More hurricanes

First Katrina and now Rita. According to reports, Rita is bearing down on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I didn't get when they thought landfall would be but there is evacuation going on in Houston and Galveston is apparently a ghost town right now. Everyone, or most everyone, is gone. Can't believe it.

I grew up in Texas and remember hurricane Beulah, 1967 it was, and Celia in 1970. Beulah is the one I remember most. Lots of rain and flooding up in San Antonio where we lived, high winds, though not hurricane force, and tornadoes. We of course were 120 miles away from the coast so we wouldn't have gotten the hurricane force winds. What we did get though was quite a bit. But it was a real big deal further down near Corpus Christi and that area.

I was in grade school at the time and I remember walking home and seeing some fish along the fence line of the school grounds. I thought that the hurricane had sucked up fish from the Gulf of Mexico and had dropped them over San Antonio, with some ending up by the school fence. That made the hurricane a very impressive thing to me. The problem with my theory is that I only found fish in that one spot so, thinking about it now, someone probably just dumped some fish there from their trip to the lake to get rid of them. Someone was always making a trip to the lake--can't remember the lake there now-- or to the coast and cleaning out their boat in their driveway or alongside the road.

Even so Beulah was a big deal and it impressed me enough to remember it.

I do hope for the best for Texas. I was born there and lived a lot of my life there.

One thing I can say though with a lot of confidence: Texans will not permit looting and lawlessness. They take that sort of thing personal.