God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(24)
But Houston had to face its own destiny in 1935, when downtown flooded. “That’s what got everybody spurred into action,” Judge Emmett told me. A flood-control district was established. Two large reservoirs were built to contain floodwaters; at the time, they were twenty miles from downtown. “They were out in the middle of nowhere,” Emmett said. Since then, some fourteen thousand houses have actually been built inside those catchments, a fact that may not have been disclosed to the homeowners. Those reservoirs were now filled to the brim, many houses within were flooded, and the Army Corps of Engineers was releasing water to keep the levees from breaching, adding to the flooding of the hundreds of homes that had been built around them.
“I’m not a hydrologist, I’m not an engineer, but something didn’t work,” Emmett said.
I asked Emmett, a Republican, if he was a climate-change skeptic. “The seas are rising, we have to deal with it,” he said. “I’m more concerned if we’re at a new normal. We’ve had three five-hundred-year floods in less than a three-year period, so our definition of a five-hundred-year flood is probably wrong. Either that, or we get fifteen hundred years off.”
Emmett laid part of the blame on his own party for being anti-intellectual and failing to take climate change seriously. “We’ve got too many people in our party who believe that the earth is less than ten thousand years old,” he said. “Some of the political leaders are so afraid of this extreme element in the party. Periodically, just for fun, I go back and watch the movie Inherit the Wind”—about the Clarence Darrow–William Jennings Bryan “monkey trial,” which featured a debate about the biblical account of creation versus the science of evolution. “I can’t believe we haven’t gone any further than that.”
* * *
GREG BOYD FINALLY ASKED to speak to me and the cast about the fate of Cleo. The pain in his face reflected the bad news he was carrying. The lower part of his theater was being demolished at that moment. There were dumpsters lined up outside, crammed with drywall, moldering carpet, props, and rows of theater seats. Several of the city landfills were flooded and there was no place to put the debris. Similar piles of rubbish were all over town, where homeowners had stripped their houses of furniture and floors and had taken the walls down to the studs. I was touched by their determination to rebuild as soon as possible, but I also took note of the number of For Sale by Owner signs that had sprung up in neighborhoods like Meyerland, a predominately Jewish section, which had been badly hit once again. Members of the Alley staff had also lost their homes or suffered significant damage. (Greg would step down after the turn of the year amid charges of abuse. It’s been quite a rocky season for the venerable old theater.)
It wasn’t a surprise when he said he had to cancel the production.
I admit that my involvement in the theater world is tangential. I am a nonfiction journalist, deeply curious about the world outside but not so much affected by the interior landscape. Actors are a little mysterious to me. Their emotionality, their expressiveness, their intuitive genius—all of this is about as far from who I am as nuclear engineers or trapeze artists. When I’m with them, I feel like I’m visiting a foreign country—a friendly place, but one with unfamiliar folkways. I once made the mistake of uttering the word “Macbeth” during a rehearsal in New York, and the actors marched me outside on a cold winter day, made me turn around three times on a crowded sidewalk, and then beg for readmittance. The Scottish play, you are supposed to say.
When Greg delivered the news, the cast nodded, then one of them spoke up, saying, “Yes, well, we just want to keep rehearsing.” They all agreed. It was totally unrealistic. There was no venue for us. The Alley was facing millions of dollars in damage. Even when the theater got back on its feet, there was no room in what remained of the season. Greg began to weep. The next day, the Alley staff somehow managed to find space for Cleo the following spring.
Shortly before I returned to Austin, there was an ad in The Houston Chronicle. “To our friends in Texas,” it began:
Twelve years ago, you took in hundreds of thousands of us. You opened your homes, closets, and kitchens. You found schools for our kids and jobs to tide us over. Some of us are still there. And when the rest of the world told us not to rebuild, you told us not to listen. Keep our city and traditions alive…
The way of life you love the most will carry on. You taught us that. Your courage and care continues to inspire our whole city. We couldn’t be more proud to call you our neighbors, our friends, and our family. Texas forever.
We’re with you.
It was signed, “New Orleans.”
FOUR
Culture, Explained
Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. It is in the sound of our voices, the flavors of our food, the rhythms of our music. Whether through the visual arts, literature, theater, architecture, music, dance, or cuisine, culture is a mirror of a million facets reflecting the society it contains. Primitive cultures reflect nothing more than that. Unauthentic, phony cultures mainly reflect societies other than their own. A great culture is aware of the world beyond but is constantly turning back on itself, searching for its roots, examining its direction, criticizing and talking to itself—in short, taking itself seriously.