How Hurricane Ike Ended Up REALLY Pissing Me Off

Actually, I can’t totally blame Hurricane Ike for this — we, us humans, are guilty, too. We built too many houses in too many vulnerable areas, and then Ike showed up and blasted it all to hell. What do you get? A big g-darned mess up and down the Texas coast. Including the world’s longest undeveloped barrier island, Padre Island.

I understand the need to live reallllly close to the beach. I aspire to live on the water, too. But it’s not exactly smart or environmentally sound.

Normally, I can ignore these news stories, which just end up pissing me off.

But this happens to be the ONE WEEK I am HOME to experience it:

Hurricane Ike Dumps a Mess on Padre Island Beaches

Damnit.

Corpus Christi Botanical Gardens = Texas-Sized Flora and Fauna

PHOTOS!

o

That's a hibiscus I'm holding up to the camera.

A really, really big black bee.

A butterfly

A slightly larger butterfly.

Things I Like about Going Home to South Texas

In a week, I head up north to South Texas for a full week. I love going to visit, it’s so relaxing. After living in NYC and now Mexico City, it’s like an escape to another, calmer world. Some things I like:

• iced tea served everywhere, and refilled frequently
• migas breakfast plates (scrambled eggs, peppers, onions, tomatoes and crushed up tortilla chips, served with refried beans and super-thick, warm flour tortillas)
• the wide, quiet streets & overall lack of traffic
• spicy, smoked beef jerky
• the warm air, the high humidity and the gusty winds – always occurring together, always bad for hair.
• the smell of the salt grass on the sand dunes of Padre Island
• plush carpeting in my parents’ house
• jalapeno hush puppies

Things I love even more now that I have lived in Mexico City for a year:

• (relatively) safe tap water and ice
• people who speak English
• giant drugstores like CVS
• breakfast burrito bars at gas stations
• cops who are basically trustworthy
• Old Navy and Target and Ross Dress for Less and all the oh-so-cheap clothes/shoestores.
• anything you could ever need is at HEB

If You’re Hurricane Ike-Obsessed Like Me

Hurricane Ike at 1:30 Wednesday. Damn him.

Google Maps now has a hurricane tracking feature. It’s pretty awesome, although at the same time pretty scary. As you can see, the current prediction is for Ike to make landfall on my homelands of Corpus Christi. Here’s hoping it gets fickle with the forecasters and veers way north (as in, Louisiana. Houston has my family in it, too) or way south (although not too close to me, claro.)

Also a good bookmark is the National Hurricane Center, where I just learned that within just the last four hours, Ike grew to a Category 2.

Another Reason the Mexico Border Fence Is Worst Idea Ever

(Armadillo crossing the road. For more wildlife photos of South Texas by yours truly, click the photo.)

Of all the dumb and hostile things the U.S. government has done in the past few years, the construction of a fence along the Mexican border is the most pathetic. It’s a symbolic representation of our inability to think beyond knee-jerk, xenophobic, medieval solutions. Hate illegal immigration? Let’s build a wall! And not think about how immigrants can (and do) take boats across international waters. We’ll wait until that becomes overly problematic (decided arbitrarily, of course) — then put giant nets at sea, snagging their boats before they cross international boundary waters! Or, um, something...America, f yeah!.

Anyway, of course, an idea this bad is bound to have far more consequences than just making Americans look stupid. Its impact on nature (something that a lot of Americans don’t care about, especially if it means brown people will be in their country) is potentially devastating.

For those of you who think of South Texas as a dry, dusty place, it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s a wasteland. South Texas, in spite if its many problems, teems with biodiversity, and like all things wonderful and worth preserving in Texas, it transcends the border with Mexico; you can’t have one without the other.

The Sabal Palm Audubon Center is one of many areas that will be potentially damaged if the wall makes its way down to the mouth of the Rio Grande. This area, according to an article today in The New York Times, houses “rare birds of impossible colors… snakes…tortoises… and the occasional ocelot” (a gorgeous type of large feline). Not to mention native palm trees.

One of the guardians of the center, Jimmy Paz, is rightfully worried about the fence. From the Times:

“[Paz] says the Fence would create a twilight zone out of a swath of distinctive American soil, disrupt and damage wildlife and have the opposite of the intended effect: it will be the birders and other tourists — not the illegal immigrants — who stop coming. It may also put him out of a job.”

An audio photo slideshow of the Sabal Palm Audubon Center.

The Not-So-Sparkling City by the Sea

I can’t help but love my hometown, but the place has seen much better days. Especially the older parts of town. It’s a damn shame that such once-beautiful houses and beach bungalows are literally rotting, and that almost every other business is shuttered. I do not have much hope for the future of Corpus Christi, a place dubbed the “Sparkling City by the Sea,” a motto that most people laugh at. Sure, there are lovely parts of the city, but each time I come back, I see fewer of them.

I See Miles and Miles of Texas

In one week of vacation, we kayaked the South Llano River with Dana and Cristian, spotted pronghorn antelope, frequently contemplated how to earn “passive income,” learned to play the card games 99 and Bull Shit, polished off a bottle of Tito’s Vodka (distilled in Austin), got turned away from the YO Ranch, smelled a dead deer behind a rest stop, petted Fluppy and Motley, sipped drinks under the watchful eyes of a stuffed longhorn at the Driskell Hotel, bowled in San Antonio, played pool in several Texas cities and some shuffleboard in Austin, toured an impressively eco-friendly remodeled King William Historic District house owned by our former landlord Roy, saw The HorrorPops with Ric, Amber and Nicole (and admired a young lady’s Snow White tattoo), spent St. Patty’s Day at Cheers, ate many plates of migas, toured adorable-but-windy Rockport with Betty and Don, giggled with Jenny and John, visited Dan and Zach at Chuck E. Cheese’s, watched a homeless man draped in a self-made plastic spacesuit walk across a park, soaked in lots of South Texas humidity, drove many miles, drank lots of coffee at uber-cool Austin coffeehouses, and generally had a great time seeing our fantastic friends and family in the mightily mighty Lone Star State.

Love It: NYT Article on How Dumb Americans Are

My Spanish tutor has a habit of frequently asking me if I miss New York City or the U.S.

Each time, my answer is the same: not really.

While I certainly miss bits and pieces of my former American life — my friends and family, the wide open sky of Texas, the wackiness of Astoria, Queens — overall I am quite happy in Mexico City. A lot of this has to do with one easy fact: It’s not America. Not only is Mexico City a fascinating place, it is almost 100 percent blessedly free of the stereotypical American. (Yes, we have tourists, but the American tourists who come here are quite different than the sort of tourists who visit Cancun).

Who is this stereotypical American that so bothers me? It’s the sort mentioned in this fantastic piece from The New York Times, “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”

“A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

There is so much about this two-paragraph passage that reveals Dumb America: The obsession with a vapid show like American Idol (who is more vapid: the judges, the contestants or the audience?), the existence of a game show involving intelligence comparisons between adults and grade-school students (for the sake of my argument here, please ignore my previous post), and the inability of a semi-famous young American woman to recite basic geography facts.

It also reminded me of the last time I was back home in Corpus Christi, Texas, (pop: 280,000) during the Christmas holidays. I was getting my hair cut, and the hairstylist asked me where I lived. When I replied Mexico City, she blinked and innocently asked me “How many people live there? Is it about the same size as Corpus?”

Sigh.

It also reminded me of every time I read my hometown newspaper, The Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Readers can leave comments on the stories online, and the the comments always follow a pattern: First someone makes a joke, then someone else makes a joke, someone posts something inflammatory, and then someone else gets offended, and this pattern goes on indefinitely, until it ends with a giant fight bordering on complete, absurd stupidity. For example, a smattering of comments from a recent article on a fire that damaged a local Mexican restaurant:

“awe dang, I was on my way over there to get my morning taquito.”

“The roaches were probably hungry and decided on a late night snack.”

“stingy people they deserve it. they didnt even want to sponsor our youth!!! i know first hand”

“Why are you looking for a hand out? I have an idea…why don’t YOU sponsor your kid! Lazy people feeling that everyone owes them something are IDIOTS.”

“Fight, Fight, Fight looks like 3:30 behind the cafeteria…….. This is funny all from a simple fire. POOP HAPPENS”

Photo: Padre Island From the Belly of a Giant Shark

Padre Island near Corpus Christi, Texas, was once a peaceful, quiet place…. OK, it’s still pretty sleepy — as far as tourist destinations go — but it’s added a few super tacky souvenir shops in the last few years. Above, you see my new blog banner. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

And here’s another view:

Photos: Here in South Texas, We Got Gators, Lots of Wildlife

My brother and I traveled to the Aransas Pass National Wildlife Refuge today. It was perfect — cool, crisp and full of animals. First there were the ‘gators. Two small ones and one (shown above) that could be used to tow heavy cargo.

These are wild, untamed reptiles, folks. Not a zoo. We were just a few feet away, across a small body of water, when we spotted them. Thank god for telephoto lenses.

We also saw two snakes, thousands of birds, deer, hogs, javelinas and two bobcats. The bobcats were, of course, too shy to allow photography. And the javelinas had their faces shoved in the dirt, eating.

But here’s some pretty good shots, from both me and mi hermano, Erik.

Parallel Lives, Except I’m Not Director of Creative Writing at Harvard

My husband alerted me to an article printed in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (scroll down the page to get to the story) that was a little uncomfortably familiar.

It contains an interview/memoir from Bret Anthony Johnston. Before I read the article, I only knew who Johnston was because he wrote a book of short stories called “Corpus Christi.” I also knew, from reading the press coverage of the book, that he and I had the same creative writing teacher in high school, Mr. Joe Wilson, who is still my favorite teacher, as he is the favorite of many a King High School graduate.

But, apparently since the publication of his short stories, Johnston has moved up the literature ladder quite a bit — he’s now director of creative writing at Harvard University. Wow. (And, while I enjoyed reading the book, mostly because I am from Corpus, I didn’t think “you know what, this guy should be director of a writing program somewhere important sounding and expensive.”)

Yes, I’m a teensy bit seething with jealousy, but I still enjoyed the NYT article, in which Johnston discussed his prolonged adolescence as he tries to find himself while attending Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, a place with a student body that skews middle-aged and blue-collar. I too attended TAMU-CC, and I too took random classes and generally had no idea what to do post-college.

Eventually, after two years at TAMU-CC, I left to attend NMSU — an equally impoverished school, but one that at least has a young student body and student housing. At the time, I thought of New Mexico as some distant, foreign land, which was the main reason I chose to attend there. Ah, the naiveté of youth. (Thankfully, employers don’t really care where you attend college — just that you have a degree and have managed to get newer and better jobs every few years.)

Anyway, as my friends already know, it wasn’t until I moved to New York that I realized Corpus Christi is the perfect setting for a novel, as this paragraph from the NYT hints at:

“This was in Corpus Christi, a small city on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where fishing and quail hunting carry the weight of religion. (Remember when Cheney shot that lawyer in the face? Right outside Corpus.) The heat is glomming; the land is as wide open as the bottle-green bay. There’s a pickup truck in pretty much every driveway. In ours, it was my father’s, a Dodge he had to jump-start on cold mornings.”

To me, that’s far more fascinating than any setting in New York City.

Freaky Bizarre ‘News’: Cockroach Trapped in an Acorn

My favorite lil’ newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, inexplicably published a brief item online about a cockroach with its head trapped in an acorn. There’s a photo, but it’s not that exciting and it’s pretty gross — exactly what you would expect, basically.

The posting immediately made me recall my youth: Stepping into my parents’ garage at night was always a nervous affair — would one fly up at me in the dark (they are fantastic flyers) and land in my hair? Would I have to squish one scurrying across my bedroom floor, and see the green guts splatter all over my orange shag carpet? I remember once trying to chase one with a broom, scared to death it would turn and make an aerial assualt at me. Purely haunting. And inescapable. Man, Texas has some big bugs.

Still, I have no idea why they felt this roach-in-a-nut was news. It’s not. I think they knew it was more like “easy page views,” a term in the online biz that we kindly call “page view whoring.”

Yet, I also have to admit: The mere act of them posting the item led to a lengthy email debate between my husband and me about what people think of when they hear the word “cockroach.” Brendan maintains that the gigantic cockroaches that flourish in South Texas (and sometimes get stuck in acorns) are actually “palmetto bugs” and that when “most people” think of cockroaches, they think of the (much) smaller German cockroach. He can be such a snooty Minnesotan.

I disagree with him, although, admittedly, there is no correct answer when you’re debating people’s perception of the word cockroach. The American cockroach — which, really folks, could the name get more generic? — is the same breed that is sometimes called the “palmetto bug.” I grew up around cockroaches as big as a deck of cards. And so did anyone who grew up in the South – from California to Florida. So, I think I win: There’ s more people living in these states than in German cockroach land, aka the states that stretch from Washington to Maine, including Minnesota.

(and folks, I’m not really serious about this being an important issue to me, but I am curious of what you think of when you think of a cockroach. Gigantic and capable of flying? Or small and incapable of flying?)

The Miles I’ve Walked in Astoria

I’m getting nostalgic again, as I have just taken another long walk through Astoria, and, like always, fought the urge to eat at all the little odd restaurants I walked by, like the unpronounceable place called Djerdan advertising “the best burek in town” (as if there’s stiff competition). I also got yelled at by some construction men on 30th Ave, west of the hospital, for not crossing the street where they were working. (NYC has a law that sidewalks have to be maintained during home building, but, of course, construction laws in Queens were meant to be broken). It’s not a real walk unless you have some sort of run-in with all the ugly new construction going up at a breakneck pace in Astoria.

Astoria has its good points (the food) and its bad points (the ugly new apartment buildings). Yet, it is pretty much the only thing I’ll miss about NYC. It’s really charmed me, over and over, as the most neighborhoodly of neighborhoods in the most diverse county (Queens) in the United States. I told Brendan once “If we hadn’t moved to Astoria, I’m not sure I would have wanted to stay here much longer.”

I ponder often how the population of Astoria — roughly 300,000 peeps — is equal to that of my hometown, Corpus Christi, Texas. But Astoria is crammed into about a 5-mile-wide square space, while Corpus Christi is at least 10 times larger. Like all of NYC, the extreme urban density in Astoria means that you can get all your stuff done in one small block near your apartment. (We have a big grocery store, pharmacy, diner, post office, gas station, etc, all down the street from our house). So, when you finally just let yourself wander around, you’ll find new places, and in Astoria, that usually means new food, too.

I hope I can make it back to the burek place before we leave, but the clock’s ticking pretty fast these days.

Where I’ve been in Astoria (in green). I’ve really only just begun…

Giant Spider Web Found in Texas Park

I’ve written before — many times, actually — about how wild Texas still is, how it doesn’t get enough credit for being a wildlife haven.

So, here’s yet another totally wild example: Monster Spider Web Spun in Texas Park 

Previous examples:

Rattlesnake joins my mom for dinner 

There ain’t no tree like a Texas Live Oak

Texas has some cool dolphins

Memories of my grandparents’ farm: watermelons and jackrabbits

How About One Laptop for Each Child in a Colonia?

When I tell people in New York that I am from South Texas, it’s usually apparent that they have no idea what that means, or how it sets me apart, other than I might be a Republican (I’m not), I might have had some good Tex-Mex in my time (yes, certainly) and I probably knew who Selena was before she died and was played by J. Lo in a movie (yes).

I also have grown up around colonias, which the New York Times wrote about today. “Colonias” is a nice word for South Texas shanty towns. They are mostly along the border, but, in fact, they are everywhere in South Texas. Growing up in Corpus Christi I knew lots of poor people, but my closest encounter with true colonia residents was after college, as a local newspaper reporter covering medical and health issues. From time to time, I needed to visit people who lived either in a colonia, or one step up (a home with indoor plumbing and electricity, but with residents too poor to afford those services). It was not hard to see how poverty exacerbated preventable, treatable health conditions; I won’t ever forget a woman I met who was dying of cervical cancer.

At any rate, I found the timing of the NYT article interesting; just last night, I was thinking of colonia residents while I watched “60 Minutes,” which aired a report on Nicholas Negroponte, a wealthy technology guru who has started a program called “One Laptop Per Child.” Children in poor countries — not the U.S. — will be provided with a durable, cheap but highly capable laptop in order “to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning.”

OK, fine. I’m all for children learning, especially poor children. But the program ended on a sour note for me. The reporter turned to the camera, and said, “Would you like to get your child one of these new laptops? Negroponte says they will be for sale soon, but you’ll have to buy two: One for your kid, and one for a kid in a poor country.”

What about the poor kids in our country? Don’t they deserve free laptops, too?