From perpetual Sunday to unrelenting Saturday


Power company trucks and a steady stream of traffic ensures you can’t get to there from here.

The first few days upon returning to Beaumont, Texas, after evacuating for Hurricane Rita were like a perpetual Sunday to me. Next to nothing was open. Often times you would see more dogs on the street than people. And the curfew presumably kept the looting class off the street.

Now our city leaders didn’t jump up and down on top of City Hall and proclaim to the world that Beaumont is open for business once again. But people began trickling in. The curfew was lifted, as was the evacuation order. More businesses continue to open each day and we find ourselves enmeshed in a never-ending Saturday. It’s more like a Christmas shopping Saturday from hell.

It is hard enough to get around town with the utility crewfolks, all 9,000 of them it seems, on every third street with their big trucks. That’s not to mention the tractors and big trailers on every other street picking up limbs and logs from downed trees. So when you throw in a lot of people driving their pickups, SUVs and every other vehicle in this galaxy, you have a hell of a mess on your hands.

Of course, I’ve got no complaint about the utility or cleanup crews. I don’t really have a beef with those who have returned. The more people who come home, the more businesses will open and perhaps sometime in the near future we’ll see some sanity prevail in our local traffic situation.

But I’ve got to ask. What are all these people doing out on the streets and where are they all going? It would seem Wal-Mart and Home Depot would be a couple of destinations. Or so you would think, judging by the crowds packing those places like dead men’s ballots in a Louisiana election. Maybe these people are just wandering around like nomads. Perhaps the storm left their houses unfit for living but they have no other place to go, so they just drive and drive and drive.

Or maybe they have just lost their minds. That sort of makes the most sense to me because you really have to be crazy to be driving around in my city right now.

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