Words like "flattened" and "scraped" lop over the gunwales of my skinny little sloop on WiFi waves from the gulf coast of Texas today.
Such definitive language and plenty of daunting imagery strain my hope that friend Stefan's Rollover Bay beach house on Bolivar Peninsula survived Hurricane Ike. Strain, but not collapse. Not yet anyway. There's always hope.
Then again, looking back at Jigglebox.com at my writings from the winter I lived there, I am reminded that to Stefan's mind, the house lived on borrowed time:
Thunder from the East and Stefan speaks of this beach house pink & purple painted stilt stork house as though it weren't even here anymore.
More troublesome are the numbers, figures of how many people stayed behind and how few are yet accounted for. My mind fills in the blanks. After twenty five years without television in my life, my imagination is very much in tact. And so the mind wanders.
And the wind begins to blow. The surf writhes and the water rises like a tide hell-bent on rising to meet the moon.
The crawfish rain from the sky and a thousand hardy Bolivar tough-out-the-storm residents take to the sea in Barcaloungers as an etherial aquarium screen saver swells out of their buoyant television sets in radiant projected imagery filling living rooms with walls once solid now melting into salty night like Maurice Sendak's dream-jungled bedroom of little boy Max who preferred the company of monsters to his mother.
What a daydream. What a drag. What a surreal event is this life, existing on the edge of strange and raging organism.
Earth.
And Jeliza-Rose goes deep sea diving with her daddy, and the house goes down, down, down. This a short YouTube clip of one of the more trippy scenes from one of my all time favorite films. Terry Gilliam, of course.
This article from the NYTimes posted just a few hours ago mentions Rollover Pass, complete with video and slide shows. If I'm not mistaken, the oil pumps pictured in the beginning of the video clip titled "High Island After Ike" are the one's from a favorite little story I often tell friends of my time on Bolivar with Stefan.
Back in 2002, Stefan told me he'd passed the praying mantis-like pumps time and again driving out to his family's beach house since childhood and often imagined what it would be like to climb up and ride one. That was the end of the story. The beginning was that I'd egged him into pulling over there one day, shouting "Let's ride those fuckers!" Up the pumps we scrambled with true irreverent gonzo grit. They're bigger than they look and not a little scary as they buck and curtsy with menacing moans, their creepy tendril straws stuck deep and sucking the blood of the earth far below. Somewhere, I have a photo of Stefan riding one such pump under power with his white cowboy hat flung high in one hand in true buckin' bronco style.
Now that would have been a helluva shotgun seat to ride out raging Ike.
I went digging deep in the muddy backwater of old hard drives and assembled this little photo album of images from my Bolivar days. Alas, no shot of the oil pump ride. Just hafta imagine that one.
- RSM
Such definitive language and plenty of daunting imagery strain my hope that friend Stefan's Rollover Bay beach house on Bolivar Peninsula survived Hurricane Ike. Strain, but not collapse. Not yet anyway. There's always hope.
Then again, looking back at Jigglebox.com at my writings from the winter I lived there, I am reminded that to Stefan's mind, the house lived on borrowed time:
Thunder from the East and Stefan speaks of this beach house pink & purple painted stilt stork house as though it weren't even here anymore.
More troublesome are the numbers, figures of how many people stayed behind and how few are yet accounted for. My mind fills in the blanks. After twenty five years without television in my life, my imagination is very much in tact. And so the mind wanders.
And the wind begins to blow. The surf writhes and the water rises like a tide hell-bent on rising to meet the moon.
The crawfish rain from the sky and a thousand hardy Bolivar tough-out-the-storm residents take to the sea in Barcaloungers as an etherial aquarium screen saver swells out of their buoyant television sets in radiant projected imagery filling living rooms with walls once solid now melting into salty night like Maurice Sendak's dream-jungled bedroom of little boy Max who preferred the company of monsters to his mother.
What a daydream. What a drag. What a surreal event is this life, existing on the edge of strange and raging organism.
Earth.
And Jeliza-Rose goes deep sea diving with her daddy, and the house goes down, down, down. This a short YouTube clip of one of the more trippy scenes from one of my all time favorite films. Terry Gilliam, of course.
This article from the NYTimes posted just a few hours ago mentions Rollover Pass, complete with video and slide shows. If I'm not mistaken, the oil pumps pictured in the beginning of the video clip titled "High Island After Ike" are the one's from a favorite little story I often tell friends of my time on Bolivar with Stefan.
Back in 2002, Stefan told me he'd passed the praying mantis-like pumps time and again driving out to his family's beach house since childhood and often imagined what it would be like to climb up and ride one. That was the end of the story. The beginning was that I'd egged him into pulling over there one day, shouting "Let's ride those fuckers!" Up the pumps we scrambled with true irreverent gonzo grit. They're bigger than they look and not a little scary as they buck and curtsy with menacing moans, their creepy tendril straws stuck deep and sucking the blood of the earth far below. Somewhere, I have a photo of Stefan riding one such pump under power with his white cowboy hat flung high in one hand in true buckin' bronco style.
Now that would have been a helluva shotgun seat to ride out raging Ike.
I went digging deep in the muddy backwater of old hard drives and assembled this little photo album of images from my Bolivar days. Alas, no shot of the oil pump ride. Just hafta imagine that one.
- RSM
