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I don't like Ike: for Houstonians, the hurricane was not a disaster, just an enormous inconvenience. That didn't keep us from griping about it for three weeks.

Article Excerpt
"Houston looks ... wounded," my husband, John, said, choosing the word with care. I couldn't disagree: More than three weeks after Hurricane Ike blew through town, the streets are still piled high with debris, and Houston's beloved trees--mighty oaks, pines, pecans, and sweet gums--are still crashed into rooftops or chopped into mournful stumps at curbside. The traffic is, if anything, worse than before the storm; getting to the Galleria from downtown on Westheimer is both glacial and life-threatening, as every major intersection poses a new cognitive challenge: red light, blinking red light, or no light. The southeast side of the JPMorgan Chase Tower, a symbol of local pride, is boarded up like a slumlord's warehouse, with hundreds of windows shattered not by vandals but by the wind. Houstonians, so accustomed to sprinting from the slightest unpleasantness, still seem enervated by Ike's wrath, as if they cannot quite comprehend that a hurricane--and just a category 2 at that--could bring them to their knees. "I'm tired of this," a friend told me, as if she had any option besides moving away from the coast. "I went through Alicia. I went through Carla." More than forty years of storms and selective memory mean that most people assumed we'd be all cleaned up and back to normal by now, which proves nothing more than that Houstonians remain optimistic beyond reason and oblivious to the streams of fragility coursing through their assiduously modern city.

For most of my life, hurricanes have been a minor inconvenience. I was very young and far from the coast during Carla, in 1961, and spent Alicia, in 1983, inexplicably cat-sitting for a friend in West University. I remember that the eye passed over sometime in the late morning and that there were many downed trees and that my friend Tim broadcast live from downtown, reporting on falling glass from the Chase Tower. Even though some people waited three weeks for power, I went back to my apartment, turned on the lights, and resumed my life. It was the 2005 one-two punch of Katrina and Rita that forever changed my attitude, and that of my fellow Houstonians. Never mind that much of the devastation in New Orleans was created by collapsing levees--people had seen the social fabric unravel, and it wasn't pretty.

As Ike approached, my first decision was the traditional one: Go or stay. I chose the latter because Ike was reported to be a big storm but with only category 2 winds. Three years ago, Rita had headed for Houston as a category 5, a difference of about 50 miles per hour and ten to fifteen feet in storm surge. I left then with our son, Sam, on orders from a tense troika that included my boss, husband, and mother and spent nine hours...

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