“Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”
—Michel de Certeau
Twenty miles east of downtown Houston, where Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River meet, the Baytown Nature Center sits on a shifting landscape of wetlands and marshes surrounded on three sides by Burnet, Crystal, and Scott Bays. Men toss fishing nets into shallow channels while herons and egrets rummage among the grasses for crawfish. Concrete rubble forms the shoreline; beyond it, flare towers and storage tanks and distillation columns of oil refineries line the horizon as far as the eye can see.
I first came to this nature center two years ago, after a severe winter storm brought snow and ice deep into Texas and a grid failure plunged millions across the state into the dark, freezing cold for days. Hundreds died in the blackout—frozen to death, or poisoned by carbon monoxide, or burned while trying to keep warm; hundreds of thousands suffered damage to their homes. At my house, our pipes froze and burst; water poured out of the ceiling, raining insulation and sheetrock down on our heads. It wasn’t our first disaster here, or even in this house, but those days felt different, enormous—as if something had finally given way. As if after this, life would never be the same.
When the weather warmed and the power returned, we repaired the pipes and hauled the soggy sheetrock and insulation to the curb. We did the same at our neighbors’, where the children’s bedrooms had been destroyed, a closet in the primary bedroom also destroyed. We brought over food, and they offered us some corrugated plastic posters they had in their garage to cover the gaping holes in our ceiling—advertising a new gasoline formula from Shell that “Helps Your Engine Run Like New.” We nailed one poster over a hole in the hallway ceiling; it took several to cover the hole in the kitchen. Every morning that followed, I woke up changed all over again: by the posters in the kitchen, the holes in the ceiling, the sensation of having stepped just over the edge. Until one day, feeling over the edge felt normal, and so did the holes in the ceiling and the posters that covered them.
