Ike, Galveston and John Steinbeck

Hurricane Watch 2008 Storm activity during the past week formed out of systems located in the northeastern Caribbean. Kyle gained Tropical Storm status on Friday September 26th in the area of Turks and Caicos Islands before moving north into the Atlantic. Kyle past west of Bermuda on its move north toward Nantucket, Massachusetts generating winds of 80 mph. The storm moving at 26 mph entered the cold waters of the North Atlantic where the velocity of its winds quickly dropped and the storm broke up north of St. Johns, New Brunswick. Just as Kyle was breaking up Tropical Storm Laura formed and followed a similar path to that of Kyle. Wednesday morning October 1st the remnants of Tropical Storm Laura was located 295 miles east southeast of Cape Race, Newfoundland moving at 16 mph with diminished winds of 45 mph.

As a follow up on Hurricane Ike's devastation to the north Gulf coast and in particular Galveston I'd like to share with you an article written by Joan Reeves a Texan from the area. Bio Note: Joan Reeves is a published author of book-length fiction and a long-time successful freelance writer. www.joanslingwords.com

Hurricane Ike Creates Uncertain Future by Joan Reeves

I've lived most of my life on the Gulf Coast though for about six years I lived thousands of miles away on a speck of an island between the East China Sea and the Pacific known as Typhoon Alley. So I'm not exactly a stranger to tropical storms, hurricanes, and their Pacific sibling, typhoons. The destruction from these violent storms is a certainty. The only uncertainty is when it will happen. Time is the great unknown.

Too often, the passage of time brings a false assurance to those who love to live near enough to the ocean to hear the waves lapping the shore. In 1983, I rode out Hurricane Alicia with my toddler daughter and my husband. We lived in the pinewoods, northeast of the Houston-area near the small town of Humble. During that long day that Alicia battered us, tornadoes ripped through our subdivision, capriciously felling forty-foot pine trees on unsuspecting houses. We all survived the following two weeks without power when we sweated to the background music of chain saws as downed trees were cleared. A couple of years later we moved to Clear Lake, home of NASA, and started visiting Galveston fairly often. It was less than an hour's drive away. If we wanted to see ocean water sooner, we could just drive over to Seabrook and Kemah on the northern end of Galveston Bay and only ten minutes away. This was the mid-eighties when there were few residences built around the waterfronts of those small towns on Galveston Bay. The old houses that were left standing had been there for decades, braving the storms and always surviving intact. I sometimes think the wood they used in those days must be harder than the wood used in home-building now.

In the late 1990s, new subdivisions began sprouting like mushrooms after a rain all over the Clear Lake area and all the other small towns between there and Galveston Island. A few years earlier, I'd noticed the boom in home building on Galveston's west end. You see, there's a defined difference between Galveston and Galveston West End. That difference is the seawall. The fact that they started putting in oceanfront mansions in the 1990's was startling. I recall how my mouth dropped open in shock the first time I saw one of those million dollar villas with nothing between it and the surf maybe a thousand feet away.

Galveston is old by Texas standards. In 1817, it was home to notorious pirate Jean Lafitte and other exiles. Jane Long, called the Mother of Texas, gave birth to the first Anglo child in 1821 on Bolivar Peninsula. By the late 1800s, it was on the fast track to becoming the Wall Street of the South. The city was a major shipping, business, and cultural center. Then the first week in September a hurricane formed out over the warm waters of the ocean. On September 8, it made landfall at Galveston. There was no seawall then. Everything was at the level of the west end of the island. That was before storms were named so the storm that killed 6,000 - 12,000 people is called simply the 1900 Galveston hurricane, and it's the deadliest natural disaster to ever hit our country.
(To be continued)

Writers Notebook:

Answering a friend's call for help in writing an important biography

John Steinbeck wrote and said, "˜"¦Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm, which can only come with a kind unconscious association with the material.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place the nameless faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place unlike the theatre it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person "“ a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.' If that phrase "˜write freely and as rapidly as possible' seems familiar it's because it is.

Stephen King takes a similar approach: refer to my post of August 13, 2008.

Tom Barnes -- Actor, Writer and Hurricane Hunter. Check out my website for books, blogs, western legends, a literary icon, reviews and interviews. Also my novels The Goring Collection and Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone along with a non fiction remembrance of The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

www.tombarnes39.com
www.RocktheTower.com