Debris in.... debris out.

The huge piles of tree limbs and branches that covered both sides of our street are now gone. The trucks and their crews were here yesterday, and spent the better part of the morning shoveling everything into one huge pile at the end of our street. While they were picking up the tree limbs in front of our neighbor's house, they also plucked her mailbox right off its post by her driveway. That wasn't the first mailbox to be a casualty of the out-of-state trucks, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

I happened to be outside when that mailbox got picked up by the fork-lift truck, and the driver cradled it in his arms like a baby and brought it to me with profuse apologies. "I am deeply sorry, ma'am. If you'd like me to fix this for you, I can do that right soon after my shift ends here." I explained to him that it wasn't my mailbox, and told him that he had no way of even knowing that a mailbox was even underneath that massive pile of branches. I carried the mailbox to my neighbor's front door and told her what had happened to it. She didn't even care... she was just excited to get the pile of branches taken away so she could see to the other side of the street.

The fork-lift guys managed to get all of the massive branches and limbs, but left piles of leaves in front of everyone's house. I was going to get out there with a rake and some plastic bags yesterday, but then remembered that the lawn guys would be here today with their noisy leaf-blowing machines, and they will pick up all the leaves faster than I could rake and sweep them.

The debris trucks are still in the subdivision-- they came from other parts of Texas, from Florida and South Carolina, from Kentucky and Kansas, as well as other states, I'm sure. They seem to have a system worked out--- the fork-lifts come on the street first, lift up all the limbs and branches from the curb grass, toss them all into the street, then use the fork-lift thing to sweep them all into one massive mountain-style pile at one end of the street. Then they have to let someone "guard" their mountain of branches because workers have filled up their trucks with piles of debris that had been stacked up by other companies.
One of our neighbors told me that the men get paid according to the weight of debris that they bring to the landfill. (It's all being chopped up for mulch.) So if one crew takes two or three hours of their time to stack up all the branches at one end of the street, and another crew comes in and picks it all up in less than half an hour, that second crew is going to get the credit for the truck-load. Even in this kind of situation, with such a massive clean-up effort going on all over the area, some people find a way to take advantage of other people.

Our street looks more or less normal now, except for the piles of leaves. Within a few days, everyone's lawns will look green and pretty again, and Ike will be nothing but a memory for us here. Not so for those in Galveston, and in the waterfront areas. They are all still cleaning up, drying out, trying to salvage whatever they can from their wrecked and flooded homes. Over three hundred people are still missing, mostly from Galveston. Some bodies have washed up onto the shores, others have just plain disappeared. The fishing and shrimping industry here has come to a halt, leaving a lot of fishermen without work and without hope... and without shrimp, which is a big business here in the Gulf area.

Most of the traffic lights around the area are now up and working, making driving easier and saner. It's a wonder that we didn't hear stories of "road rage" these past couple of weeks, but drivers here tend to be gracious and patient, for the most part. The grocery stores seem to be back to their normal state-- the freezers are filled again with frozen foods and ice cream. During the days after Ike came in, the local stores couldn't keep ice cream in their freezers once their power got turned back on-- as soon as they stocked up on the BlueBell and the Ben & Jerry's and the Breyer's, everything got sold out. The Bird's Eye frozen vegetables were stacked up, but the ice cream freezers were flat-out empty.

I still think of Galveston, and the way it was, and I have to wonder if it will ever be the same again. Just like what happened after Katrina hit New Orleans a couple of years ago, The Powers That Be are now talking about not re-building certain parts of Galveston Island. Just as in New Orleans, where all of its citizens contribute to the flavor and the character of the city, the same can be said for Galveston, where every single person on every street in every single district brings their own uniqueness to the Island. Galveston lost more than imaginable after Ike tumbled it around and spit it out... it shouldn't have to lose its character as well.