I’m so sad to hear what Texas and the Gulf have gone through in the wake of Hurricane Ike. True, it’s not nearly as bad in terms of human loss as what happened with Katrina–and I’m glad to hear the population of Galveston has undergone only four reported deaths, a far cry from the 8,000 or so that died in the “Storm of 1900.”
Still, this town was my vacation spot as a kid, and I’m sad everytime I see the headlines this week. Galveston was the home of Jean Lafitte in the early 1800′s (I got to see the ruins of his house once), and it was where my ancestors from Ireland landed in 1830 when they wisely moved to the States, though I think it was still part of Mexico at the time. It’s a lovely beach community, one that took great pains a century ago to make itself hurricane-proof by building a sea wall and raising the whole town by as much as seventeen feet! It’s such a cultural and financial travesty to see it wrecked by mother nature.
Jimmy Webb wrote a song about it once, that Glen Campbell covered and made into a hit. True, it’s a weird Vietnam ballad, and not the most country of country songs. But this week it’s ringing loud and clear for me.
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