Feb. 03, 2003 ~ Not quite business as usual
College Boy works and goes to school in a nearby town. That school district is closed today, while employees search the ground for debris. Roads are closed in our area, because debris has fallen in the highway. Thousands of pieces of debris have already been found, and this is just the beginning. Some of you may have a picture of Texas as desert, cactus, and cowboys wearing boots. That's true, in some areas. But Texas also has black farmland, mountains, prairies, and woods. We live in a region called the Piney Woods. The terrain might surprise some who have not been here. We have hills so steep that they're hard to climb. Even on our own property, I've only climbed the hill in the back pasture a handful of times. We have dense pine forests, acres and acres of them. Many people own farm land or forest land but do not live on it.
They will never find all the debris.
On Saturday we were told to stay indoors, or to be very careful if we chose to go outside, because of the continuing risk of falling debris. But the woods are my comfort. In times of stress or sadness I always head for the woods, just to walk. Walking and thinking, that's what helps. I seem to think better when I'm walking. So I stayed indoors like some caged animal, pacing to and fro, looking out first one window and then another, until I absolutely couldn't stand it any longer. They talked of radiation and poisonous chemicals and suspended particles in the atmosphere. I knew that indoors was probably best, and stayed there just as long as I could. Finally I told Husband, "Let's go. Let's walk in the woods. I can't stand it any more."
We looked, some, in our back pasture and in the woods. It took all of five minutes to realize it is a lost cause. A thick layer of leaves blankets the ground, and piles of brush and logging debris are everywhere. On the news, they show the searchers, lined up, maybe ten feet apart, looking down. There are DPS troopers, military, Texas Rangers, police, and volunteers. Our weather forecasts now have an overlay of the debris area. Try to picture it. They show the doppler radar images of clouds and rain, and there is this diamond-shaped image, the debris field, there with the clouds. "Bad news for searchers," the weatherman says. "It looks like rain in the debris area." The area encompasses hundreds of miles, and the governor has ordered the school districts in 93 counties to search their grounds for debris.
There were several more paragraphs here, but I think it best to save them for another time.
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