“Galveston is a writer’s town.” I remember telling Adi this the first time we visited the island together. Our first time to Galveston was incidentally my first time to visit the city. Adi had lived a lifetime in Galveston; her family owns two homes on the island, and they celebrated holidays and summers there where they built memories long before I arrived in Adi’s life.
I had no real idea what to expect the first time I came to the island. I had heard people disparage the place by saying it was a “low rent beach” with “brown water” and sand that was far from fluffy and white like the Caribbean beaches people have come to worship. When we rolled into town for the first time with our small brood of three young teenagers with a gaggle of their friends, I was instantly taken with the grittiness of the city. It felt real to me. It felt like a city with a story to tell and the more I learned about Galveston the more I came to like my new acquaintance.
That first vacation a few short years ago set the stage for our second trip to Galveston with our kids, this time minus the friends due to our new cautionary “socially distancing” times. It wasn’t lost on me that by socially distancing from each other we are losing the very community that we all shared just a few short years ago. In order to keep ourselves safe, we have alienated ourselves from the very thing that makes the human experience…well…an experience. Our humanity is comprised of shared experiences that allow us to remember how truly similar we all are. We are far more alike than we are different, and it is our commonality that we may all consider embracing once again. But I digress…
Adi and I loaded up our more mature teenage kids for our “mandatory” family vacation (it’s getting harder for us to convince our kids to go with us) with a U Haul in tow behind us. Adi and I decided we would kill two birds with one stone with a combination family vacation/pre-move trip. We loaded our U Haul with a few essentials that we would need for our upcoming sabbatical from Fort Worth until we decide where we will land next.
I can feel our kids getting older. I sense they don’t need us like they once did, and I have both feelings of nostalgia for times when they were younger and liberation of knowing that Adi and I can now explore the world as a team without a hint of guilt. Our kids are celebrating our move in ways I didn’t expect. They are part cheerleader (“Go do it. Have fun!”) while simultaneously planning their own futures which are not all that far in the future (“I am going to travel the world on my own the very first second I can!”).
We hit the road for Galveston at 6 am. Adi, our youngest and I loaded up in one car while the “boys” traveled separately behind us in a Mustang 5.0 that sounds far cooler than it may be in reality. I reminisced back to when I was 17 years old and I thought how cool it would have been to take a road trip with a friend? I feel so blessed that our oldest boys are friends in a ridiculously “Step Brothers” (if you haven’t see the film watch it and you will get it) kind of way.
As I drove down the highway with only the U Haul in my rearview mirror, I couldn’t help but think that the whole scene was an almost absurd version of Clark Griswald meets Step Brothers. My U Haul replaced Clark Griswald’s wood-paneled station wagon, but the results were essentially the same: emasculation. The days of me being cool (if they ever existed) have vanished in a puff of mid-life crisis smoke and I am now simply the father of three kids that need him less and less every day. This is success, right?
So much change is happening so fast. Sometimes I feel like I am just trying to hold on while other times I wonder, “Why the hell am I holding on so tightly to the unraveling of my former life? Let go already! A new reality is here.” I think a lot of us are going through this and probably not talking about it. It’s easier if we just keep moving forward and then hoping something will make sense in the coming days or weeks. Months, maybe? For the time being, we are just moving forward, albeit somewhat blindly and without much of a compass to guide us.
Our tribe rolled into Galveston 6 hours after leaving Fort Worth. We managed to take a five-hour drive and add an hour to it. Adi and I drove up to our new home and without saying a word, we both looked at each other and energetically said, “This is what we’re doing, right?”
This IS what we are doing. This is our new home for the next few months and it feels nice having the kids here with us for the time being. They start school again in a month and in that time we will all most likely move into quarantine (maybe until the end of the year). We will all self-isolate again which leaves me asking the question: If we isolate ourselves away from the rest of the world, aren’t we really creating a different kind of virus, one that is much more dangerous than even the one we are trying to avoid?
Writer’s Town
Galveston is a writer’s town. There is a grittiness to the place that has an underlying sense of survival to it. This city was almost entirely destroyed when the Great Galveston Storm came ashore the night of Sept 8, 1900. When it arrived with all its bluster it had an estimated strength of a Category 4 storm. Storm forecasting at the dawn of the 20th century was rather primitive, relying primarily on reports from ships in the Gulf of Mexico, and although locals knew a storm was coming, they had no idea the power of destruction it would bring.
On the night of September 8, 1900, it is estimated that between 6,000 to 12,000 people died on Galveston Island and the mainland. It remains the deadliest natural disaster and the worst hurricane in U.S. history. Texas’ most advanced city was nearly destroyed. At the dawn of the 20th century, Galveston was the grandest city in Texas. It could boast the biggest port, the most millionaires, the swankiest mansions, the first telephones and electric lights, and the most exotic bordellos. After the 1900 storm, she would never regain her status. She survived, but she was never the same.
Read “The Zebra and the U-Haul
As our family rolled into town, I couldn’t help but think about this story—a once royal and thriving city is knocked to the ground by a storm that no one saw coming and then never quite regains its footing. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me—this city that we call Galveston and I share a similar story. My “Great Storm” has been this life-changing, once in a generation pandemic that literally destroyed everything that I had worked for my entire career. This all occurred in what seemed to be one short weekend. One weekend I was working in our theater and by Monday everything was shuttered. My longtime business partner and dear friend, David Wilk, said to me, “I think we are going to have to shut down due to this pandemic.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked innocently.
“This thing is moving fast, and I don’t think we will make it until Wednesday before we are forced to close,” he said.
It seemed preposterous to me. It seemed like he was over-reacting until I discovered his instincts were
100% correct. I was the naïve one who didn’t trust the reports that were rolling in about this “storm” that I didn’t see coming.
In 1900, the citizens of Galveston didn’t see the storm coming. In 2020, many of us didn’t see it coming either. Like the Great Galveston Storm, the destruction snuck up on us in the middle of the night and wiped out entire lives. The question remains: Will we thrive after the storm? Will we recover? Only time will tell and the history of our storm, like the Great Galveston Storm, may be written long after we are gone.
What story do you hope the world will tell about us?
Galveston is a writer’s town…
