surrounded by water in a city with no electricity for two weeks. Worst case.... well, feck worst case, I'm coming to get the paintings." We have four more conversations before I leave, he is getting angrier, more insistent that I Must Not Come, a kind of dry hopelessness crackling in his voice. I know this tone, and know that I have to ignore it and persistently, gently state the obvious: We cannot leave those works in a city that is likely to be barricaded for weeks. Period. The friends who are lending me the Jeep are also appalled: "There is no gas on the coast," Tanya tells me. Her husband is under the car when I arrive, putting in new shocks. "You're gonna get 12, maybe 16 mpg in this thing," he says, wiping his hands. They've loaded three gas cans on top of the car, which I'll need to fill on my way out of town. I can't believe these people. I kiss them and climb in, declaring that I'll be back in the morning. "I truly doubt it. Just come back in one piece." *** I make the drive between Austin and Houston about twice a month; flying down 290 through Elgin, Giddings, Carmine, Brenham, Chapell Hill, Hempstead. Our studio is on the western edge of the city; over the years I've learned how to float those three hours into a single, earflattening sweep. Of course tonight the road toward the studio -and by extension, the hurricane-- was nearly deserted, but traffic on 290East clustered in bursts of 20 or 30 cars at a time. Nothing like the gridlock I had expected. I had been driving 65-70 mph and running the struggling AC, so I pulled into a gas station in Giddings and refilled the quarter tank I'd used since leaving Austin. Pulling back onto the highway, I called a friend in an earlier timezone, asking him to talk me awake. "Oh, I think you'll be waking up there directly," he chuckled. With my buddy still on the phone, it was passing midnight when I caught my first glimpse of the Halogen Dragon stretched out from Brenham. "Willard, you aren't going to believe this... Traffic is bumper-to-bumper, but I think it's moving. . . no wait. . . " I saw the ruby sparks of a thousand brakelights in my rearview mirror. "Maybe not." Now it is early September 22 and I have arrived with about 2/3 of a tank. From Brenham every station had a "NO GAS" sign taped over the pumps. I check the stations along 1960 W. - nothin'. A Chevron near Veteran's Memorial Hwy. has garish pink paper taped up everywhere, but there is a tanker in the lot, pumping down the porthole. I pull in and fill up, no idea how lucky this is. But I am starting to feel grateful (and a little bit of something else) for the 9 gallons sitting on top of the truck. This turns out to be the last active gaspump for the next 30 hours. I let myself into the three-story glass&brick building. At 3 a.m. I think it will be deserted, but someone is inside, gathering up 5-gallon water jugs from his office. He eyes the fuel on top of the Jeep, asks me if I want to sell it; then suggests that I might want to uh, 'secure' those cans, you know. "Are you packin'?" It takes me a moment to understand --oh, am I carrying a gun?-- then I lie in the affirmative. We both laugh, but things are starting to clarify. People will be opting for personal protection of a rather definitive stripe. Ah, Texas. In the studio there are a couple of new pieces stretched out, and good progress made toward finishing two others. I delaminate the old from the new as carefully as I can, carrying them two-at-a-time to the elevator and down to the ground floor. I will take as many as I can carry, which turns out to be most of the finished work. I find myself apologizing to the new stuff, explaining that they are too fragile to be loaded without special protections. This is a creative space, a tenemos, so the energy is springy and responsive. I can almost feel the art-djinns patting me on the arm: You go on now, we'll be fine. After two hours the car is packed, but it's my muscles that are completely out of fuel. Electrolytes have fled, I haven't eaten since 4 in the afternoon, but there are crackers and cheese in the studio fridge. I tank up on water and salty food, hoping that my system won't tilt into rebellion. The sun is coming up as I head out, hoping to crawl far enough north on backroads to where 290 breaks loose. Some miles west of Tomball I find a coffee house. They have coffee, but no food. No. . . wait, there's one soggy ham&cheese croissant left, and yes I can have it. Ten people behind me sigh. I poke around for four more hours, looking for the trek from 1744 to 290. People keep trying to flip me around to I45, which I sense is One Big Mistake. By 10 a.m. I am wandering the Woodlands, and succumb to the roadsigns of highest frequency, which indeed debouche into Interstate 45. "Which circle of Hell is this?" I wonder, pulling on to the feeder road. The six naked lanes north are broiled to a halt as far as the eye can see. I turn south, heading into the city again. Exhausted, but more critically, I have 9 gallons of flammable liquid on top of this truck, and it's not hard to imagine how quickly it could ignite. I decide to go back to the studio and wait for gridlock in the 90 degree night rather than the 100+ day. As soon as I get back, Jerry walks through the door. He is not amused. My plan, I tell him, is to get a hotel room, try to get a few hours of sleep before I make the second sortie. If I have less than a half-tank left by Brenham, I'll return to the city and ride out the storm in the unreleased room. While this does not entirely pacify him, it sounds plausible enough to mitigate the continuous scowl that has settled into his features. Plausible enough until I actually look for a room. I find exactly one on the eastern edge of the city. Okay, it seems I'll be staying in the studio. I go out to forage for food, discovering that I have the bivalve effect on every store I approach: the apologetic employees are locking the door as I touch the handle. Four times. I roll through the scorch back to the studio, empty one of the 2 gallon cans into the tank: the needle registers 'full' again. Say what? Five hours of muddling through the pencil-thin driveways of north Houston - in a JEEP, no less- and I've only burned two gallons of gas? It occurs to me that if I am going to rest here, I'll need to protect the gas I have left, so I schlep it upstairs. During my last foray I had also wanted to buy a small mattress pad, but now settle onto a yoga mat, my head on the broken back of a chair. I drift into a pearly white vortex made of thousands of ladies' opera gloves. With the ladies still in them. As they snap their ivory fans in unison, the door to the studio opens with a bang. It is the building maintenance man, and he is telling me that he has been instructed to empty the building and change the locks. "Oh no, that really won't do..." I say, sitting bolt upright. "I'm leaving in a few hours, but I first absolutely have to get some rest." An hour of calling Jerry, the management company, various demigods, and just for fun, the IPCC, and we all come to a quiet consensus. I will lock the building myself on the way out. The maintenance man, who just wants to get home to his kids, happily passes me the key. As we go downstairs together I see that the empty gas can has disappeared from the top of the Jeep. I go over to make sure it hasn't somehow fallen off. Nope... and furthermore, whoever took the thing couldn't even be bothered to unhook the bungie cord. Fortunately, they were also too stupid to realize that the gas tank wasn't lockable. My visitor might have siphoned out the gas, but apparently s/he was too busy sawing through bungie cords. For once I don't lament the relative idiocy of my fellow Americans. Well done, baby formula companies! Let's keep those IQs a-dropping!! Bravo, brain-melting video games and 24 hour shopping malls and endless reality TV! Mission accomplished! Back upstairs I call my Jeeplandish family. They have checked their sources all up and down 290: Yes, it is still a parking lot, worse even than the night before. Another friend calls to assure me that in the event of mass hysteria his rich uncle can come airlift me out of the gridlock. "Just make sure it's a Chinook," I say, "because I am not leaving one piece of artwork behind." About 9 p.m. I finally leap into the trusty steed and head out. Since I had spent all morning wandering the byways of northwest Houston, I opted for the horse ranch route on the other side of Tomball, catching 2920 as it rolled past the Christmas tree farms toward 290. I stopped in Rose Hill at another convenience store for water. They were out of everything-- water, coffee, all food but for a few lonely condiments on the shelves. Everyone was wild-eyed and exclamatory. "People are yelling at me cause I can't give 'em any goddamn gas!" bellowed one trucker. It seemed the nozzles were too small for car tanks. "I'm only ten miles from home," he groused. I looked at him, pushed my hair out of my face and said: "For godssakes man, why don't you walk? If I was ten miles from home, I'd simply hoof it." He looked like someone had hit him upside the head with a glacier. He grinned and shot out the door. They did have toothbrushes, but no toothpaste. I bought the toothbrush, a can of salt and some bottled lemon juice and rinsed my mouth out with a solution that probably took off more enamel than the day's tooth furch. I rinsed with a nasty, sugarless 'sportwater' that claimed to provide "superior" hydration. Only if you were made of cotton candy, mon ami. The drive from Tomball had been free of traffic for about 6 miles, but I knew this couldn't last. "How much farther until the thrill is gone?" I asked the cashier. "You've got about 2 miles," she sighed, "then it's just packed in." Crossing Decker Prairie, my good map (and the shoulder of the road) gave out. My other two maps were at different scales and didn't offer any detail beyond the fact that I might be between 15 and 30 miles from 290. 15 miles at 3 mph is only slightly less horrible than 30. At a certain point you just give in to the zombescence of the whole experience. Sliding past Hegar Lane something began to stir. I knew that Hegar leads to the Austin highway, but I couldn't tell whether to turn right or left off of 2920. The truck drifted along another 200 feet or so while I considered my options. Turning around to pick up Hegar, I saw that the line stretched out another 3 miles behind me. "I'm going to try Hegar..." I shouted to a few friendly faces as I slipped back upstream. Thumbs-up from half-dozen cars. The country lane was utterly dark: no moon, no streetlights - and best of all - no traffic. I was doomed. Driving along for five miles or so, I felt the road veering back toward Houston, and decided to get my GoodforNuthin' friends out of bed and make them play GPS with me. One call, then three, then five. Nobody. I looked at my watch: midnight, and now it is Sept. 23. My X would be the one person awake and on-line at this moment (he is almost always on-line), so I threw in the towel. "Kent, are you awake? can you give me directions?" A flurry of lost souls showed up in my rearview mirror, running their highlights. Turning around, I flashed a quick 'brightdown' message, revealing the mangy form of a coyote crossing the road. The oncomer saw it too, and braked to let the critter pass. As the X and I worked our way through the map, an armadillo appeared like a chitonous pillow directly in front of me: "Woohoo!! " I twirled the Jeep a quick 5 feet to the right, just missing the 'dillo -- and a ditch. "Say, if you follow Hegar up through Waller, it looks like there's another 290." "Oh yeah, 290 Business... I think it goes through Hempstead, but I didn't realize I could pick it up this far east." "Seems like you might. . . Good luck!" I scooted under the parking lot that 290 had become and over to 290B. Turning west I was accompanied by a dozen cars that had taken the Hegar detour, some of which roared by at highway speeds. "Now that's just peachy," I mumbled. I would see at least one of these out of gas and stranded another 70 miles up the road. In Hempstead I briefly considered going north again to 105 and making my way down to Austin from College Station, but decided it was too far off the beaten track, and if there was gridlock, I could wind up on some Aggie's bonfire. I resigned myself to the singular sclerosis of 290. At 12:30 I had made Hempstead. But Chappell Hill --a mere 12 miles up the road-- wouldn't show up until 3 a.m. Now some 40 hours into my 'day' I was starting to hallucinate: trees were sprouting through the pavement, birds of paradise winging past the windshield. I put in dj soma's "Travel is good for you" turned it up LOUD and started serious Spacelady Seatvoguing to keep myself awake and amused. Brenham -another 10 miles up the road- appeared at the near-miracle hour of 4 a.m. The first exit into town had been barricaded. Eyeing it at 5 mph, I decided that one might as well find out about that famous Jeep overdrive, and so carved out a small path to the side of the barricade -- surfacing in an HEB parking lot. Hundreds of people milled around under the sodium lights. I pulled over and emptied the two cans into the tank, which sent the gauge sailing back up to 'Full.' A Mexican family approached me and asked if they could buy the gas-cans. I told them that they were not mine, but hey, would you like some gum? I offered the pack, and the young Machito reached for it. "Enh-enh, papacito; las diosas antes de todo... ['No, good-daddy; goddesses first.]" He passed it over to the little wife with the baby on her hip and 4 year old daughter clinging to one leg. She laughed with delight, a nice big laugh I was glad to hear. Not the sound of a beaten woman. I wandered around among the families that didn't speak English, setting up my biggest map and talking with them about the fastest route out of there. Frankly, if Houston gets smacked, you're going to be better off in Round Rock than in Austin; we're just stuffed, and Round Rock has more money for public services. The Easterwood racial integration program: send a wave of Latinos to help RoRo realize it's liberal roots. That's the ticket. It was starting to look like a party out here. Without the beer or (much) singing. Three police cars pulled into the parking lot, and the energy changed instantly. People started tensing up, and I stepped over to a cruiser as it approached. "Say, officer, is there anything you can do to help these people?" Something about asking for someone else helped re-frame things. We chatted for a while, as I shuffled questions and answers across the language barrier. It seems the gas stations would be opening in an hour and a half, and there were only three in town that would have fuel. I gave the largest family my map, saying "If you have to wait another 90 minutes, it might as well be in line at the gas pump." The next few traffic clogs were around those stations, and by a stack of tankers that seemed oddly inert given their precious cargo. But the road was starting to loosen up; clumps were giving way to quarter-mile slides. About 5 miles out of Brenham, the jam broke. I called Jerry's phone and left a message of laughter, whistles and applause, without adding another damn word. At 5:30 a.m. I was driving through Giddings when he called back. "Yeah, I woke up around 4:30 with the words: Go... Go... Go... ringing through my head. I figured you had pulled through. " Somewhere in the conversation I'm pretty sure he thanked me. By 7 a.m. I was on the edge of Austin's rush hour traffic... and decided to swing down 'Manor' road where it actually begins in Manor and ends up a half-mile from my neighborhood. A new --and it turns out, faster-- route between my house and 290. I look down at the fuel gauge. I have 2/3 of a tank left. Now let's see if we can squeeze that 3 hours down to 2•5. [Oh. The paintings smell like tailpipe tallow. But a few days in the Breathing (formerly the Looking) Room should clear that up. ] *** About 'Rita' - which is of course short for 'Marguerita.' The name means 'pearl' - as a pearl is the product of 'amarga' bitterness, which the oyster laps round with the beautiful mirror of its own inwardness.