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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.

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 Galveston means that someone in Brownsville, or along the Mexican coast, or in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida will be swept by wind, rain, and the deadly tidal surge that you have just avoided.    

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.

Every year the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, along with other sites throughout the island, is hit with a blizzard of black birds, mostly Great-tailed Grackles mixed with European Starlings. During the day the birds are not very noticeable, just part of the local avian life. But at dawn and at dusk, they congregate to roost in trees and on ledges, filling the dim sky with the din of their cry and the muted flutter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wings. I need not go into detail about the side effect of these roosts upon the sidewalks and lawns under the trees.

These nocturnal deposits have led many residents to attempt multiple strategies to convince the roosting birds to find a new set of trees for their bedroom. We have had plastic owls with mechanically rotating heads, tapes of hawks and other raptors, booms and bangs of recorded fireworks and shotguns, but none of them seem to have a long term impact. The grackles, after all, were roosting here long before we arrived, and behave as though they have the right to continue regardless of what we may think of them. The starlings have joined the grackles over the last century but seem to be equally assured of their property rights. I like to point out to those who complain about the grackle/starling invasion that the primary food of both species when they are here is insects, especially yummy larvae. If we have, say, 200,000 birds in the combined flocks (which is easily imaginable) and they stay for 30 days and eat, on a guess, five insects each every day, then the island has been spared 30,000,000 bugs that would still be around if the flock were to leave. And if that’s not a blessing, I’m not sure what is.

The new year is upon us and so far the winter weather in Galveston has been erratic but not too bad. According to our local weather guru, we are overdue for a hard freeze. The last time the thermometer hit freezing, and just barely at 32 degrees, was during the great snowfall of Christmas Day, 2004. We had almost four inches of the white stuff and it obliged us by sticking around for three or four hours so we could enjoy it. The photograph here was taken that day and shows our resident mockingbird waiting for his/her daily dose of raisins. I could swear he/she is frowning about the weather, but it’s not clear from this distance.  

That was the second snow of our 20 years here. Snow on palm trees looks a little anachronistic, but interesting. Kids (and their parents) were out in the wee morning hours, building snowmen and making snow angels before the sun would come up and start the thaw. The heaviest snowfall here, six inches, was on January 12, 1886, and it was notable enough to make the New York Times. According to the Times article, by “10 o’clock” the weather moderated enough that “thousands of clerks and others in the business part of the town turned out and enjoyed the novelty of snowballing.” I don’t doubt that the weather was a novelty, but the “thousands of clerks” does somewhat bewilder me. This was a thriving commercial and economic center in 1886, but I doubt that there were that many clerks in a town of just over 22,000. This was probably just a little NY “Yankee” hyperbole.  

There are few things that so aptly describe the architecture and industry of the east end of Galveston Island as the scene from the windows of my office. From the southeast window, one can see the Strand area with its Victorian buildings, the old print shop (now a condominium), the American National Insurance Company building (previously the tallest building on the Island until it was dwarfed by the 32 story condominiums near East Beach), and – in the distance – the Gulf of Mexico. The British flag that flutters over the Strand flies every December as part of the Dickens Festival held the first weekend of the month. On the far left, the buildings on the horizon are part of the University of Texas Medical Branch, more commonly known as UTMB. In the early morning haze, it is difficult to clearly see the narrow strip of the Gulf lying just over the trees that mark a residential area. The four small rectangular images in this strip of water are ships waiting for a pilot to escort them through the Bolivar Pass and into Galveston Bay. From there they turn left into the intercontinental waterway towards Galveston or travel up the Bay into the Houston ship channel.

From the northeast window, I get a clear view of the Port of Galveston and a wide expanse of Galveston Bay. In the foreground, the masts of the 1877 Elissa, a three-masted iron-hulled barque registered as a National Historic Landmark, rise up into the sky. The Texas Seaport Museum is located next to the Elissa, telling the story of a rich legacy of seaborne commerce and immigration and containing a database of the names of more than 133,000 immigrants who entered the United States through Galveston, “The Ellis Island of the West.” Behind the Seaport Museum is another museum, the off-shore oil rig, the Ocean Star. The ominous-looking blue cranes behind the Ocean Star on the right are for hoisting containers from ship to shore and vice versa. The little red boat making its way towards the piers is the Seagull, which offers visitors a water-eye trip around the Gulf. On the far left, just out of view, is the ferry terminal that transports cars, trucks, and people from the Island to the Bolivar Peninsula portion of Galveston County.

And there is it: water-borne commerce, historic architecture, museums, festivals, retail establishments, the two major employers (ANICO and UTMB), the Gulf and the Bay, urban lofts, and residential neighborhoods…and all from my windows. It’s a wonder I get any work done at all.

Some of the sidewalks along the Strand date back to the 1800s. The streets in many intersections reveal red paving bricks; the old sidewalks that remain are brick or slate. In places they are uneven with the wear of thousands of feet that have traveled down that street and can be treacherous if you don’t watch where you’re going. But, unlike the concrete that is gradually replacing the old stone and brick, they have a charm all their own.

Early one morning I was heading east along Strand, just after the fog had lifted, and the slate sidewalk was absolutely shining with dew. Footprints from the morning’s pedestrian traffic were still visible, but would not be for long.