The Ditch

 

I swore that I'd never do another summer in Texas

It's currently 97 degrees in Houston. In the swamp, it feels like it's 109. It is not possible to work or even be outside for periods longer than about an hour at a time. 

It's that bad. 

The past several weeks there has been quite a bit of rain, first from hurricane Hanna which cut through the Corpus area before ripping the Valley a new one, then from an early season front that crashed in to the moisture heavy hot and humid Texas air. 

It's best to try and accomplish anything outside very early in the morning or late in the afternoon / evening. Sometimes, I go through several changes of over-sweat stained clothes in the course of the day. I try not to think about it, it's better to just deal with it. 

Last night I finally tackled the disgusting ditch that is supposed to drain this area into another drainage canal. It is of course an exercise in futility because Houston is a sea level swamp, not unlike New Orleans, a little further to the east. Water doesn't run off anywhere here....it  sits ponded across acres of fetid landscape as the swamp just increases in size, if temporarily.  

The ditch had become choked by all manner of leafy and grassy plants vying for space.

The ditch runs the length of the property here at Dumas, about 1/4 mile or so. I strung and fired up the weed eater and started down the middle of the now just muddy canal leveling a foot or two at a time. It was a painfully slow process and I was covered in sweat and green shards of plant material like some sort of hybrid monster.

Dumas storage lies on the line between Pasadena and Houston Texas. It is a solidly entrenched petrochemical-manufacturing area, inhabited by a groundswell of low or no income people. Houston is a sanctuary city and so a significant portion of the area is occupied by non legal people. what was once an outlying agricultural area has become a maze of section 8 housing and miles of squalor.

We are fortunate here in our real nice trailer house. It is a place of refuge, somewhere where we can tie to, where we can minimize our lives and get ready for the next trip. The new owner seems to be of the same genuine mold as our friend Sean, we will likely become friends.

We're conveniently sandwiched between two industrial warehouses that emit strange and ominous commercial noises day and night. The sounds of high pressure relief valves and screeching machinery serenade us round the clock. Our only respite is to come indoors to the cool of the artificial weather and turn up the volume on the music until it drowns out the sounds of the outside. 

Yet life goes on out there regardless of the heat. As is want in places like this, there are numerous stray dogs that routinely show up at the front door, having been unceremoniously dumped. Litterers litter, cars peel out on random hours throughout, conjunto music um-pahs through walls and the staccato pop of a semi automatic weapon is occasionally heard.

Nature creeps around the edges of all of this filth.

In the evening's, after the sun starts to dip below the buildings to the west, several black crowned night herons glide in to the unit and behind the gate to forage for food. Sometimes I hear and sometimes I see the shy Coopers Hawk as he surveys the buildings looking for an easy morsel, maybe one of the fat rats that are ubiquitous in dirty cities. I have seen possums and raccoons that live in the tiny island of trees behind our fence on the south side of the property and at night after a rain there are frogs and toads, all getting fat on the clouds of mosquitos that hatch every day.

The ditch itself was full of sedge and other wetland plants. It rarely ever dries completely out, and crayfish, Louisiana mudbugs, build towering burrows above the soft mud. When it dries out they and frogs, amphibians estivate in the caked substrate to await the next rain.

I sometimes try and picture this area before it was overtaken by this ocean of people. I imagine truck vegetable farms and corn fields. Cattle and hay. That was the America I know, the America that I still look for just down the highway to anywhere. All of that is gone here now, replaced by industry, housing and people. 

Still, I am grateful to be here and for the time we have been here. We were brought to this place for a reason and that reason is now quickly being filled and soon the open road will lie ahead. As an old sea captain, the open sea and the open road are very similar to me. It is the adventure and the unknown around the next bend that drives me on, just as the passage and the next port are.

Like the mudbug, we revel in the rain and swim in the waters, burrowing deep into the clay when it dries up, just waiting for another deluge to set us free.