Galveston Quotes

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

When it worked, reading could take away the burden of time.

We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it.

Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

There’s no getting out alive, but you hope to avoid a deadline.

What I remembered about the man then was how helpless he'd seemed, and how you could tell that helplessness had made him cruel.

I suppose you have to be very careful how you use your memories.

The past isn't real.

Something passed close to me then, a feeling or piece of knowledge, but I couldn't quite get it. A sense of something I'd once known or felt, a memory that wouldn't come into the light. I kept reaching, but I couldn't grasp the thing. It felt near, though.

No sir,” Dunwoody snapped. “It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.

The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

And then she started crying, tears which crawled slowly, silently down her cheeks, as though pain had finally found an avenue of escape.

Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life—people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle—and I wanted to alter that.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.

You’re born and forty years later you hobble out a bar, startled by your own aches. Nobody knows you. You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key. So you head toward the last thing you have left to lose, with no real idea what you’re going to do with it.

When I read I got involved in the words and what they were saying so that I didn't measure the passing of time in typical ways. I was surprised to learn that there was this freedom made of nothing but words. Then I felt like I had missed some crucial point, a long time ago.

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

I remember a buddy of mine once telling me that every woman you loved was a mother and sister you didn't have, at once, and that what you were always really looking for was the female part of yourself, your female animal or something. This guy could get away with saying something like that because he was a junkie and read books.

If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far.

In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.

I think the reason men liked her was because she gave off high levels of carnality. You looked at her and just knew - this one's up for anything. It's sexy, but you can't really stand it.

In 1924, Nikola Tesla was asked why he never married? His answer was this: "I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship. But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man - in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization. Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again. Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it - and there is striking evidence at hand that they do - then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history. Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects - a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life. The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me." Galveston Daily News, Galveston, Texas, page 23. August 10, 1924.

Now and then she looked harassed by her own potential, like certain young people, and you might notice then the way a stillness spread through her eyes, and her unguarded face forgot to play a role, just look stunned by confusion and remorse, while the features of this face were organized by a kind of country pride that wouldn't admit confusion or remorse.

So I was wrong when I told Rocky you could choose what you feel. It's not true. It's not even true that you can choose when you'll feel. All that happens is that the past clots like a cataract or scab, a scab of memory over your eyes. And one day the light breaks through.

You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key.

She reminded me of the empty glass of a swallowed cocktail, and at the heart of the empty glass was a smashed lime rind on ice.

For both of us the landscape had a gravity that tugged us backward in time, possessed us with people we used to be.

I was worried I’d live forever.

I’d known dudes like this my whole life, country morons stuck in a state of permanent resentment. They abuse small animals, grow up to beat their kids with belts and wreck their trucks driving drunk, find Jesus at forty and start going to church and using prostitutes.

actual army, because I’d used a knife to cut little strips out of the can sides so that they folded down, like arms, and I’d pulled the tops upright to resemble heads. I’d done all that while watching Fort Apache,

…I relied on an unpublished report by Jose Fernandez-Partagas, a late-twentieth-century meteorologist who recreated for the National Hurricane Center the tracks of many historical hurricanes, among them the Galveston Hurricane. He was a meticulous researcher given to long hours in the library of the University of Miami, where he died on August 25, 1997, in his favorite couch. He had no money, no family, no friends--only hurricanes. The hurricane center claimed his body, had him cremated, and on August 31, 1998, launched his ashes through the drop-port of a P-3 Orion hurricane hunter into the heart of Hurricane Danielle. His remains entered the atmosphere at 28 N., 74.2 W., about three hundred miles due east of Daytona Beach.

CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families. At

She sipped her drink and the ends of her lips curled, stamped two dimples on her cheeks, and in her smile flashed the danger of momentum, of riding hard with no plan. But I didn't need a plan, only movement. Like the purest assassin, I was already dead.

If I give her the truth, then maybe I am released of its obligations. I can pass the truth to its rightful owner, and the frozen stars in my chest might finally ignite.

She was weak, a clever woman who willed herself stupid.

What I came to see later was that I was asking her to convince me, to give me an excuse. Like an unmade part of me saw its chance to be born.

For the rest of the day, her weight echoed in my empty hands, light but dense, her throes and kicks.

Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous—entirely too hopeful—to be true.

Queers doing cowboy dancing. Who would’ve thunk it? Kids who grew up in Galveston and Tucson and Modesto, performing the folk dances of their homeland finally, finally with the partner of their choice.

In the book, hummin bins made castles, and towers up to the sky. They tamed the animals and took care of them. And hummin bins helped each other. They were always good. "When I was done, Ma asked, 'Delly, what are hummin bins?' 'They're like people, but better,' I said. Then I told her, 'When I grow up, I'm going to live with the hummin bins,' and she smiled. "But Galveston grabbed the book, 'Let me see that,' she said, and started laughing. 'This says human beings. There's no such things as hummin bins.' "'Ma, is it true?' I asked, and she nodded. 'How come you didn't tell me?' I cried. "'I liked the hummin bins better, too,' she said." ... "RB's right, Ferris Boyd. You are a hummin bin." Her eyeballs were wet, like they were swimming. It was quiet, then, till RB's soft cloud voice said, "You're a hummin bin, too, Delly.

He noticed Miss Bettie was wearing a watch, a steel Rolex with diamond chips. "What time is it?" he asked. Miss Bettie glanced at him and laughed. "You do seem to have difficulty remembering, don't you? Well, then, I shall tell you. It's now, Joshua Cane. Always and only now.

Kolchak nodded, 'Right, because that would make sense." He took off his hat and crumpled it against his hip. 'When I lived in Seattle, I met a man who had been killing people for a hundred years easily. I nearly got arrested painting on his portrait in the bank he owned, just to match his face to the hundred-year-old shot I had of him with a beard. It's possible.' 'Why didn't you just take a picture of the painting and scribble on the picture?' 'It was a gesture,' Kolchak wrung his hands, 'and anyway that's not the point.' ("Wet Dog of Galveston")

As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.

Some seagulls strutted the parking lot with a kind of haughty entitlement that made me think of clergy.

The sensation of a thing forgotten but resonating.

Mama!” a little boy squealed. “Take me closer!

In a way, for women, marriage was like an extended babysitting gig. The woman was committing herself to coddling and watching over a grown man for the rest of her life.

Today is a day for jubilation,” Grant said, leaning on the podium. “We celebrate this day as the day word reached Galveston and then spread throughout the region and into other Southern states that freedom had come to millions and a great injustice had been undone. We celebrate the day we got word our great nation, torn apart, but once again united, had taken one bold and decisive step toward fulfilling a promise at the core of its creed, that all people are created equal. But this is not just a celebration. The path toward justice is long and uncertain. It sometimes moves forward and sometimes winds its way back. So today is also a day of reflection. It is a day to look around and ask ourselves, ‘Where are we on that path?

We lost our courage as a people. Sure, some people still had it, but as a people, as a group where we all had to commit resources to a common good, we were too scared and petty and divided to do anything worth remembering.

The long red hair was feminine on his slight frame and his features were all about deprivation, angles of want. But maybe that beggary tugged some sympathy from me, because I remembered how hard I worked not to seem scared at his age.

An army of empty High Life cans covered the floor around the chair—an actual army, because I’d used a knife to cut little strips out of the can sides so that they folded down, like arms, and I’d pulled the tops upright to resemble heads.

I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier." "Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not." "We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born." "Oh, I like choice, though," he said. "I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and yarn with. Don't you wish for a choice once in a while ?" She considered, and then said, "Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr. Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?" "Well, I'm kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel. But ma'am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I'm a simple aeronaut, and I'd like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I've got enough, ma'am, I'm gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I'll never leave the ground again." "There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves." "I see that, ma'am, and I envy you; but I ain't got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I'm just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain't been told nothing about kinda troubling." "lorek Byrnison's quarrel with his king is part of it too," said the witch. "This child is destined to play a part in that." "You speak of destiny," he said, "as if it was fixed. And I ain't sure I like that any more than a war I'm enlisted in without knowing about it. Where's my free will, if you please? And this child seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she's just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can't change?" "We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she's told what she must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. * * * I left Ashton Villa and began my trek to Galveston’s Old Central Cultural Center, about a half mile away from Ashton Villa. The building was formerly part of Central High School, which

Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red to purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows.

Before these laws could be put into effect, a new wave of white settlers swept westward and formed the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa. This made it necessary for the policy makers in Washington to shift the “permanent Indian frontier” from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian. (This line ran from Lake of the Woods on what is now the Minnesota-Canada border, slicing southward through what are now the states of Minnesota and Iowa, and then along the western borders of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, to Galveston Bay, Texas.) To keep the Indians beyond the 95th meridian and to prevent unauthorized white men from crossing it, soldiers were garrisoned in a series of military posts that ran southward from Fort Snelling on the Mississippi River to forts Atkinson and Leavenworth on the Missouri, forts Gibson and Smith on the Arkansas, Fort Towson on the Red, and Fort Jesup in Louisiana.

Galveston?” he asked in that amazing voice, still surprising me by keeping our conversation going. “Yeah. Staying at a beach house and everything. Totally slumming it and having a miserable time, you know?” I gave him a real smile that time. Rip just raised his brows. “I promised her I would go visit, and she promised she would come up too... What’s that face for?” I surprised myself by laughing. “I don’t believe it either. I’ll get lucky if she comes once. I’m not that delusional.” I didn’t imagine the way his cheek twitched again, just a little, just enough to keep the smile on my face. “I’m stuck making my own lunches from now on. I have nobody to watch scary movies with who’s more dramatic than I am screaming at the scary parts. And my house is empty,” I told him, going on a roll. “Your lunches?” was what he picked up on. I wasn’t sure how much he’d had to drink that he was asking me so many questions, but I wasn’t going to complain. “I can’t cook to save my life, boss. I thought everyone knew. Baking is the only thing I can handle.” “You serious?” he asked in a surprised tone. I nodded. “For real?” “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I can’t even make rice in an Instant Pot. It’s either way too dry or it’s mush.” Oh. “An Instant Pot is—” “I know what it is,” he cut me off. It was my turn to make a face, but mine was an impressed one. He knew what an Instant Pot was but not a rom-com. Okay. “Sorry.” He didn’t react to me trying to tease him, instead he asked, “You can’t even make rice in that?” “Nope.” “You know there’s instructions online.” Was he messing with me now? I couldn’t help but watch him a little. How much had he drunk already? “Yeah, I know.” “And you still screw it up?” I blinked, soaking up Chatty Cathy over here like a plant that hadn’t seen the sun in too long. “I wouldn’t say I screw it up. It’s more like… you either need to chew a little more or a little less.” It was his turn to blink. “It’s a surprise. I like to keep people on their toes.” If I hadn’t been guessing that he’d had a couple drinks before, what he did next would have confirmed it. His left cheek twitched. Then his right one did too, and in the single blink of an eye, Lucas Ripley was smiling at me. Straight white teeth. That not-thin but not-full mouth dark pink and pulled up at the edges. He even had a dimple. Rip had a freaking dimple. And I wanted to touch it to make sure it was real. I couldn’t help but think it was just about the cutest thing I had ever seen, even though I had zero business thinking anything along those lines. But I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t say a single word to mention it; otherwise, it might never come out again. What I did trust myself to do was gulp down half of my Sprite before saying, “You can make rice, I’m guessing?” If he wanted to talk, we could talk. I was good at talking. “Uh-huh,” he replied, sounding almost cocky about it. All I could get myself to do in response was grin at him, and for another five seconds, his dimple—and his smile—responded to me.

DURING those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the changes that took place in a man’s beliefs and scale of values. More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now; his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant; accidents that had occurred en route, like the shipwreck in Galveston harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric. He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing.

Witches own nothing, so we’re not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don’t feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?” “Well, I’m kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel. But ma’am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I’m a simple aeronaut, and I’d like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I’ve got enough, ma’am, I’m gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I’ll never leave the ground again.” “There’s another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.” “I see that, ma’am, and I envy you; but I ain’t got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I’m just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain’t been told nothing about kinda troubling.” “Iorek Byrnison’s quarrel with his king is part of it too,” said the witch. “This child is destined to play a part in that.” “You speak of destiny,” he said, “as if it was fixed. And I ain’t sure I like that any more than a war I’m enlisted in without knowing about it. Where’s my free will, if you please?

If I give her the truth, then maybe I am released of its obligations. I can pass the truth to its rightful owner, and the frozen stars in my chest might finally ignite.

Galveston had worked out a good deal, and it didn't mean schlepping bags through security with all the other cattle.

One of the hardest lessons we all have to learn is how few choices life gives to a civilized woman with any conscience at all.

The application of time and skill to frivolous things is the hallmark of civilized society,

We get a whole lifetime to learn just one lesson,” Samuel Cane said. “How to lose with dignity.

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

I tugged on Galveston's parka. "I have an idea," and showed him a tub of bacon grease from my bag. I had procured it from the meteorological station.

He hadn’t been so well worked over since Galveston. Judging by the muted morning light outside, they had just enough time to do it again before the real world intruded, if only he could find his wayward bedmate.

On November 2, 1899, eight members of the United States Navy were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism and service beyond the call of duty. On the night of June 2, 1898, they had volunteered to scuttle the collier USS Merrimac, with the intention of blocking the entry channel to Santiago de Cuba. On orders of Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, who was in command, their intention was to trap Spanish Admiral Cervera’s fleet in the harbor. Getting the USS Merrimac underway, the eight men navigated the ship towards a predetermined location where sinking her would seal the port. Their course knowingly took them within the range of the Spanish ships and the shore batteries. The sailors were well aware of the danger this put them into, however they put their mission first. Once the Spanish gunners saw what was happening, they realized what the Americans were up to and started firing their heavy artillery from an extremely close range. The channel leading into Santiago is narrow, preventing the ship from taking any evasive action. The American sailors were like fish in a barrel and the Spanish gunners were relentless. In short order, the heavy shelling from the Spanish shore batteries disabled the rudder of the Merrimac and caused the ship to sink prematurely. The USS Merrimac went down without achieving its objective of obstructing navigation and sealing the port. ‎Fête du Canada or Canada Day is the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the Canadian Constitution Act. This weekend Americans also celebrate the United States’, July 4, 1776 birthday, making this time perfect to celebrate George Fredrick Phillips heroic action. Phillips was one of the men mentioned in the story above of the USS Merrimac. He was born on March 8, 1862, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada and joined the United States Navy in March 1898 in Galveston, Texas. Phillips became a Machinist First Class and displayed extraordinary heroism throughout the Spanish bombardment during their operation. He was discharged from the Navy in August 1903, and died a year later at the age of 42 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His body was returned to Canada where he was interred with honors at the Fernhill Cemetery in his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick.

For the rest of the day, her weight echoed in my empty hands

On many a Friday night, coming home from a week-long training mission in a T-38 just like the one I was in now, Roger and I would buzz our houses just before turning sharply left, dropping the gear and landing at Ellington Air Force Base. From as far as San Antonio, we would point the needle nose of our plane directly at the driveway separating our houses and roar over Barbuda Lane, shaking the shingles and rattling the dishes at 600 knots. The noisy message let our wives (and neighbors) know that we would be home soon. We would land, jump into our cars, and race down the two-lane Old Galveston Highway, through the single stoplight in the town of Webster at eighty miles per hour and screech up to our houses in less than ten minutes. It was all somewhat illegal, but what the hell, we were astronauts!

I mean, you told me once that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s not giving a crap.

Everything’s worth fixing if you care about it. Even people.

For several seconds, both of them stood together laughing, crossing from the side of that invisible bridge where strangers meet by chance, to the other side, where friends gather by choice.

I tried to conceive of not existing, but I didn’t have the imagination for it.

My license was suspended after an unfortunate incident involving a raccoon, a bottle of castor oil, and a road trip down to Galveston.

I am unsure if teaching me how to fish could feed me for a lifetime unless I aspire to spend my whole life living in the Galveston seashores.

Life was short, cruel, and worth the effort, and compromise and accommodation were easy habits.

The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went. Even now, with barbecues and red soda pop, they celebrate June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers rode into Galveston, announced that the Civil War was over, and released the quarter-million slaves in Texas who, not knowing they had been freed, had toiled for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Besides, there's more to a person than the worst thing they done.

Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Nutrition is the most under-utilized medication, yet it is the most effective.

And once she’d repaid her debt to Huey, maybe then she and her son could truly start over.

No, she’d need to mask her advice-giving behind something else. Find her own version of bitterroot. Her eye snagged on the yellow book. Palm reading. Ridiculous as it was, it might be the perfect guise.

When Texas seceded from the Union, the German preacher, Peter Moeling, wrote from Galveston: “I shall die a true patriot and a soldier of the Cross, the gun in hand and Christ within my heart.

Her story about an Ohio storm that split open one tree and burned down a carriage house was nothing, not to me. I didn’t know where Ohio sat but I figured it didn’t have water on all sides. Galveston was my home and you won’t catch me saying one bad word against it. But I remembered from my schoolgoing days the map of the United States. It was pinned up on the wall by the chalkboard. Texas was big, like it deserved to be. It outshined every other state by a mile. But a person had to look hard to find Galveston. It was off to the side of Texas, just a sliver of land in the Gulf of Mexico.

The 1900 Galveston storm was the worst US natural disaster in the twentieth century. The city, population 37,789, was submerged in 8 to 15 feet of water, and prior to the wind destroying the Weather Bureau’s anemometer, the last recorded wind velocity was 84 miles per hour. It is speculated that during the height of the storm the winds ranged from 120 to 150 miles per hour. Historians estimate that over 6,000 people were killed in the city and that another 1,000 perished on the rest of the island. On the mainland, the death toll was approximately 1,000. The Promise is a work of fiction but I tried to keep the depiction of the island, the sequence of the storm, and the aftermath grounded in fact as much as possible. A great deal has been written about the city of Galveston but very little about the people who lived outside of the city limits.

the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes spoke to very specific things.

While African Americans had long played important roles in civic life, while the docks had seen the progress of the Negro Longshoreman’s Union, and while all kinds of people mingled in the city streets, much of Galveston’s social and political life had long involved rigid racial segregation.

Quarterbacks today, they're ripped. You ever see players at the combine meat market, standing up on stage in their skivvies so the owners and coaches can take a look?" "Uh, no. I haven't. And I don't want to." Sam chuckled. "It is a bit strange, white team owners and coaches eyeballing these big black studs same way white plantation owners used to eyeball black slaves being sold on the docks in Galveston—I saw a show on cable about that, struck me—but difference is, these black players are going to make millions not pick cotton.

Clear of the cities, Texas turned into a green desert meant to hammer you with vastness, a mortar filled with sky.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. —William Faulkner

Static filled the television’s noise, and the voices from it sounded like endless newspapers being crushed.

—¿Has estado alguna vez en Galveston? —le pregunté. Ella negó con la cabeza.

managed to snag the last available table and all three ordered the special with sweet tea to drink. “It’s like Thanksgiving,” Shiloh said. “Not for me. Thanksgiving was working an extra shift so the folks with kids could be home for the day. Christmas was the same,” Bonnie said. Abby shrugged. “The army served turkey and dressing on the holidays. It wasn’t what Mama made, but it tasted pretty damn good.” Since it was a special and only had to be dipped up and served, they weren’t long getting their meal. Abby shut her eyes on the first bite and made appreciative noises. “This is so good. I may eat here every Sunday.” “And break Cooper’s heart?” Bonnie asked. “Hey, now! One night of drinking together does not make us all bosom buddies or BFFs or whatever the hell it’s called these days.” Abby waved at the waitress, who came right over. “I want this plate all over again,” she said. “Did you remember that we do have pie for dessert?” the waitress asked. “Yes, I’ll have two pieces, whipped cream on both. What about you, Shiloh?” She blushed. “I shouldn’t, but . . . yes, and go away before I change my mind.” “Bonnie?” Abby asked. Bonnie shook her head. “Just an extra piece of pie will do me.” “So that’s two more specials and five pieces of pie, right?” the waitress asked. “You got it,” Abby said. “I’m having ice cream when we finish with hair and nails. You two are going to be moaning and groaning about still being too full,” Bonnie said. “Not me. By the middle of the afternoon I’ll be ready for ice cream,” Abby said. “My God, how do you stay so small?” Shiloh asked. “Damn fine genes. Mama wasn’t a big person.” “Well, my granny was as wide as she was tall and every bite of food I eat goes straight to my thighs and butt,” Shiloh said. “But after that wicked, evil stuff last night, I’m starving.” “It burned all the calories right out of your body,” Abby said. “Anything you eat today doesn’t even count.” “You are full of crap,” Shiloh leaned forward and whispered. The waitress returned with more plates of food and slices of pumpkin pie with whipped cream, taking the dirty dishes back away with her. Bonnie picked up the clean fork on the pie plate and cut a bite-size piece off. “Oh. My. God! This is delicious. Y’all can eat Cooper’s cookin’. I’m not the one kissin’ on him, so I don’t give a shit if I hurt his little feelin’s or not. I’m comin’ here for pumpkin pie next Sunday if I have to walk.” “If Cooper doesn’t want to cook, maybe we can all come back here with him and Rusty next Sunday,” Abby said. “And if he does?” Shiloh asked. “Then I’m eating a steak and you can borrow my truck, Bonnie. I’d hate to see you walk that far. You’d be too tired to take care of the milkin’ the next day,” Abby said. “And you don’t know how to milk a cow, do you?” Bonnie’s blue eyes danced when she joked. Abby took a deep breath and told the truth. “No, I don’t, and I don’t like chickens.” “Well, I hate hogs,” Shiloh admitted. “And I can’t milk a cow, either.” “Looks like it might take all three of us to run that ranch after all.” Bonnie grinned. The waitress refilled their tea glasses. “Y’all must be the Malloy sisters. I heard you’d come to the canyon. Ezra used to come in here pretty often for our Sunday special and he always took an extra order home with him. Y’all sound like him when you talk. You all from Texas?” “Galveston,” Abby said. “Arkansas, but I lived in Texas until I graduated high school,” Shiloh said. The waitress looked at Bonnie. “Kentucky after leavin’ Texas.” “I knew I heard the good old Texas drawl in your voices,” the waitress said as she walked away. “Wonder how much she won on that pot?” Abby whispered. Shiloh had been studying her ragged nails but she looked up.

A True P.I. Private Investigator has offices in Katy, Conroe, Galveston, The Woodlands and Clearlake however we cover all areas in between San Antonio and the surrounding areas. In a city as large as San Antonio you need an experienced San Antonio private investigator, one with the right ability training and knowledge to conduct an investigation, at A True P.I. we have handpicked each and every investigator and provided extensive training, starting with state of the art equipment and up to date investigative techniques.

One must not panic or struggle when trying to get free from a rope …

What if I am panicked, though?” she blurted out. Darl was quiet for a minute. “Practice until you’re not.” “That doesn’t help much in the moment.” “Life ain’t about a single moment.

If you’ve noticed that you’re hungrier and crave unhealthy foods when you don’t get enough sleep, chalk it up to hormones. Studies show that when you sleep only four or five hours a night, the hunger hormone ghrelin spikes—so you feel really hungry the next day. Plus, when you’re sleep deprived, your body releases cortisol. When cortisol goes up, it tells your liver to release its stored glucose. But it also limits insulin. So, your blood sugar levels soar, making you crave foods, usually sugary carbs. Still other research has linked sleep deprivation to depression and anxiety, both prevalent in mid-life, as well as insulin resistance, which is a trigger for high blood pressure, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.