I finally saved up enough to get a new 300mm lens and have been having fun wandering around town and taking photos and trying it out. As a result, the photos below are rather a mishmash of subject matter that well illustrate the breadth of the natural and built environment of this island.
I only made it to two parades this year, The Children’s Parade and the Barkus and Meow Parade, but that was enough. The day was beautiful and the route for both went right down the Seawall. The crowd, while certainly nothing to sneeze at, was smaller than at the more raucous evening parades and all in all relatively well-behaved (it is, after all, Mardi Gras and you don’t want an excess of good manners).
I have let this blog lapse for almost a year and have no idea why. It’s been a busy year and I’ve taken a lot of photos but never get around to posting them. The Dickens on the Strand this year was not as exciting as it has been in the past. The boys with chestnut carts are going, half of the arts and crafts vendors are gone, the wandering mistletoe sellers are gone, and you no longer get free admission with a costume, so many of those who used to dress up no longer bother. But the parade was excellent, worth the price of admission all by itself.
In 1817 the pirate Jean Lafitte settled on Galveston Island and, under the protection of the Mexican flag, continued his harassment of Spanish ships in the Gulf. He built a fort on the island that included his home, the Maison Rouge (red house). The windows in the upper story of the house were designed for cannon and the downstairs was furnished with treasures from captured ships. When he left the island in 1821, he burned the house and the surrounding fort and sailed to Mexico. In 1870, another residence was built over the foundation and cellars of Lafitte’s home. That residence is now also gone, leaving behind parts of walls, stone stairs, weeds, and vines.
Every day hundreds of cars go by the site without any idea of its history. Flanked by a biolab and a welding shop, the evidence of the lot’s past is fenced in by both wire and vegetation. In the right light, however, there is the sense that the pirate’s spirit is still hanging around his old home and there is a certain eeriness in the ruins.
A year has passed since Ike hit Galveston and I have been busy repairing my house and trying to save the remnants of a garden saturated with salt and heaven knows what else. I tried planting a little of this and a little of that to see what would survive and was so pleased to find that most of my efforts were successful. In spite of heat and drought and humidity and lots and lots of bugs (and birds to eat the bugs along with the eggplant and peppers — a balanced diet), there was a lot of beauty out there. Here are some samples.
This Pavonia just showed up near a drain spout and has been blooming all summer.
I lost every leaf of my passion flower vine to Gulf Fritillary caterpillars, but I don’t know which was more lovely — the vine or the orange butterflies that filled my yard after they immerged from their cocoon.
My oxblood lilies survived not only the water but also a bleach rinse of the house before it was repainted.
The nasturiums did beautifully, although I put them in a pot. This month, however, I noticed they were popping up anew throughout my daylily bed.
These are not the naked ladies of my youth (these have leaves when they come into bloom) but they are very similar. I’m trying to track down the correct name. [Feb. 14, 2010 — This is a crinum, exact variety unknow.]
The old cemetery on Broadway sent up its usual display of thousands of coreopsis and a few Mexican blankets to set a cheerful note in an incongruous setting.
The pride of Barbados is also in a pot because after I bought it I found out it would grow too large for any empty spot in my yard. That didn’t stop it from blooming magnificently, however.
The Banksia rose really looked bad over the winter, but in the spring it began to bloom, first a little here and then a little there until it was almost 80% back to its normal cascade of yellow.
Here’s another shot of the cemetery. I’m surprised there are not traffic accidents along Broadway when its in bloom.
In many places, Galveston looks like a giant sandbox where a child has, willy-nilly, strewn all her toys. Large white pleasure boats lean against the freeway guardrails, pieces of lumber are piled up where there used to be a house, huge oak trees lie on their side, the tendrils of their roots exposed. Driving around, however, it becomes obvious that the real impact of Hurricane Ike has not been upon either the built or the natural environment, as severe as that impact might seem. It is upon those people whose homes and business were drowned under the sandy silt of the waters that rose without warning from the bay to the north and then tore over the island from the Gulf to the south as the storm surge’s heavy waves swamped the island. “Flee from the water; hide from the wind,” the saying goes. As with Katrina, water, not wind, was the real foe.
As residents pull the soggy remains of their home to the curb, as they pile wet dry wall on their lawn, as they rip up floor boards and linoleum and carry them, piece by piece, outside to join the sofa and the refrigerator and the TV set and the curio cabinet out in front, their lives are stripped bare of things, not all of which can be replaced. Businesses as well have been affected, their inventory destroyed, their survival threatened, their workers, many of them now homeless, displaced.
But nature has already begun its comeback. Plants that had been buried under salty water are already shedding their browned leaves and replacing them with new green ones. The first day of my return a battered swallowtail was flitting around the yard.
The birds are mostly back; only the doves and the gulls seem to be absent. Our backyard is active with hummingbirds, jays, house sparrows, and grackles. Yesterday I saw a small wren in the bushes and today the same bush held a Common Yellowthroat. Geckos hide in the coolness of the brush piles in front of most of the homes and squirrels dart about in seventh heaven with all the nuts and seeds they used to have to climb for now brought down to ground level.
A couple of days ago I went over to St. Vincent’s (see posting for February 14 below). The building had taken seven foot of water, destroying the kitchen and the day care center, but had not reached the second floor where the free clinic and administrative offices are located. The children’s paintings on the walls, both interior and exterior, had somehow remained, their colors still bright. Holes had been punched in the doors to allow the water to be suctioned out, but the innocence of the art was unaffected.
Nevertheless, the piles of rubbish give a hint of the destruction, with the remnants of the day care center tossed outside along with the furniture and odds and ends from the gutted interior. A little Tigger lies all alone in the wilted grass. One can only hope that the little smile on his face is an indication of better days to come.
UPDATE: This was written before Hurricane Ike hit Galveston head-on. The waves were nowhere as calm as the photo above but the statue shown below survived.
I have lived in quite a few states, all of which had their resident natural disasters. I have experienced earthquakes, floods, and – from a distance – tornados. But there is something different about hurricanes: the element of guilt.
One does not wish that an earthquake shake somewhere else; that is not in the nature of earthquakes. If you’re on or near a fault, you will be shaken. A flood belongs to a particular river or river system. You cannot say to yourself, “I hope the flood hits another river instead of mine.” All you can do is fill sandbags or flee to higher ground. You can wish away a tornado without wishing it on someone else. You can just hope that it jumps your house or swallows itself back into the clouds, leaving everything and everybody intact.
But with a hurricane, the wish that your town be spared automatically means that you are hoping someone else’s town is hit. The pain of watching a Katrina or a Rita or a Gustav veer away from
The top photo is of the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston. It was taken the day that Gustav hit the central and eastern Gulf coast. The photo below is of a Seawall monument to the 6,000 or more who perished in Galveston’s 1900 storm, a storm that most certainly would have been wished away if anyone had seen it coming.
Every year, Galveston has a Backyard Garden tour of selected well-maintained yards about town. I try not to miss the occasion, both because it is a good way to be introduced to plants that may not die in our humid summer air, but also because there are some excellent examples of garden art. It is not difficult to have artistic touches in your yard. Gazing balls abound and bird baths and fountains turn what would have been a grassy corner into an oasis. But really good garden art is not just art “in” the garden; it is art that has become part of the garden.
Much of the knack of developing good garden art is placement. I’m attaching two examples here from this year’s tour. The brick wall makes the cat bird house come alive. The ceramic frog doesn’t even have to be seen as a frog because it is so much a part of the shady kaleidoscopic cranny dominated by the caladium.
There are buildings going up all over the island, especially on the west and east ends. The majority of the new construction is luxury homes and condominiums, most of them designed as second or retirement homes for those who have an extra million or two to put towards a residence on a storm-prone barrier island. At the far eastern end, however, there is a section of land now designated for the development of the East End Lagoon Park and Nature Preserve. Long a favorite spot for fishermen and birders, the constantly shifting lagoon looks out over the Bolivar Pass leading into the Houston Ship Channel. There a solitary pelican hovers on an updraft as two tankers sit just outside the Pass, waiting to be piloted into the heavy traffic lanes of the Channel.
St. Vincent’s House, which runs a free clinic, day care center, and other essential services, is located in a very depressed section of Galveston. The neighborhood is full of dilapidated houses, empty lots, corner hangouts, and broken fences. There are a few well-kept homes and a cheerful coffee house, but they are more the exception than the norm. But St. Vincent’s is one of my favorite places to visit. The children are laughing, the play yard is full of music (from hymns to opera), and almost every flat surface is covered with paintings. I have, on three or four occasions, taken my camera with me when I visit and have begun amassing quite a collection of St. Vincent’s art. The two photos here are only a sampler.
