Chest Deep: a story about Hurricane Harvey
It was Sunday afternoon. The rain was still coming down sideways, and the flood had not yet receded. My neighbors, whose place sat in 2-plus feet of ship channel-tainted rainwater, were reviewing their options on my couch, ruminating on whether to stay with me or take their chances camping out in the Marquee Moon, their still-dry bar across the street.
For whatever reason I still had (questionably clean) water, power and an internet connection, so I was able to receive emails. I got one from Chris Cope, then-editor of RideApart, an online magazine for motorcyclists, for whom I'd begun writing road stories about ISFB. He asked me to consider writing something from the viewpoint of biker living through the storm - which in theory would have been easy, given how close I came to losing my beloved DR650 to the floodwaters.. but it wasn't. It took a month for words to form that could in any way give justice to what I saw my city go through.
Hurricane Harvey dumped over 51 inches of rain on Houston, Texas, between August 24 and 28, 2017. That's 14 to 15 trillion gallons of water over the course of 5 days. 8 months later we are still recovering from this, a process that will likely take years.
I wrote about it for RideApart in early October, 2017.
