That night, sudden and unseen in the embracing dark, as though the city, like Alice, had tumbled into some primordial hole and through to another world, a storm broke.
I woke, at three or four, to the sound of tree limbs whipping back and forth against the side of the house. Power had summarily failed, and there were no lights, was no light, anywhere. Wind heaved in great tidal waves out there in the dark somewhere. Rain hissed and beat its fists against the roof. Yet looking out I could see nothing of what I sensed.
It went on another hour, perhaps more, the edge, as we learned the next day, of hurricanes that touched down in Galveston, extracting individual buildings like teeth, and blew themselves out on the way up the channel toward Mobile.
The morning we learned this, weather was mild, air exceptionally clear, sun bright and cool in the sky. Worms had come out onto sidewalks and lay there uncurled in the steam rising lazily from them. In every street, cars maneuvered around the fallen limbs of age-old trees. And ship-wrecked on the neutral ground, crisscrossing trolley tracks, lay uprooted palms-fully a third of the city’s ancient, timeless crop.