Texas Floods

a story of a magical night and ways you can help

The stars at night (clap clap clap clap)

Are big and bright (clap clap clap clap)

Deep in the heart of Texas.

Folks,

We need to talk about Texas. I have a complicated relationship with Texas. Some of the best people I’ve met in my life are Texans, and also by the time I moved back to the northeast, nine years after I arrived in the Lone Star state, I felt angry, disillusioned, and hurt. Those contrasting feelings are hard to hold at once, but I do.

I’d like to tell a story. In the summer of 2014, I was nursing a broken heart and feeling pretty unmoored in general. I was two years into a three year MFA program at Texas State University alongside some other truly talented writers, but my peers in general were writing more academically rooted poems than I wrote, poems that never used words like soul or lover. I on the other hand loved (and continue to) love souls and hearts and accessibility (and politics, LOL, another contentious poetry topic). It was also a pretty academically rigorous MFA program, a year longer than most and while heavily craft-based, there was strong focus on literature. In addition to hundreds of individual collections, my fellow students and I read the complete works of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Gary Snyder, and I hopped over to the fiction side of things to read the entire catalogue from Cormac McCarthy because the library on campus was home to his manuscripts. I had read a metric buttload those last two years.

Opposite my rigorous dip into academia, for the last three years I had been dating a gorgeous man who struggled with addiction, and who would continue to struggle until he died in 2023. It was the messiest relationship I’ve ever been in. I was eating poetry like it was breakfast, and he was treating Vicodin the same. Eventually, just as my second year at Texas State University was ending, I broke up with him.

I was burnt out and lonely and drinking too much to cope with it all. One day that summer I got a call from my college roommate Abbi, the woman who is the reason I moved to Texas in the first place, asking me to join her volunteering in exchange for a ticket to Little Folk at the Quiet Valley Ranch in Kerrville, Texas.

I had been to this ranch before because the band with which I occasionally read psychedelic poetry hosted a music festival there called Head for the Hills Fest. But the land itself is more known for hosting Kerrville Folk Festival, a three week camp-out that I never attended (but ask my husband about it sometime, he’s got stories). Little Folk is the pocket-sized festival later in the summer. It has less people, performers, and days.

Abbi’s invite to Little Folk came with a couple of shifts at the ice cream stand with two of our good friends, Sarah and Laura. All three of those ladies lived in Austin, while I had moved thirty minutes south to San Marcos for school. Though only a few towns away, we weren’t as close as we had been when we all lived on the same block. I hadn’t hung out with that crew in a minute.

I remember being anxious as I was driving out into the hill country that day. I didn’t really feel like I knew who I was. I knew how to put on some bravado and swagger, but that was going to be hard to maintain for multiple days with women who knew me well. But when I pulled into the driveway, and was warmly welcomed, I let down my guard a little. It was going to be okay to be authentically me here, even if the me was a stranger at the moment.

Over the course of that weekend, I saw some of the color return to the world. Kerrville is beautiful. If you haven’t been to the hill country of central Texas, you’re likely imagining a different landscape. When Texas is evoked, it’s easy to think about endless flat and brown. There’s a desert cactus and a tumbleweed blowing across an empty highway, or maybe you imagine the oil fields and an old man in starched jeans. This is fair, but not entirely accurate because Texas is friggin huge and has a lot of landscapes. Kerrville has cacti for sure, but it also flowers and trees and hills of all sizes and it’s nestled alongside the Guadalupe River. The river that flooded and took the lives of over 100 people this weekend.

That weekend though, the river was perfect. It was cold but I could step straight into it without holding my breath. Alongside that river after one of our shifts, Abbi asked the hard questions everyone had been politely avoiding all summer. How was I really doing? Drip drying under the Texas sun while that river calmy flowed by was the safest I felt in months.

That night, free of any more camp responsibilities, and emboldened by all the beautiful, varied people I had met, the people I had scooped ice cream for, and the strangers I’d hugged, and the women whom I was lucky enough to know and love already, I tried something new. I played my banjolele and sang for a group of people. There were probably only six of us around the fire, but before that night I had only ever played in front of one or two people and never at the same time. I stumbled through two terrible covers but I was received again with warmth and freedom. A year later, I would start my band Penny Farthing & The Cheapskates.

I stayed up all night that night with a very silly man that I never saw in person ever again. All the walls were down. We talked about life. We talked about poetry. We talked about folk music. We talked about hip hop. We talked about love. We talked about addiction. We talked about owning and caring for a body. We giggled. We babbled nonsense for an hour. We talked with various accents and speech impediments. We danced when there was no music. And finally, when it seemed like the whole ranch was asleep, we climbed the biggest hill on the land, chapel hill, to find a lone guitarist playing for the incoming sunrise.

I remember starting to wonder if we were going to kiss, which felt fine but didn’t feel accurate to what we had shared that night. We didn’t kiss. We held hands as the sun came up over the Kerr county. It was a perfect time. I drove home a few hours later exhausted and reinvigorated to trust my heart again.

Texas can be like that. It can also be brutal. The wildfires rage out of control. River breaks from their beds. Too many people walk around with guns on their body. Ted Cruz goes on vacation every time there is a natural disaster that threatens his constituents, and still the state votes for him again, or more accurately, dismally few people vote at all.

There were flash floods that killed over one hundred people this week in Texas. In Kerr county alone, where I had one of the most magical nights of my life, eighty-six people lost their lives. I can’t even actually really comprehend that magnitude of loss. I know personally how grief ripples outward, how many people are affected by a loss in their community even if not directly. The death toll in Texas will impact generations of people.

I’m not on social media the way I used to be, but I’m on it enough to have witnessed a pretty gross reaction to this horrific event. They voted for this. HA GOOD LUCK GETTING FEMA FUNDS NOW. Texans deserved this.

I remember this from just last year when another one of my beloved homes experienced the fatal effects of climate change in action, Swannanoa. People love to hate on the south, and on Texas, and on all the rural communities of our country where the communities often vote conservatively. But it’s not the whole picture. Even in a place like Kerr County that majorly voted to elect Donald Trump, 22% of the vote when to Kamala Harris. To put that into perspective, while it may seem small, that’s over 6,000 votes for a different future. Furthermore, when we look at Kerr county’s eligible voters as a whole, another nearly 12,000 people did not vote. Texas purposefully disenfranchises its voters. It lies to its votes. It’s more difficult to vote in Texas than it is in Massachusetts. There are fewer polling locations. Less people are eligible for mail-in-voting. When more people exercise their right to vote, more liberal politicians end up in office. The GOP in Texas knows this, and acts accordingly.

When we talk about people deserving this, we’re talking about systemically manipulated communities. When I talk about a better, more equitable future I mean it for everyone. I believe the absolute best thing we can do, my northern liberal neighbors, is to offer our help. We can’t keep claiming we’re so kind and progressive while laughing at the most vulnerable among us.

This flood is absolutely political. Multiple important positions that might have helped to make this a less fatal event were vacant because of this administration’s greed and incompetence. This flood is political because climate change is real and deadly. This flood is political because our representatives across this country cowardly voted for the BBB which will move funds from FEMA to ICE.

Texas, like the US, is deeply flawed. And still, they don’t deserve this. And still, they need our help.

The Quiet Valley Ranch is collecting donations here, which they will distribute to local relief organizations.

World Central Kitchen is always doing good work.

HEB, the absolute best grocery store in all of the land, is collecting donations here.

If you’re in Texas reading this, there is a supply drive set up at Live Oak Distillery in Dripping Springs, and they are looking for cleaning supplies, personal hygiene products, and a whole lost of other supplies listed here on their Instagram.

TEXSAR is part of the search efforts and donations to them can be made here.

Thanks always for being so generous with your hearts and your time and your wallets. We already know the government is going to fail the people of Texas, so it’s up to us.

Keep fighting. Keep standing up for those who need it. I’m proud of you all.

Here are some photos from that fateful weekend.

I love you,

EBG

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