The sentiment of Glenn Campbell's famous song is perhaps more poignant than ever tonight as people south of here struggle to dig their way out from under the wreckage left by Hurricane Ike.
A childhood spent at Galveston beaches, parties with college friends, tours with my mom to the historic Strand district with its circa 1900s architecture and, more recently, vacations to the Island with my own children -- it's all in my mind and captured on film.
Tonight, many of those places have been swept out to sea. Others lie under several feet of muddy saltwater, their recovery possible, but light years away.
I grew up about 45 miles from the coast, and a trip to Galveston always promised big adventure. As a child, my folks driving me from the mainland over the big bridge to the island never failed to make my heart skip a few beats.
Water -- as far as the eye could see -- and boats, and funny little houses built on stilts, and seagulls and pelicans, and if I rolled down my window the sharp smell of salty sea air. I was never prepared for the most breathtaking sight of all, though. As we'd come up over the rise at Broadway, or at 61st St. or any of the streets in between that led to the Seawall, my little-kid mind would ready itself to behold the most massive and moving thing I knew.
The Gulf of Mexico. The ocean. The sea. The body of water pulled this way and that by the earth's rotation and its perpetual love affair with the moon.
My dad had been a Navy diver in his younger days as well as a meteorologist. I got many private tutorials in my early years about tides, currents, dangerous sea creatures, the relationship of the earth to the moon, and much more.
Dad was pretty fearless back then and thought nothing of scooping up his little daughter -- who could not yet swim -- and taking me out past the shallows and the sandbars into much deeper water where even he struggled to touch bottom. The waves would come at us, I would scream, and Dad would simply buoy me up as they rolled through us.
I never saw a shark, though I often imagined the little mullet fish nipping at my legs and feet were somehow kin.
I never saw a Portugese Man 'O War jellyfish, but I heard my dad tell stories about them. And I saw their cousins, the much bulkier and less attractive "cabbage head" jellies washed up on the shore from time to time.
As a teenager, I went with my mother to the island's annual Dickens Festival and Christmas on the Strand, a celebration of life as it might have looked in Charles Dickens' time. We donned our old-fashioned costumes, sipped wassail, ate roasted chestnuts and for an evening lived in another time. Once we even met a descendant of Charles Dickens at a special tea party to which Mom had bought tickets in advance. That was my first taste of Earl Grey tea and I did not like it.
This was several years after the 1983 Hurricane Alicia, a storm that wreaked enough havoc to make me believe in the truth of "mandatory" -- as in evacuation. We lived through that storm without power or water for nearly a week. My most vivid memories? The spooky incessant wailing of the wind the night Alicia plowed through, walking out in our backyard as the eye passed over and seeing blue sky and shining sun, my father calling me back in as he could see the clouds of the opposing eyewall heading towards us and, later, piles of tree debris as tall as every house on my street.
It wasn't long after that I bought a little book titled "Weekend in September" about the famous 1900 hurricane that wiped out the island and killed nearly 8,000 people. I read it in one sitting, so compelling was its collection of first person accounts and photographs of the aftermath. By this time I was old enough to appreciate devastation, having finally been subjected to school assignments on slavery in America, the Holocaust of WW II, and several other unfathomable human tragedies.
My pre-marriage, pre-motherhood memories of Galveston adventures are too numerous to recount in one 'blog entry but suffice it to say the island is part and parcel of the psyche of so many of us who have spent much of our lives in close proximity to it.
More recently, I'd just begun introducing my own children to the wonders of The Island. In 2006 they made their first journey over that big bridge to see for themselves the ocean. It was in November and in spite of the cold wind and water my oldest daughter was loathe to leave the beach. We fed seagulls, shopped for kitschy souvenirs at Murdoch's Beach House and Pier and toured the aquarium at Moody Gardens. We watched them toss pizza dough at Marios, and time and again in those three days went back down to the ocean for "just one more" look.
Last year, we took the girls and their brother back for another round. This time I was very pregnant with Baby No. 4 and while some activities weren't appealing to me, we made sure to visit the old haunts -- Murdoch's, Mario's, et al. My daughters greeted the different places like old friends, chattering excitedly as they changed from sandybeach swim clothes to souvenir-shopping and eating clothes. "When are we coming back?" they asked as we drove home. "Will it be soon? Will it be after the baby is born? Will we bring him to Galveston, too?"
We were planning another trip this very November so that my then-unborn son could see what he'd missed by being in utero at the time.
I finally saw a photo of Murdoch's today or, more accurately , the space where it used to be. I wondered what had happened to it as a result of this weekend in September.
It's all gone. Not a shell, not a keychain, not a tee-shirt remains. All I have is a photo of my two little girls -- how little they were -- sitting on the steps of the shop next to Murdoch's trademark giant clam shells and smiling.
It was a beautiful, breezy day that day. Just right for goin' to Galveston.
The memories aren't enough to keep me from mourning.
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