A great guy named David commissioned me to paint him a piece. After I completed the work, packed the painting and shipped it out to Houston, I realized I had just sent it into the middle of a hurricane.
It did arrive safely, only a little late. I asked David if he would tell us what he went through and saw. Here is his story…………
HURRICANE IKE
By David Bedikian
Hurricane Ike was a learning experience for me, as I think it was for most of Houston and Southeast Texas. Thing is, it wasn’t the kind of learning experience I thought it would be. Going into it I thought I’d learn what it feels like to be in the middle of winds that can destroy a whole city. I thought I’d learn what a tornado looks like. I thought I’d see massive waves come in and flood everything. I thought I’d see trees come crashing down, and cars fly, and homes disappear . . . In other words, I thought my experience with Ike would be about the storm. I was wrong. Ike wasn’t about any of that. And that was only the beginning of what I learned.
Ike was about people. Ike was about being stuck at home without power, with no gas, with the street outside your house looking like a war zone. Ike was about re-learning how to spend an entire day with no tv, no computer, no car, no friends, and no family. Ike was about being your own repairman, gardener, and cook, but also about being a neighbor, a member of the community, and a friend to people you didn’t know and had never met. I saw people giving toys to kids that they didn’t know. I saw people giving away their extra food and water to people who didn’t have it. I saw people freezing ice in their own refrigerators, and then giving it out to people on the street, even though they didn’t have to and nobody asked them to do it. I saw people with extra gas giving strangers and old folks rides. I saw people repairing other people’s homes. Think about the last time you let ten total strangers into your place, not just thinking but knowing they were genuinely there to help you. Think about that kind of trust. And it all happened, all of it, because this hurricane brought us all together.
The same things, the same people that I saw everyday before were . . . different. I’m a guy in my 20s, with a stressful job and a lot of stuff to do, running around from place to place trying to get things together in my life. I never stopped moving long enough to notice all the people around me. After the hurricane hit, all the people I never stopped long enough to appreciate were the same ones helping me cut broken trees down, clean up the street, find water and food, and pass the time. It didn’t matter if people were rich or poor because neither the 08 S550 benz nor the 82 chevy rustbucket had any gas. It didn’t matter if you had satellite, cable, a 50” plasma, sound system, xbox, or anything else, because none of that was gonna work. It didn’t matter if you had an expensive home or a place that was falling apart, because yknow, it all looked the fuckin same in the dark.
So yeah. Ike was a learning experience. I saw beer become water for washing hands, because the water looked like sludge, and the sludge looked like broken glass and waste. I never knew beer could be so important. I saw a front yard become a grocery store, a community center, and a haven. I never knew some bottled water and peanut butter could look so good. I saw broken houses, broken trees, and broken lives being overcome with the help of total strangers. I never knew that people cared. But most of all I saw that no matter how important you think you are, no matter how much stuff you have, no matter how many friends you’ve got, no matter what school you went to or what neighborhood you live in, there are times when none of it matters. Ike didn’t care. Nobody else cared either. My community got through this because we pulled together and worked to help each other out. Because at the heart of it, we are all good people and hated to see others suffer when there’s something we could do about it.
I wish we could all be like that without needing a Hurricane Ike to remind us of these things. Think about the difference it could make if we all cared that much about our fellow man every day. If we stopped trying to divide ourselves into social classes, ethnicities, religious views, or affiliations and started just being people. People who care about each other. It took a massive storm, a bunch of destruction, hardship and misery for me to really learn that. I had to see it with my own eyes or I wouldn’t have believed it. It shouldn’t have taken all that. And maybe that was the most important learning of all.
Dave
*Images collected by writer
