She lives in far west Houston, in a two-story house overlooking the upper reaches of Buffalo Bayou. When that feed dropped, I called my mother.
I switched to another live cam, this time on a dock in Port O’Connor, where a row of skiffs bobbed, then rocked, then shanked violently against their pilings. The shrubs began to whip back and curl over the home’s deck. The stream lasted until the sky sank and the rains turned horizontal.
Before evacuating, a man had propped his laptop in the kitchen, faced it east through a window, and left it on. When the eye got closer to Texas, I turned to the feed of a resident’s webcam in Corpus. I’d started by watching the radar at my home in Iowa, where Harvey blossomed into a fierce, twirling rose over the Gulf. I rode that wave for a week or more, keyed-up, electric with faint paranoia. I saw cattle, too, and horses, huddled on bare islands of pasture, and I thought, in an irrational spiral of anxiety, that the rain would never stop, that the fauna would disappear, and the city I knew as a child would sink, quietly, gradually, into an industrial Atlantis, a relic. Later that week I’d spot three deer in a quarter-mile stretch of suspended freeway, all of them dead, all of them mature bucks, improbably posed there on the damp shoulder, high above the city. The weather had turned the terrain strange, and the animals seemed to channel its most dramatic permutations. Sources warned residents to stay away-the rafts of displaced colonies might swarm your body in an instant. They drifted, impermeable, furious, for miles. It was the swift and anomalous conduct of wildlife that got to me initially, the ants in particular, which had been observed floating in odd heaps throughout the city, each insect clasped to one another, thousands of them, like some kind of freakish, buoyant phalanx.
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