Rites of Passage: Friday, Sept. 12-Sunday, Sept.14

7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12

The last stop of the day is at Game Warden John Feist’s house. The power is already off, and John hurriedly empties his refrigerator and freezer and grabs some essentials for what he figures will be a long couple of days camped-out at the sheriff’s office.

On the way there, a motorist tells us a homeless man is camped-out at the Army Corps of Engineers park up the road. John radios the sheriff and lets him know we’re going to get him. The Sheriff calls back: no way. Essential personnel were supposed to be back at the shelter of the office an hour ago.

The DPS troopers are hunkered-down at the county maintenance facility, and all of the deputies are in. We’re the last law enforcement vehicle on the roads, and we’re late. John is clearly torn, but as gusts buffet his truck, he clicks the radio back in place and we race for safety.

10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 13

The winds have died enough (they are still gusting to more than 40mph) for us to venture out. We stop half a dozen times to clear trees from the road. It takes us two hours to go less than 10 miles. Power lines are down everywhere.

Feist, Boatmate Scott Evans, Chief Photographer Earl Nottingham and I begin making the rounds through the parts of Chambers County we can reach, checking on people we know rode out the storm. In the Channelview neighborhood of Anahuac, entire houses have been swept from their foundations.

Wind and waves have peeled the bark from oak trees.

The storm has wrought havoc with communications. Cell phone towers are down everywhere. Radio repeaters are down. Tin cans with strings, when the string is intact, still work.

The game wardens are frustrated; before the storm, they moved their boats north to Silsbee, out of the worst of the hurricane’s projected path. They want them back. In the meantime, they cover as much ground as possible in their 4WD trucks.

Towards the end of the day, John makes it to the Corps of Engineers park. There, he finds Mr. Genesis Trinity, the man who weathered the storm in a tent atop the birding platform. He was, he told John, collecting data for NASA, and had clocked winds between 175mph and 250mph. He says he’ll ride his bicycle down to the Johnson Space Center to deliver his findings as soon as the roads are clear.

7 a.m., Sunday, Sept. 14

We awaken with a sense of purpose. Before the storm, district game warden supervisor Capt. Scott Ousley made a fallback plan in the event communications went down: meet at the Beaumont office at 8 a.m.

Overnight, Maj. Rolly Correa’s strike team has moved-in and literally set up camp in the parking lot of an old Academy store. More than 30 game wardens form five teams with boats: one to Port Arthur, which is badly flooded; one to Pleasure Island; one to Bolivar, or as close as they can get … and so on.

Earl heads-out with game wardens who have been assigned Sabine Pass. I opt to stick with the Chambers County game wardens. By mid-day, we’re launching air boats off of State Highway 124 – as close to the town of High Island as we can get.

It’s not very close; we’re still more than 6 miles from the bridge that crosses the Intracoastal.

Game Warden Bobby Jobes, a Chambers County veteran of more than two decades, runs his air boat down the flooded ditch along Hwy. 124, sometimes down the roadway itself. Debris in the canted power lines nearly 30 feet overhead show how high the water was, or at least how high the tops of the waves were.

We pull up where the highway emerges again from the water at High Island, built on a 38-foot-tall salt dome. A crowd that includes the assistant fire chief is waiting. We’re the first boat they’ve seen, they say, though the assistant chief has been in radio contact with the Emergency Operations Center in Galveston and several residents have working landlines.

The High Island residents are okay. About 120 stayed, and property losses are relatively light, especially – as we will see – compared to the rest of Bolivar Peninsula. The town’s elevation and grove of massive oak trees have shielded residents from the worst of the storm.

From High Island, we skim west along the bay-side edge of the Peninsula. All of us are shocked when we recognize Rollover Pass; the 200-odd houses that once stood there are gone. Literally, nearly completely, gone. I’ll be quoted later by the Associated Press saying that it looked like someone took a razor, and “pffft.”

I said a lot of things about the destruction I saw Sunday, but I don’t really know how to make that sound and I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that. Still, it’s an apt description of what we encountered. Only – if it was a razor – it was a dull blade indeed, and left a stubble of pilings and overturned vehicles and – in rare instances – unshaven patches where houses still stood.

We beach the boat and walk in at the places where each of the lower peninsula’s three incorporated towns stood. Gilchrist is a memory, and the post office there is just a slab. In Crystal Beach, perhaps half the homes are left standing.

Port Bolivar, the westernmost town on the Peninsula, appears to have fared better, though the water line just below the second floor of some of the homes hints at the destruction within.

In Crystal Beach, we meet Bobby Anderson, walking up what used to be State Highway 87. We ask him if he wants to leave: no, he wants to get his truck running and come out on his own. Does he need food or water? No, he’s okay for now. Anderson is a builder and owned three homes on the Peninsula. He rode out the storm near his house on Jack’s Road, and asks about Gilchrist.

I shake my head: “It’s pretty much gone,” I tell him.

Bobby then asks if we’ve seen a woman, and begins to describe her. He and his friend Sandy had climbed into the rafters of the sturdiest building they could find. As rising water came through the walls below them, an angry swell reached up and plucked them from their perch. Anderson reached for something solid, and reached for his friend. As she slipped from his grasp, he shouted for her to swim back.

“No,” I tell him. “We haven’t picked-up any women, and we haven’t heard anything about her.”

Anderson turns and walks a few steps away. I see his shoulders heave once, twice, and then he rubs his red-rimmed eyes and walks back.

A postal inspector who had hitched a ride with us walks up just then with a big grin on her face. She is, she has told us several times, having a grand time. She cheerfully asks Anderson how he’s doing.

“I was doing okay,” he says, with a forced laugh. “But then I got over it.”

We make it to Port Bolivar – more than 30 miles from our launch site – before turning back. We’ve seen a handful of survivors on the peninsula, and none have wanted to leave the wreckage of their homes. We’ve told them we’ll be back the next day with food and water.

9 p.m.

Darkness has fallen and a full moon spangles the waters of East Bay and the water over marsh and pastures, water that shouldn’t be there. It’s a beautiful night, and if not for the images of the day etched in our minds, it would be hard to believe anything was amiss.

A slideshow plays as I close my eyes:

(click) A Gilchrist Volunteer Fire Department ambulance floating in the Intracoastal.

(click) A house lodged on Goat Island, where no house has ever stood, roof intact and windows still boarded-up.

(click) Sunken boats littering the canals in Crystal Beach subdivisions.

(click) Dead animals – nutria, muskrats, rabbits, cows – floating, swollen and stinking, on the outgoing tide.

(click) An elevator cage standing between the shorn pilings that once supported a home.

(click) Bobby Anderson, grasping at a last, thin thread of hope.