The Devil Has Texas: Days One and Two

I have been to Abilene
The spirit world rising
I have seen in Abilene
The Devil has Texas
--Daniel Johnson, "Spirit World Rising"


I. Tenderfoot

I call my boyfriend, Doug, a tenderfoot because he’s all white-collar, despite being a Mississippian born and bred. Years spent roaming concrete jungles first as a journalist and then as a lawyer had chipped away at his country upbringing. By the time I got him, he had forgotten how to labor manually with the world—forgotten or just plain didn’t have the stomach for it. He claims that growing up, he was the family yard guy, but all those sweaty, scorching afternoons mowing grass and weeding flowerbeds must have soured him to soil.

I don’t know if it was moving to Texas or becoming a homeowner that eventually reignited Doug’s blue collar/laborer spirit. Probably a little both. In Texas, you must be prepared for every malevolence Mother Nature throws at you. Wildfires, cedar trees with misery-inducing pollen, all the venomous snakes that you can shake a stick at. Even our pretty flowers—like bull nettles—can kill you or maim you for life.

Then there’s the thunderstorms and hurricanes. Sure, this large, semi-desert patch of dirt stuffed inside America like a twisted womb is dry most of the year. But when it’s not, it’s not.

Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey came, our backyard flooded and drowned a pregnant cat queening under our porch. With a neighbor’s help, Doug dug a hole beneath the wooden planks to retrieve the body. “Don’t come outside,” he warned me, knowing my love for cats.

Doug gradually came around to playing farmer. Growing peppers, specifically. I will never understand what makes men want to eat something that burns their mouths on the way in and lights up their rear ends on the way out, but Doug loves those twisted scepter-shaped fruits of Satan. He grew quite a selection in the old bookshelves that we had laid flat and repurposed as vegetable gardens: Anaheim, bell, Jalapeno, Serrano, Poblano. As late as early February, we still had some blooming at the stem, eager for longer daylight hours and a chance to be reborn.

Then, a week before President’s Day, winter storm warnings began flooding the airwaves. We didn’t really pay attention. Doug’s snarky comment, “There’s an eighty-percent chance of snow Sunday night and a seventy-percent chance on Monday, which means we will get nothing,” was met with my laughter. We took great joy reveling in the Weather Channel’s often inaccurate predictions.

Oh, hindsight.









II. Proof

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

I think of this quote from Watership Down as I corral the feral cats that live in my backyard into my house for the night. Because I apparently live in a damn zoo, raccoons followed closely behind them. I slid the door closed before they had a chance to step inside. Dejected, they paw at the door, their fluffy, banded faces pressed into the glass. Light from the kitchen reflects the desperation in their eyes—they know what was coming. My heart cracks. “What if..?” I begin.

“No,” Doug says curtly behind me. He may have embraced his inner pioneer, but he still had the good sense not to invite a trio of potentially rabid, wild animals into our home.

III. Sickness & Darkness


I wake up on the morning of President’s Day with the first signs of COVID. Achy throat, swollen limbs, my nose clogged as if an invisible Kleenex has been stuffed into its cavities.

I know it’s COVID and nothing else. My son had brought it back from Colorado (an ill-planned ski trip courtesy of his wealthy father). He had tested positive the day before. Almost a week earlier, during his first night at my house after the trip, I had reached for my bottle of Sprite only to discover it was half empty. My son chuckled from the other couch. “I may have had more than a sip,” he said.

“Kaya! What if you have COVID?” I cried, half-jokingly.

Oh, hindsight.

Now my throat is sandpaper; my sense of smell, kaput. I turn on my lamp. Only, nothing happens. I make a mental note to replace the bulb, then stand up, walk to my bathroom, and flick on another light. Still, nothing.

Then it hits me, and I groan.

“What is it?” Doug asks groggily from the bed.

“The electricity is out.” I pause, and add, “Also, I think I have COVID.”


IV. Tenderfoot No More

For the last two years, Doug and I have gone out of our way to visit popular destinations during off-season, even if it meant foregoing the chance to indulge in activities only offered in peak-season. In our over-40, not-much-fun-to-begin-with, crowd-adverse minds, not doing those activities was far more agreeable than doing them with other people.

And if you, dear reader, are like-minded, may I recommend the American Northwest in November? Doug and I found it ideal. Two years ago, we went to South Dakota. It was a ghost town. We loved it. Last November, amid a pandemic that required social distancing for more than just hating-most-other-people purposes, we went to Wyoming. Also lovely and devoid of life.

Both places, Doug drove. I have a history of wrapping cars around trees in bad weather, so it was for the best.

In South Dakota, Doug played safe. Wyoming was different. Doug had made a pact with himself that he was going to push his winter-driving skills to the limits. He rented a four-wheel drive—a big bulky number that only Bubba-types drove back home—and headed off to elevated grounds. It was dodgy at first, but he got the hang of it. By the second day, he was driving around edges of snow-capped mountains. At one point, a local hunter stopped us and asked, “Where do you think you’re going, fella? You don’t have the right tires.”

“Oh well,” Doug had said and waited until he rolled up the window before muttering, “Screw that guy. I know what I’m doing.”

I was in awe of him. With a little determination and chutzpa, Doug had taken a step farther than his kin, had dove deeper and trekked higher into the wild, untamed Americana than his ancestors had ever dared.

And I know driving in dangerous, icy terrains may seem like nothing to a Northerner, but to a Mississippi-turned-city-turned-Texas boy, it was everything. Doug was a tenderfoot no more.

On President’s Day, my former tenderfoot’s new winter driving skills becomes a life saver when we realize our electricity isn’t going to be turned on anytime soon. Earlier, Austin Energy had tweeted, “Per ERCOT, controlled outages will likely last through tonight + into Tuesday as ERCOT works to restore the electric system to normal operations.” Translation: “Y’all are shit out of luck.”

So, Doug and I decide to head out into the wild, blue yonder and bag some supplies for the rough days ahead—even if scoring said goods is going to be a crap shoot. We have no way of knowing if anything was open. By this point, our cell service is shoddy, the network overloaded because everyone else’s internet is down; half of Austin is using cell data too. The only option is to drive around and see.

V. The Unfamiliar Familiar

My first impression of our winter-stormed city: it’s still Austin and yet it isn’t.

Gone is the clear, blue sky and yellow sun; gone are the sun-soaked buildings framed by dried landscapes and backdropped in pigments of a perpetual summer.

Instead, muddy, gray clouds smear the sky. Snow and ice pack the sidewalks. Snow caps the tops of cactuses and twentieth-century plants, ice coat their prickled skins, and long, sharp icicles line the trim of snow-coated rooftops and edges of street signs.

The roads are mostly empty, chafed in places by the odd tire tracks stenciling mud into the snow, and Doug finds it easy to drive. “Everything is easy, after Wyoming,” he says, which I decide should be his new motto. I stay huddled in the passenger seat, however, and shudder every time it feels like we’re slipping.

We drive past pedestrians in wool caps and heavy coats pacing along the gutters and lingering at street corners below downed traffic lights, and parking lots dotted with parents helping their children ball up snow or carry garbage lids for sledding, our eyes searching for lit Open signs that didn’t exist. Everywhere is closed. The gas stations, the dollar stores, the grocery stores.

We are about to give up when I remember the Target on Frontage Road, north of Brodie Lane. One of my favorite Sunday Funday hangouts on normal occasions. I have no idea if it’s open, but my primal, white woman instinct told me that it is.

As it turns out, I’m right. As my dad would say, even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in awhile.

VI. A Map of the World

Honestly, I don’t know what is scarier—living without heat in freezing temperatures, or sending a man into Target by himself. In ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t have to choose either. But today is not ideal, and I have no choice. I have COVID. I can’t go inside. Doug will have to shop solo.

Doug isn’t thrilled about being the designated shopper either. I mean, we’re talking about a man who hasn’t been inside a brick and mortar store in seven years, thanks to a girlfriend who loves him and the miracle of Instacart. But now, he finds himself at an existential quagmire, with the chances of survival for himself and the woman he loves completely at the mercy of the very skillset he has strenuously for years attempted to not acquire.

I help out by drawing a map on a napkin, showing Doug what we need and where he can find it. Batteries on Aisle Nine, flashlights on Aisle Thirty-Two, candles and lighters on Aisle Twenty-Three, cat food on Aisle Twenty-Seven, and so on (I never thought my detailed knowledge of Target’s store layout would become a life-saving skill, but here we are.)

Doug stumbles out of the car and into the Target parking lot like an unseasoned soldier storming the beaches of Normandy. But to his credit, he comes back an hour later with everything but the milk. “They aren’t selling produce,” he says. “They’ve taped the freezer doors shut.” He says inside was spooky, Armageddon-like. He describes the eerily half-stocked aisles with dimmed lighting (electricity had gone out there too, they were using generators). Only self-checkout counters were open, and the line to check out went down the shampoo aisle. In the bottled water aisle, which had been picked over by early shoppers, a woman had been crying.

A car squeals by us in the parking lot and rams into a curb. Another car cannonballs into its side, ice flying, smoke puffing miserably from the exhaust pipes. The two drivers hop out unharmed, and Doug and I wait until we knew they have it worked out before pulling out into Frontage Road. Doug turns the steering wheel with a steel grip. “Thank you, Wyoming, thank you,” he keeps repeating, over and over until we were almost home.

On the corner of our street, we notice our neighbor standing in her front yard beside a tent where she sells plants for reasonable prices. In her hands sits a small, dead houseplant, its brown, wilted vines dancing in the wind. “Triple mask yourself,” Doug say. “I’m gonna stop and see if she is okay.”

It turns out, our neighbor had lost $30,000 worth of plants. She had a greenhouse in the backyard, but when the energy went out, the greenhouse went too, and the plants with it. Her boyfriend comes outside and hands a Terra Cota pot to Doug that we can turn into small heater, like we had seen on social media. He tells us to keep it as long as we want. He looks down at the dead plant in his girlfriend’s hands and adds, “We can do without it for a while.”

Their plight sobers our mood, and we stay silent rolling into our driveway. We park, grab our spoils and carefully head inside, sidestepping chunks of ice. Although it’s only six o'clock, it’s already dark. The darkness, made thicker by the cold, blurs every detail with its ragged veils.

Once inside, a kind of manic urgency takes over. The Weather Channel said it would be ten degrees tonight, and this time, Doug and I believe them.

VII. The Long Night Has Begun

Pick your favorite vampire movie. How about The Lost Boys, when the two Cories are filling up the bathtub with holy water, anticipating the arrival of vampire Keifer Sutherland? Or how about I Am Legend, when Will Smith sees the sun going down and immediately shuts the blinds and locks the windows and doors, fearful of some unseen threat?

This is how it feels getting ready for a night without heat. I work at creating a tiny heater out of the Terra Cota pots and twelve tea candles. Doug collects blankets around the house and lays them on the couches in the living room, the most central room in the house and our designated bedroom until the heat came back on. We push the couches close together. Doug cooks soup using a hand lighter to light our gas stove while I read my slow-loading Twitter feed on my phone: rolling blackouts that weren’t rolling, seconds and minutes away from a months-long blackouts, ERCOT not unable to turn on electricity at this time. Republicans predictably blaming green energy. Liberals predictably blaming Republicans. Outrage over affluent neighborhoods bearing the smallest burden of the outage. Austin Energy asking its residents with electricity to use it sparingly (Echoing my thoughts, one person responded, “People with electricity aren’t reading this shit. They’re sitting in a warm house watching Bridgerton on Netflix, you dumb ass mfs.”)

After dinner, we snuggle into our ten layers of blankets and twenty layers of cats. I’m daydreaming about microwaved popcorn when Doug brings up an excellent point, “At least London and Kaya aren’t with us.”

Usually not having my kids was a bad thing, but this time, I couldn’t agree more. The kids are spending the week at their dad’s house in West Lake—a rich, mostly white suburb in northwest Austin. Their electricity is on, as was the case with most affluent areas in Texas, per Twitter. Social justice warriors are having a field day over it on social media—as was I—but the mom in me couldn’t help but feel grateful my kids were safe and warm.

Exhausted from the war going on with my white blood cells, I go to sleep immediately, and stay sleeping until early dawn. By the time I wake, the cold had seeped inside me, crawling into my bones. A wet cold that burns. I try to move, but everything hurts.

VIII. Other States

My dad calls after I’ve taken an ibuprofen and feel well enough to clean the first of many cat pee puddles from the kitchen floor. “I can’t believe what is happening over there,” he says. “Texas is a mess. You wouldn’t be without electricity if you were back in Mississippi.”

My dad is always trying sell Mississippi to me, even though I hadn’t lived there in twenty-five years and have no plans to return. If a Metro bus ran over me on Congress Avenue and crushed my guts and I died, my dad would probably say at my funeral, “She wouldn’t have gotten run over by a bus and had her guts crushed on Congress Avenue had she lived in Mississippi.”

Overnight, my employer, a state agency, sends an email, “Due to the continuing severe weather event, if you are not directly involved in responding to COVID-19 or the winter weather event, please do not report to your work site and limit telework activity in order to conserve electricity.”

What if you were involved in directly responding to COVID-19, but also, you have COVID-19, I thought.

Of course, my COVID-19 responsibilities had mostly subsided after the initial outbreak. I had been center stage on the onslaught, charged with communications in our effort to send 1,400 employees home. That was almost a year ago. Since then, I had been sidelined to the remedial—keeping spirits up and engagement high in our new remote workforce still plagued with the plague. Not really mission-critical stuff. I figured: that fact, along with being Typhoid Mary, along with having the same access to modern resources as Little House On the Prairie, put me in the exempt-from-work category.

But that, of course, did not stop the work emails from coming. Most were meetings cancelations. At least one major player in every project had drawn the losing hand in the Austin Energy lotto. Our CIO was the worst off. No electricity or water, and two trees had kamikazed into his roof in the middle of the night.

I hear from Dina, our office manager, as I’m cleaning the second pool of cat pee. She had flown to Florida to visit family before the storm. Now she was stuck there and happy about it. “I’m actually glad to be in Florida, ain’t that some shit? How are you, Erin?”

I tell her everything, including the COVID part, and immediately wish I hadn’t. I hate being fawned over, unless it’s by Doug after he’s done something wrong.

I am again reminded of my distaste for feeling like a weak and helpless sad sack’o’crap later in the morning, after stupidly posting a miserable and (admittedly) self-pity-party on Facebook.

Kind, well-meaning friends across the country begin to private message me.

“This is horrible! How can I help?”

“I read your post. Can I send you something? What do you need?”

“Erin, you sound like a poor, weak, and helpless sack’o’crap. What can I do for you?”

I think about my neighbor cradling the dead plant like a baby. I think of the car wreck at Target, and the woman crying in Aisle Seven amid rows and rows of empty shelves.

Nothing, I think. There’s nothing anyone can do but wait.