The Outside World
The city had surprisingly little to say. Their announcements about power restoration were careful in a way their preparations for emergencies had not been. FEMA was impressed and declared it a Disaster associated with large sums of money but nothing specific or physical was on their website. Broadcast news tended to echo the latest weather prediction and maybe bring on a sober looking city official in a polo who dodged questions in a very mature and responsible manner. The electricity, water, and gas all went out at different times and in some places, all at once, but the internet stayed up like the stars in the sky. Facebook sustained an endless supply of direct personal narratives unfolding in real time, in places that I knew, happening to people I knew, and shit was bad. First, the problem was cold. People were wearing everything they owned and huddling in the bedroom, suddenly becoming homeless people in their own homes. There was a lot of experimentation with candles and terracotta pots. Tents were set up on the living room floor or on queen sized beds. It was clear a lot of homeless people were simply going to freeze to death. The Palmer Events Center had been converted into… not a shelter, or a place to sleep, but a “Warming Center”. I didn't know what that meant, other than an indoor space where one could stand around not freezing to death. People needed help to get there, being stranded in apartment complexes.
I got the signals from the greater world that it was still functioning, but that the circle of civilization that was Texas was not. It felt like a kind of failed state. No voice emerged to claim leadership or control, or even express a credible understanding of what was happening. The Governor blamed renewable energy. The Senator flew to Cancun. A skeleton crew of bureaucrats remained. The people running civilization abandoned their posts, perhaps not understanding their roles. It seemed forgivable. Civilization is a riddle. It's like an iphone, no one person understands how everything in it works. Daniel Dennet calls consciousness a “pan-demonium”, as in a committee of demons. That also seems about right for civilization: a loose committee, each member acting in self interest, each thinking it is the center, the point of the whole thing. Self interest prevails when certain events occur: when your wife has a baby, you leave work. When your house catches fire, you restrict your sphere of concern from community to family. When it happens to too many people at once, the committee disbands and there is no longer a coherent group. There was no longer a quorum to meet and pilot the machine of our city, so the machine stopped. It was like the engines cutting out in an airplane. No one knew how far it could glide.
For a few days, we glided. People flushed toilets with melted snow, if they could get it to melt. Many things still worked as before, the roads were still roads, they worked the same if you could keep your tires in the black ruts of exposed asphalt. Cars still went across town without the aid of stoplights. Besides the internet, gasoline remained available somehow. Tanker Trucks, unimpressed by snow and ice, continued to deliver to gas stations. People took refuge in idling cars for hours, days at a time.
A friend of mine, MK, had been driving his all wheel drive vehicle around, giving people rides and unreeling story after story on facebook from the seat of his idling car. He inspired me. I contacted a local organization I had worked with in the past to see how I could help, and they needed someone to drive people from their apartments to the warming center.
This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. 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.