After Ike: Tuesday, Sept. 16

The CH-47 Chinook has been canceled. Instead, game wardens are driving in to Crystal Beach across the one, cracked lane remaining at the Hwy. 87 bridge across Rollover Pass.

We check-in with Capt. Audie Nelson, who is manning the TPWD command post at a bay-side boat ramp. I’ve launched here before, to fish the rich shoreline of Big Bayou and the Sunoco Lakes across the Intracoastal.

Airboats have run all the way down to Port Bolivar and game wardens are methodically searching for survivors house-to-house in the canal subdivisions. Elsewhere, other game wardens are fanning-out on ATV’s, checking the homes that can be reached from the muddy, debris-strewn streets.

Earl clears the slab of a home to create a make-shift helipad. Game Warden Pilot Captain Lee Finch is inbound with TPWD Deputy Executive Director Scott Boruff.

We get word that an airboat crew has found someone who wants out. We wait. After about 30 minutes, the journalists with me are getting restless, so we move on.

It will be a strange, wrenching day.

Near the center of Crystal Beach we see four people walking slowly across the sand-choked highway. Houston Chronicle writer Shannon Tompkins recognizes his friends of 40 years, Tim and Laura Wolfford. With their two teenage sons, Tim and Laura have come across the bay by boat to check on their Gulf-side home.

In their hands they carry a couple of deer antlers, an alligator skull, the jaws of a 450-lb. bull shark Tim caught 20 years before and a white, 5-gallon bucket. In the bucket is the couple’s wedding photo. Altogether, it is less than eight handfuls of stuff, and it is everything – save what they packed for a hasty evacuation to Conroe – that they now own.

Some of the folks who had homes on Bolivar used them as weekend or summer retreats. They’ve lost some possessions and face the monumental chore of cleaning up and rebuilding, or not.

The restaurant where Laura worked is now a pile of splintered lumber. The Chambers County hunting lodge that employed Tim is gone. The couple couldn’t afford flood insurance on the house they built. All they have now is each other, and, as tears stream down Laura’s face, her two strong sons support her on either side.

Shannon is overcome; he can’t find the words to even comment on what has happened to his friends. And, for the first time in this long week, I look away and choke back tears. This scene, I think, will replay hundreds of times in the coming days. It’s just too much.

The Wolfford’s, who will need so much in the weeks ahead, decline anything from us. They won’t even accept a ride back to the waiting boat.

Across the street from the Bolivar Yacht Basin, we see yet another cow lying beside the road. Dead cows are everywhere, but this one lifts its head and struggles – unsuccessfully – to stand as we approach.

The animal is dehydrated and, we learn, has a broken pelvis. Shannon grabs bottles of water and pours them over the heifer’s mud-caked eyes. I try to get some down her throat.

An Associated Press videographer is capturing all of this and I feel like an idiot. A gun is what we really need, but I can’t raise any of the game wardens on my borrowed radio.

A little farther on we run across Norbert Kurtz and his springer puppy, Lucy. The lanky 50-something can’t stop smiling, and his sunny disposition amidst all the destruction almost defies belief.

“I prayed. I prayed hard all night,” Kurtz tells us. “I said: ‘God, if you’ll just let me survive this, I won’t complain about anything else that happens.’”

Like the fact that his two bait houses are demolished and he lost his old dog, his best dog, to the storm.

Kurtz lives two houses down from the weekend retreat built my friend Brandon’s grandfather. The stairs are gone and electrical lines dangle from the underside of the house. The sink where I once filleted a 25-inch trout is tilted at a crazy angle, but still there. So is the house. Paw-Paw was an ornery old cuss, but he built well.

Down the road we run across a convoy of Humvees led by 26-year-old Staff Sgt. Charles Boxley. The Texas Army National Guard soldiers – many of them wearing right-shoulder unit patches signifying service in combat – are delivering MREs and water to anyone who needs it. Sometimes, if they see signs of survivors camping out, they just drop of a case of food and a case of bottled water.

A combat medic travels with the soldiers, ready to render aid. And – strikingly – these lean, hard young men approach each of Ike’s victims with soft voices and evident compassion. It’s the third day after the storm, and many of the Bolivar residents who stayed and survived are still shell-shocked.

Maybe the young soldiers recognize PTSD when they see it. Maybe they’re just good guys with good hearts. Whatever is behind it, the respect and empathy they demonstrate must be at least as valuable as the food and drink they are carrying, I think.

By now we’re all so numbed by the improbable destruction around us, nothing much surprises. The emu hunting for food in a roadside ditch elicits a glance and a shrug. The skull peering mutely up from a grave the storm waters have pried open: shrug. The skittish, thirsty dog? Well, we can do something about that.

Shannon, who often says he likes most animals better than most people, fills a plastic dish with clean drinking water and leaves it for the dog.

We drive off the peninsula as dusk descends. Back at the sheriff’s office, Earl and I compare notes. He got his truck stuck near the Rollover Pass bridge, but got to fly with Lee and shoot some aerials.

Game Wardens Bobby Jobes and John Feist rescued a Los Angeles Times team who had gotten stuck in deep sand, and ended up part of their story.

Tomorrow, game wardens will lead animal rescuers in to collect abandoned pets. They’ll also help remove the lion and tiger that have caused such a stir.

Shackles, the lion that weathered the storm inside a church (along with eight or nine humans), loads up into a cage like a good bird dog. The muddy tiger, which has been having a very bad week, has to be tranquilized.

But all of that is tomorrow, and by the time the sun comes up tomorrow I’ll be home in Austin.

The $1.33 Billion Question

What is the value of one life? I found myself thinking about that when I returned from areas of Southeast Texas devastated by Hurricane Ike. It was about the same time the odds turned in favor of the house in what some commentators have called “casino capitalism.”

Because of the economic meltdown, news of the storm and the search for its victims was swept to the back pages of the national dailies and disappeared almost entirely from television. At the time, there were still more than 400 people reported missing.

In its place, headlines like this: “Wall Street Woes take Shine off Lavish NY Lifestyles” (Reuters). To be fair, Ike was still in the news, but a Google news search for Sept. 15-17 returns more than twice as many stories containing the phrase “Wall Street” than the phrase “Hurricane Ike.”

And the disparity has only grown over the past few weeks.

Among other things, “news” is about capturing the largest possible audience, because larger audiences mean more advertising revenue. Of course this serves other purposes – newspapers and television stations want to report news their readers and viewers care about, that is relevant to them. But the end result is the same.

So, I get that: most Americans care more about stocks and bonds and market liquidity and the mortgage crisis than they do about a natural disaster in one corner of distant Texas. The bottom line, for many, is the bottom line.

So, in financial terms, what is the value of one life? I found an interesting article in the New York Times, in which one Chicago economist placed an average value of $4 million on each life. That figure represents lost earnings, pain and suffering, lost experiences and more.

If we use $4 million as an average, four Southeast Texas counties currently have a collective $1.33 billion problem. It’s not a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, and it’s not the $10 billion or so the United States spends on the war in Iraq each month, but it ain’t chump change, either.

On Bolivar Peninsula alone, more than 50 people are still unaccounted for. That’s more than one percent of the peninsula’s entire population. In the small towns of the Peninsula – Gilchrist, Caplen, Crystal Beach, Port Bolivar – a substantially greater percentage of each town’s population is simply gone.

Everyone who lived there knows someone who no longer does.

Of course, some of the currently-unaccounted for will turn up safe, if not entirely well, in distant cities or in hospitals or care facilities across Texas. But it’s a safe bet that many – a majority, even -- of the 333 people currently listed as missing after Hurricane Ike are dead.

This weekend in Chambers County, deputies, Texas game wardens, members of the Texas Task Force 1 search team and dogs trained in human remains detection will make a major push to try to begin answering that $1.33 billion question.

I’ll be there, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be thinking of the losses in economic terms. Neither will the people sifting through the rubble that once was Gilchrest and Crystal Beach and Caplen.

More likely we’ll all be thinking about the anguished mothers, fathers, children and other loved ones of those still missing, hoping for an answer to where they are now, even if that answer is not the one they most want to receive.

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.

What floats: Sunday, Sept. 21

Refrigerators float. Mattresses float. Walls and windows and staircases and roofs float. Boats float, of course, and so do life jackets, coolers and bottles of vegetable oil.

Shoes float; so do plastic toys. Surprisingly, televisions float. Stuffed animals, dressers, hats and mardi gras beads float. Collanders float, cows float, and armadillos and marsh rabbits and horses and snakes float.

The theory is that people will, too, and that’s why we spent the day searching a massive debris field in southern Chambers County.

Apparently no one really knows how many Bolivar residents are still missing a week after Ike. We do know that much of what was Gilchrest and a good chunk of Crystal Beach is now a splintered jumble against a treeline about 5 miles inland of East Bay’s northern shoreline.

That’s where we took the cadaver dogs today. Five teams spread out across Chambers County – some traveling by all-terrain vehicle, some by airboat, some by swamp buggy. We searched shorelines and ranches and refuge marsh.

No one has yet found a body.

Everyone agrees that doesn’t mean one or more isn’t out there; it’s just that there’s so damned much debris on the ground, and so much death stink in the air, it’s awful hard to know for sure.

But Chambers Co. Sheriff Joe LaRive – and the game wardens and deputies and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees and dog handlers – all the good people out there today, feel a certain duty to be as sure as they can possibly be.

For Bobby Anderson, who says his friend Sandy was swept out of the rafters of a Crystal Beach building at the height of the storm. For the people Game Warden Hector Gonzalez talked to who, one moment, saw a dozen people on the roof of the house next to theirs; the next moment, nothing.

This low country has a habit of keeping its secrets on a schedule all its own. Like the story I heard this morning about a skull that washed into a duck blind a couple of seasons back; turned out to be the noggin of a fellow who had disappeared a decade before.

Not finding bodies a week after the hurricane ... is that good news or is it bad news? It's awful hard to know for sure.