#hurricane marco

Once again, Houston got a really close call. 

It is well known at this point that if a Category 4+ hurricane were to hit Houston head on, the results would be absolutely devastating. The buildings are not built to resist hurricane winds at all. The city is prone to freshwater flooding from rainfall. And worst of all, refineries, stores of toxic substances, and petrochemical plants lie along Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel, unguarded against high storm surges. Some have argued if a direct hit were to happen, the resulting release of poison would rival Chernobyl. 

Clearly something must be done to prepare for this. But people have limits, and in a new era where rapidly intensifying hurricanes will be more frequent than before, will Houston remain relevant? Will any part of the Gulf Coast remain a desirable place to live in a world of frequent floods, hotter summers, and stronger storms? 

I don’t have the answer to these questions.

Storms have been used as a metaphor for the will of the divine since time immemorial. The word hurricane itself is derived from the name of a storm deity that was worshipped in the Caribbean and Mexico. In western culture, storms have been used a lot in Christian literature and music, in ways both tasteful and obnoxious. Once I picked up a historical fiction novel that took place during the 1900 Galveston hurricane, only to find in the last chapter it was a religious book trying to make a statement about how Jesus was the eye of storm (”he is the calm center when everything is swirling around you”…not even remotely subtle).

But after Hurricane Laura, I see why this is the case. Storms remind us that no matter how advanced our civilization, no matter how great our knowledge, there will always be things orders of magnitude beyond our control, forces always just out of reach of our full understanding. It is a physical impossibility to predict the weather indefinitely into the future, even with perfect knowledge of the initial conditions, because the equations that govern the atmosphere have no exact solutions. Uncertainty will always be present in the calculations, and compounded over time.

Sometimes you simply can’t know for sure what’ll come next. You’re basically in God’s hands at that point.

And in this, we find the meaning of grace. For the fact that Houston was saved had nothing to do with its being deserving of saving. It just…was. And for that we have to be grateful.

We look towards the battered coast of Louisiana and say…

“There but for the grace of God, go I.”

My high school creative writing teacher always got furious at the dissonance between my art and writing. But I couldn’t just leave it uncolored, you know?

Some notes on the drawing: 

- The hands are green because they’re supposed to be the storm god Hurakan (the ones hurricanes are named after), and Hurakan was painted as having blue-green skin in Mayan murals.

-The ‘Now Kiss’ is referring to the Fujiwhara interaction, which some people thought would happen to Marco and Laura early on. The two storms would spiral around each other and possibly merge if this happened…which it didn’t. 

-Marco is nervous because in the scenario where a weaker storm merges with a stronger one, it’s not so much a merger so much as the weaker storm gets ripped to shreds and swallowed up by the stronger storm. So…a Category One going up against a high end Category Four? Yeah Marco better be scared.

This didn’t age well with the dissipation of Marco but here you go:

I don’t know if I will get a chance to color it. I was fortunate during Harvey to be in Los Angeles (instead of with my family in Houston) and so able to do tons of posts. I’m…not quite that fortunate this time around.