The Record Newspapers - Hometown News For Orange County, Texas

This is my town, a small Southeast Texas town of some four thousand families sitting on a high spot in the marsh on the top end of Sabine Lake, home to the best Red Drum and Speckled Trout fishing in the world. Life in my town revolves around work in and support for the surrounding refineries, hunting, fishing and school sports; Friday night football, power volleyball, summer evenings at the ballpark. Not nearly as fast or glamorous as life in the big city, my town is comfortable, quiet, easy.

This is my town, Saturday morning, September 13th; five feet of saltwater at the traffic signal in the middle of town; homes on the south side of town literally blown apart by the storm surge; homes on the north side filled with several feet of water and a foot of black marsh mud; fewer than a couple of dozen homes are untouched by the invading sea. This is my town, my entire town . under water.

This is my town; volunteers in inflatable boats, rice tractors, and monster trucks plucking the foolhardy from their roofs; citizens braving the dark waters, moving from house to house checking for those who stayed behind; volunteer firemen stepping over snakes and alligators to pull electrical meters from water soaked homes.

This is my town; dozens of neighbors, too busy last week to speak, coming together this week to help one another clean up the mess; the old couple whose only son died a few years ago, smiling under tear-filled eyes at the group now raking mud from their home; the woman who thought she'd lost it all until she realized her husband and sons were there to haul it to the street.

This is my town; the mechanic taking time from cleaning his shop to get a flooded tractor running to help the cleanup on the next street over; the retired refinery operator wrestling someone else's fully loaded refrigerator to the street then going back for the freezer; the couple with an undamaged home, using their vacation to help strangers clean out theirs.

This is my town; a handful of volunteers running an undamaged church kitchen, feeding over a hundred folks three hot meals a day; last weeks' grumpy old man, carefully washing a handful of plastic toys, the last few treasures of a child who'd lost everything else; the bone tired pastor carrying yet another load of sodden sheetrock from yet another house, smiling that this is where he is supposed to be.

This is my town; the tough-guy high school jock dragging a previously unknown neighbors' water heavy carpet to the pile at the street, pausing only to let the old man cry on his shoulder; the dainty, delicate cheerleader on her knees, up to her elbows in mud, trying to rescue a few precious memories for the widow with little else; the woman, between bouts of chemo-therapy, sorting the waist high mounds of donated clothes into neatly folded stacks by size.

This is my town; every street and road lined with debris too high to see over, the evidence of lives lived, evidence so easily destroyed and discarded. This is my town; a church full of people on Sunday morning, most with little more than the clothes they wear, singing praise to the Creator God, in my town.

When someone finds out the name of my town, the question I get right after "How much water did you get?" is "Are you going to rebuild?" . Of course I'm going to rebuild, this is my town, my home, and neither has anything to do with sheetrock and two-by-fours. How am I doing? Blessed beyond reason, this is my town.

R. Culp Bridge City, Texas October 2, 2008