Life is What Happens

When you think you're making other plans....

I spent all of last week in Houston, Texas, in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. My plane was scheduled to arrive in Houston Monday morning, but remarkably that was the morning the hurricane made a surprise direct hit on that city, so my flight was ultimately canceled. I was able to get a seat on a different flight that evening, after the worst of the storm had moved past Houston. City-wide power outages occurred soon after the storm arrived, so in my extra time before the evening flight I went out and bought some battery-powered lanterns, extra batteries (my bag got searched at security because they thought the batteries might be bullets!), and cell-phone charging units. My brother recommended I cancel my trip, under the circumstances, echoing the thoughts running through my own mind. However, my mother wanted me to brave the situation and go there to help my brother, who is very recently home from many weeks in hospital settings dealing with multiple traumas, and still getting his footing.

My mother would have been there herself, but she was at long last getting some much-needed respite at home in Michigan before she goes back to Houston this weekend. I struggled for a moment or two, not wanting to deal with ‘someone else’s hurricane’ (we have our own to contend with in coastal Florida!), a power outage in a Texas heat-wave, and not knowing what other storm issues I might encounter….but then, I made a clear decision to surrender into the unknown, and off I went, figuring that the plane wouldn’t take off if they didn’t at least believe they could safely land at the other end.

We did land safely, and I was thankfully able to get an Uber ride to my brother’s house 30 minutes away. Getting the Uber ride was more complicated than usual because many cell towers were not functional, so communications were quite challenged, and many roads were blocked by fallen trees and downed wires, or flooded. On the ride, I saw all the flooding and stranded vehicles on the ramps and feeder-roads. Fortunately, the main highway we were on was raised up and dry (though I learned later that it had flash-flooded earlier in the day), and my brother’s house is in “The Heights,” a neighborhood named for its relative elevation.

It was good to see my little sister for a brief overlap, before she handed the brother-care baton to me and made her way back to Vermont (which took her 3 flights and a night on the floor of an airport in North Carolina, due to the chaos caused by this storm). We played cards by the battery-powered lantern I had brought, the 3 of us siblings huddled close around my brother’s table, and that was fun. It amazes me that my brother has lived in Houston for at least 25 years, through several hurricanes and long power outages, and yet remains woefully unprepared with backup power sources. Navigating Hurricane Ian less than 2 years ago in Florida taught me a lot, and I have a whole arsenal of supplies now.

My sister and I walked to the closest grocery store about a mile away in the morning before she left (my brother no longer has a vehicle). The store was running on a generator, and many shelves and all the freezers and refrigerated sections were empty or ransacked. Most of the produce was already wilting, but I bought some oranges and bananas (a fruit diet is handy during a power outage!). We were thrilled to find bags of ice available and not rationed as we had heard they were in other places, and we called an Uber to help us home with our heavy supplies.

Saying good-bye to my sister that afternoon was another surrender moment, as I realized I would now be more on my own, in a power outage expected to last all week long. Most of the huge city of Houston was in a blackout. I gave my sister a long hug, then shifted into resourceful problem-solving mode. We would need more ice for the old coolers every day, and it was getting HOT as the afternoon wore on, with a heat index of something like 110 degrees and no air-conditioning or fans to help us cool off. Eventually, a caring neighbor brought us a tiny battery-powered fan, which went to my brother since he, being ill, was suffering far more than me. (On the last night that we were without power, another neighbor gave us a second fan, and I was so grateful to be able to sleep more comfortably that night!)

The “assignment” I had gone to Houston to fulfill was to make my brother healthy smoothies and salads, encourage him to do special exercises to build back mobility, get him to a critical medical appointment, do his grocery-shopping and laundry, and assess whether he was ready to navigate the following week on his own before our mother came back to help. As life would arrange it, I couldn’t store much fresh food in the small coolers, I couldn’t make him smoothies or do his laundry with no electricity, it was too hot for him to think about any exercises, and his critical medical appointment was canceled because that clinic was closed due to the power outage.

A very different job was asked of me than the one I thought I had signed up for, and I had to just accept the new assignment. And it seemed that my presence and assistance was likely more needed, given the stresses of the nearly week-long power outage. Life inched along in a sultry kind of slow-motion tedium, as the endless-feeling days and nights ticked slowly by in a blur of sweaty coping. I did manage to scrape the slippery storm-mud off the sidewalk, mow the lawn, and do a bit of weeding. A few days in, insult piled on top of injury when my brother got food poisoning (perhaps brought on by eating several meals of heavy meat-dishes a neighbor had made for him, while in the relentless heat and in his compromised ill-health condition). My brother accepted his predicament gracefully, but it was hard for me to witness this additional layer of suffering. All I could do was try to keep him hydrating, but he was unable to keep anything down for a day and a night and I worried we might end up in Urgent Care for dehydration. I surrendered, again.

Thankfully, my brother rebounded and recovered fully after a couple of rough days and nights. A silver lining was that the mandatory extra rest lying horizontally on the couch helped his legs recover from edema, and soreness from previous physical therapy exercises. Thunderstorms blessed us with noticeably cooler air, at least temporarily, and I spent much of my time sitting on my brothers’ porches where I could enjoy some breeze. It was still stifling inside the house. In the early part of the days we would open all the doors and a couple windows to bring in some fresh air, but my brother has no screens anywhere, and we had to contend with flies and mosquitos invading the house.

The day before my flight home to Florida, my brother was giving me a tour of his workshop and the inspired garage apartment he was building (he is a skilled carpenter) before he wound up in the hospital, when we heard the AC compressor start up. We probably thought it was just another neighborhood generator kicking on, so it took us both a minute to realize what it really was, and what that meant: THE POWER WAS BACK ON!!! We shared a celebratory whoop-whoop and a high-five, and abandoned the tour to hurry into the house to check it out. My brother wanted to give it an hour before he would trust that we really had our electricity back. Thankfully, we did. He was excited to get his TV back on, and unbelievably the very first thing that popped onto the TV screen, on every channel, was the breaking news about Trump being shot. That was a strange moment for us both, just feeling all the weirdness of the surreal twilight-zone world of that whole week, for us.

I made it home without further incident, rolling in at midnight and collapsing into my own bed, immensely grateful for the comforts of home, electricity, and air conditioning. I felt satisfied knowing that my brother was feeling better, he had electricity and a well-stocked refrigerator, and several great neighbors as well as a friendly and competent nurse looking in on him. I have an indelible memory of lying feet to feet on two long couches that span his simple living-room, shooting the breeze about all kinds of random topics with each, other while we tried to beat the heat by lying still and conserving energy.