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Cold Complacency

Small Town Texas and Climate Change

By Rana K. WilliamsonPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Cold Complacency
Photo by erin mckenna on Unsplash

Texas made the news. No gunplay was involved. No football game, oil spill, or crooked political contest. The weather just turned cold. Snow-on-the-beach-in-Galveston cold.

I know something about extreme Texas weather, knowledge gained while earning two degrees researching a seven-year drought that hit the Southwest in the 1950s. I’ve seen our spring-fed rivers sit bone dry, but until the week of February 15, 2021, I never saw them ice over.

Safe and warm in North Texas, I followed the struggles of my Hill Country hometown via social media. Most of the 2,400 people in that small ranching community hate “change” in general and lump “climate change” in the radical heresy category. In that regard they’re a microcosm of a larger problem.

Understand that during the protracted storm the townspeople did all the right things that make me proud to call that place home. They looked out after one another. Rescued motorists stranded on the interstate. Checked on the old folks, fed the hungry, and provided warmth for those who had no heat.

But as the frigid week dragged on, the cracks in their isolated lives still surfaced. Without trucks to bring in supplies, grocery shelves went bare and gas tanks drained to empty. People worried about filling their prescriptions and getting enough feed for the livestock.

Ten months earlier under the first Covid-19 restrictions these same generous, community-minded people muttered dark imprecations about “outsiders” coming in to take “our food and gas.” The irony to be found in comparing the two events was not lost on me.

Fear can slam closed the kindest door. The solidarity that accompanied this crisis stood in sharp contrast to the suspicion and derision with which the community faced the virus. One they could see and understand, the other they could not.

This is not the first time I’ve pondered the time-warp in which the town seems to exist. Over the last decade they’ve been menaced by record wildfires, floods, and even the unheard of touchdown of a tornado. Each time the citizens pull together, clean up, move on—and forget.

The time for forgetting should have passed by now. We’re looking at potential sea level rise along the coast of two to five feet in the next hundred years. Hurricanes are more frequent and intense. With water demand on the rise, Texas has depleted more than 50 percent of its underground stores since the 1950s.

The weatherman on the local channel grins and says this was a “once in a lifetime storm,” but I suspect even he knows that’s not true. Weather extremes that were once rare have become annual events and failing infrastructure reveals the thin underpinning of modern life.

Current news reports tell us that at peak demand during this winter storm the Texas’ independent power grid was mere minutes from total failure—an event that would have plunged the entire state into the dark and cold.

As the lights start to come back on, angry people will file their insurance claims and get the pipes fixed. They might buy a generator and stick it in the garage closet in case something like this happens again.

But few will pause to consider that for a week in February when sub-zero temperatures drove them from their homes and into warming shelters, they caught a glimpse of life as a climate refugee.

Next time will the people of my hometown and all the hometowns like it, the tiny havens of complacency that live 25 years in the past and turn away from realities they don’t like, be the dispensers of comfort or the “outsiders” searching for feud and fuel?

I wish that question made them as uncomfortable as it makes me.

humanity
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About the Creator

Rana K. Williamson

An independent author finding her way through life one word and a hundred edits at a time. To see my published series and projects in progress, please visit www.ranakwilliamson.com.

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