About Cold Water
This is a series of journal entries I wrote during the 2021 freeze, stitched together and edited into installments. I experienced the freeze, first as a novelty, then as a nuisance, then as a crisis. The crisis was not my own, but that of less privileged people, and a few privileged ones, losing the basic components of first world existence. In this narrative, I describe my experiences coming to terms with the situation and running around Austin with a group of friends, calling ourselves The South Austin Guerrilla Plumber Corps. For a week or two, we felt civilization shift and slide around underneath the town, as people struggled to find water, then as frozen pipes thawed and houses became unlivable. During Hurricane Katrina, many refugees fled to Austin, and their stories surfaced in my mind as something that could happen if basic services failed for long enough. When providing first aid, a cardinal goal is to stop bleeding. Our version of first aid was to restore cold water. If we could do that, we felt, we could make a house livable, and help to keep Austin in the first world.
Im trying to strike a balance here. Something neither self-congratulatory nor self deprecating, neither callous to suffering nor paralyzed by it, niether oblivious to my privilege or distracted by it. I do a lot of processing of my own feelings here and I don’t try to avoid myself as a topic, but this is mostly about everyone else. I am also seeking out other people’s stories. One year since the crisis, I think this distance provides a good compromise for reflection. Some sensory memories are still accessible and there has been time for interpretations and judgements to coalesce. Id like to publish written accounts here, or maybe on Medium or Substack, and then go around recording verbal stories and doing a podcast. My goal in all of this is to create an organized collection of real people’s stories that can exist for reference by historians, journalists, and curious people in the future. It should be done as art, as an expression, and be compelling and engaging.
Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.