It's More Than Just Houston
ROCKPORT, TEXAS-As you come up Route 35 from Corpus Christi, along a Gulf coast now placid and warm and almost friendly in an exhausted way, the sea gradually tips below horizon as the road rolls into farm country. Suddenly, almost before you realize it, you are in a place where everything you see is either bent or smashed. Telephone poles in a kind of frozen choreography, mile after mile of them, leaning away from the road; piles of tin that might have been a shed, or a watering trough for cattle, now nothing more than glinting rubble in the brutal summer sun. Then come the RV parks, looking like after-action photographs of Pearl Harbor, with RVs tossed around like jackstraws, some of them with both tires flat on one side and listing, as though they were sinking into the Earth. And then, as you come off the state road and turn once again toward the tame and shining Gulf of Mexico, is Rockport.
Here is where the storm came ashore. It came right up Austin Street, right up the center of the Rockport Historic District at full gallop, blowing things apart with wind-driven rain. Now, the only water that's left here from a storm that is going to be remembered as historic because of the flooding it caused elsewhere are rank pools of stagnant seawater. A man in a surgical mask stands atop the pile of undifferentiated lumber that once was his antiques store and tries to remove a gaily colored door from the flattened shambles of its frame because the door is the only thing left he has there that is worth saving.
About halfway down Austin Street, C.J. Duckworth and Richard Gonzalez are sitting in the empty frame of what once was the show window of Duckworth's sign shop. Inside, there's an office chair that miraculously stayed upright. A bicycle lies flat on the floor next to it.
"I haven't picked up my bike yet," Duckworth says. "I'm not sure I want to."
The window is the only real damage that the shop sustained. Next door, however, the bricks have blown off the entire windward wall of a neighboring business.
"Got water behind that wall and blew it out," Gonzalez explains. "The mortar is so burned out with the salt air, after so many years. We re-did that gallery down there years ago, and that held up. We cut out the joints, and you can see the difference in the mud there."
Richard Gonzalez is a stonemason. He learned the trade from his older sister's husband.
"I started when I was 13-years old, as a laborer. This was my summer job. Some kids cut grass. I mix mud." he said.
About 21 years ago, Duckworth approached Gonzalez about building a new home for his business, and about tacking on an apartment to the back of it. Gonzalez built him a solid building.
"That's why I came to visit him," Gonzalez said. "When he saw me the other day he gave me a hug, because we built it way before it was required to build it this strong. We got rebar every 16 inches in this building."
Duckworth will put in a new window, and Gonzalez will make sure it's secure in the wall of the building he built with his own hands, the one that stood up to the storm, rebar and all, and beat it. Nobody will be here to see the new window, though. The circus has left town. The TV trucks are gone now. Houston is the bigger story. Houston is where the really great video is. In Rockport, the sun has come out and the ocean looks glorious, and all that's left is the shiny detritus left by the passing of the storm. The relief workers are still coming; endless convoys of lumber flatbeds and electric company bucket-trucks are rolling south on Route 35 in a nearly constant stream. There is a FEMA facility set up just short of downtown. But the attention of the country is fixed on where the storm came and stayed, rather than where it blew through on its way. I heard on the radio that the president* came to Texas on Saturday. That must have been nice.
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