Houston is a huge city. It covers an area more than 28 times the size of Manhattan Island, and its greater metropolitan area is home to about 7 million people. Its sprawling size and car-focused layout has led to the local joke that “Houston is an hour away from Houston.”
In a way, it’s even bigger than that: because NASA’s Mission Control Centre is in Houston, the International Space Station has a Houston area code. So not only is Houston an hour away from Houston, but Houston is in orbit around Houston.
But at the end of the 19th Century, Houston was barely more than a backwater. At that point, the island city of Galveston, 80km to the south on the Gulf of Mexico, was the most important city in Texas. With a busy port and a bustling downtown, Galveston was on track to be one of the country’s main cities as the 1900s began.
And then, in late August of 1900, a hurricane hit. They didn’t name storms back then, but it’s usually just referred to as “The Galveston storm.”
Galveston Island – a long, skinny, low-lying piece of land on the Gulf, basically an on-ramp for hurricanes making their way ashore – was completely obliterated by the 1900 storm. Looking at a map of the damage, you get the impression that the island’s northern section was largely unscathed. That’s somewhat true, but in fact the reason there was less damage in that area was that it was somewhat protected by a two-story high wall of debris made up of all the structures to the south of it. 125 years later, it is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history.
In the aftermath, many folks decided to re-settle further inland. Houston seemed like a good spot, and it has since grown into the behemoth that it is today.
(NOTE: since drafting this post, the second of two major storms this year hit Houston, leading to flooding and interminable power outages that have led some Houston residents to think it’s time to go even further inland. Maybe Houston will become the Galveston of the 21st Century.)
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The tremolo guitar makes me think of frontier towns.
2. The rise and fall of the keyboard makes me think of slowly-rolling, innocuous ocean waves.
3. The intermittent but persistent “thum PUM” on the drums makes me think of distant thunder.
Recommended listening activity:
Standing on the highest ground in your immediate area.