By Jennie Matthew
TEXAS—It was when the water rushed around my ankles that I knew I was in trouble.
I’d driven into a ditch overflowing with flood waters and couldn’t reverse. Rain lashed the windscreen, running down in rivulets blurring my view.
I tried to open the door. It was stuck. “F-ck!”
Minutes earlier, I had headed out of my foodless hotel. Starving, I was planning to grab a bite at a restaurant 350 yards away and then head out again, to see how the weather was progressing in what was supposed to be the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Except that it wasn’t so much an aftermath as a continuation of the worst natural disaster to hit Texas in years. And now instead of bearing witness, I had fallen foul of the storm that dumped record rainfall on the Lone Star state’s eastern coast, triggering massive flooding.
Texas might be near tropical in summer but the water was cold. My trousers clung to my legs. The water was almost at my waist as I slipped and stumbled on the edge of the ditch onto higher ground.
Behind me, the white headlights of an enormous truck flashed through the rain.
Help. Thank God.
In seconds, a swarthy Texan in overalls and waders grabbed my elbow and steered me to the back of his truck.
Shaking and in shock, for a minute I couldn’t haul myself up into the back seat. Panic set in. I thought of the indignity of him having to shove me in by the backside. But Texans are far too polite to rear end an English woman traveling alone. On second attempt I hauled myself up and collapsed onto the seat.
“Did you leave anything in the car ma’am?”
My suitcase. Shit.
I clambered back out into the rain, flung open the back door of the car and grabbed the little pink wheelie from behind the driver’s seat. Water flooded out of it, movie-style. Without a murmur, my savior swung it into his truck, drove me 30 seconds to my hotel and dropped me off.
“Thank you, thank you,” I repeated over and over again. “What about the car?” I shouted.
“It’s dead,” shot back the swarthy Texan.
So five minutes after I had headed out into Harvey, I sloshed back into the lobby of the two-star Comfort Inn in Winnie, a farming community of little more than 3,000 people, spraying filthy water all over neatly mopped tiles.
Fellow guests barely noticed. They were either blank with boredom at being trapped in the middle of nowhere because the interstate was a river—or stricken with anguish after hazardous escapes from homes disappearing under water. Yet another sodden guest stomping in from outside was commonplace.
Even when I sprinted downstairs wrapped only in a towel and carrying my sopping clothes, no one batted an eyelid, just pointed me in the direction of the washing machine down the hall.
In the morning, I tried to check out, determined again to make it to Houston. “Are you sure?” asked the receptionist. “Yours is the last room and if you leave you won’t be able to come back.” I rebooked as an insurance policy, fully expecting to make it out of Winnie to somewhere more interesting.
But the highway was closed. Water flooded the main drag. Everywhere I ventured, trucks in front of me stopped and turned back. I did the same.
I spent the morning in the hotel, trying and failing to interview Mexican migrant evacuees—they didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish. Once that avenue was exhausted, I wanted to see if the rain was letting up.
Except it wasn’t. It was a one-minute drive to the only decent restaurant in Winnie. It was a risk, but I was starving. My mistake was to turn left too quickly, driving straight into the ditch obscured by the flood water rather than over the elevated lane into the parking lot.
Getting into that mess was easy. Getting out was not.
But in a natural disaster that left some 60 people feared dead, clocked up tens of billions of dollars worth of damage and left tens of thousands without homes, escaping from a flooded car was nothing.
On the fourth day Arbin, a 60-year-old Trump-supporting, terrorist-hating, North Korea-fearing taxi driver finally made it through and drove me to Dallas, the nearest airport that could guarantee me a quick flight out. Driving north, Arbin picked his way gingerly through flooded country roads. His boss called repeatedly to check on us. But long detours, Arbin’s need for cigarette breaks and sheer distance meant it took 7.5 hours to reach Dallas. There were no flight tickets left. So it was another night in Texas.
At least this time the hotel had room service.