ON HURRICANE IKE

Watching the weather forecast, when hurricane Ike was still battering the island of Cuba, I could see that the city of Port Arthur, Texas would be hard hit. And true enough, this Saturday morning, Channel 4 and the News and Weather Channel mentioned Sabine Pass and Port Arthur, the city very close to my heart.

Port Arthur was where I first taught in the early 90s. It’s a small refinery city in southeast Texas and a major deepwater port on Sabine Lake, near Lousiana. In 1901, oil was discovered in Spindletop and its population boomed to 58,724. However, oil supply underground tailed off, thousands of refinery workers were laid off, and, when I was teaching at W. Wilson Middle School, the population was just a little over 20,000 and downtown was literally a ghost town. But I learned to love the place and its people, even the strong foul fumes of the refinery. I miss those huge flames billowing in refineries day and night.

Now, I wonder what havoc hurricane Ike has brought to Port Arthur and its neighboring cities, like Port Neches and Nederland. I wonder what happened to W. Wilson Middle School and the extension campus of the University of Beaumont, which are located right by the wall of Sabine Pass. I wonder what happened to the beautiful Pleasure Island. I am deeply worried, especially that I still have lots of friends down there. I hope that everyone evacuated early. I hope that the casualties and damages, that I would hear later, would just be the properties that were left behind.

NOTE: Picture of me and my two kids was taken in 1994, right by the wall of Sabine Pass, just a little off W. Wilson Middle School. The background is Pleasure Island.