A Letter to Rebecca Solnit from Austin, Texas After the Freeze

Dear Ms. Solnit,

The man stooping to fill a bucket with melting snow Friday insisted he had all he needed, but the one carrying an armful of jugs took up my offer. Jesse had crossed town to help his parents after his father broke a wrist slipping on ice. He said he wouldn’t need me to boil the water, he’d already gathered enough of the potable kind to keep them from going thirsty. They only wanted enough to be sure they could flush the toilet.

If there was some cold irony in Jesse’s career as a construction plumber, it didn’t speak loud enough to be heard over the connection made between him and my neighbors, digging to find the shutoff valve for their hemorrhaging pipes. Even after rescuing them, he insisted he owed me another favor for having the good luck of running water. In the moment, the whole concept of debt felt absurd — I couldn’t thank him enough for needing what I had, and for having what someone else needed.

A Paradise Built in Hell.

That was the first of your books I read, pulled off a library shelf without any expectation. I absorbed it a few months before Hurricane Harvey, a storm that washed damage onto the sudden shoreline of my city. As we pushed out help in waves lapping back toward the Gulf Coast, I felt as though your ideas found me just in time.

I’ve read much more of your work since then, though far from all of it — there’s real comfort in knowing more is always waiting for me. You certainly don’t need me to tell you about your own kaleidoscopic writing, but I offer my deep gratitude for the many words you’ve given to things so hard to name — profound interconnection, complex continuities that make nihilism seem foolish, hope. Words for things none of us could live or even have come to life without, things I doubt I could survive without realizing but that I too often let go unnamed.

So, because I suspect you might be paying attention to this place and time where your thoughts have helped keep my head straight, I feel compelled to name some small part of what has happened since Austin froze and went half dark on February 15.

Here, webs woven by wealthy white men rended violently. This fossil fuel-drenched state was crippled by another in the series of unmatched weather events on the altered planet, a cold front colliding with negligence. Most all Texans, from Green New Dealers to denialists, have adjusted their expectations for increasing and intensifying heatwaves, droughts, and floods. Few were ready for a prolonged freeze, and as faucets dripped in the evening on February 14, no one was predicting that the manmade systems of basic life support were about to become falling dominoes.

We all know now that the state’s highest ranking officials had been warned about the wintertime frailty of the electric grid after a 2011 blackout. Despite this, ERCOT, administrators of an ostensible public service structured through deregulation to better suit free-market, supply-and-demand profitability, held their system tight against the risks. The decade Texas Republicans had been spared to initiate weatherization and improve resiliency was spent instead policing women’s bodies, terrorizing immigrants, marginalizing trans people, and handcuffing municipalities that try to enact policies of progress or protection or simply try to fund themselves.

In that Texas red state-blue city spirit of local decontrol, Governor Abbott’s last tweet before the grid collapsed promised legislation to punish Austin for “defunding” the police department. In reality, APD’s oversize share of a limited city budget fell by a pittance last summer. The most sizable cuts came through moving functions like 911 and the forensics lab into civilian departments, with what little of the pie was actually pried away from the cops feeding critical needs like public health and EMS.

The governor’s Valentine’s Day attack proved extraordinarily relevant, EMS badly needing additional crews when their single-day record for calls was doubled by the blackout. Selena Xie, president of the Austin-Travis County EMS Association, testified to 28 hour shifts, ambulance wrecks on icy roads, families poisoned by carbon monoxide from burning their furniture for warmth, and finally breaking down when she had to tell someone to either continue storing a fresh corpse in their home or, if they could do so safely, drive it to a funeral home themselves. Receiving hospitals were packing patients into hallways and using kitty litter to manage human waste.

Perhaps Xie’s week could have been the slightest bit less traumatic if Austin actually had defunded APD, at levels the community demanded following two days of militarized assault on the uprising for Black lives that sent 29 protesters to the emergency room and lead pellets into the young brains of Justin Howell and Brad Levi Ayala. Instead, City Manager Spencer Cronk reacted with wooden defiance and a bureaucratic recalcitrance the entire city has now experienced once again. Before, during, and after the freeze, text alerts never came, warming shelters went unpublicized, rumors of a looming water crisis were denied while reservoirs ran dry, and calls from city council members trying to get food and water to their constituents were ignored. The city’s official response proved it was not simply the language failing when hypothermia, empty oxygen tanks, hunger, and thirst were called “frustrations” and “inconveniences” instead of “emergencies”.

Left adrift by all this suit-and-tie barbarism, other webs, webs of care woven with strands more tenuous but more plentiful, held communities together against unknowable suffering and death.

Perhaps most eye-catching have been the mutual aid groups that initially sprang up as antibodies to the pandemic. The relationships they built with unhoused neighbors prepared them to execute an emergency response the city failed to provide. Austin Mutual Aid and their allies moved 467 people from tents into rooms, receiving a request for assistance every six minutes while simultaneously cobbling together an infrastructure of service. Thousands of meals have been cooked, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been raised to foot hotel bills, and even as the temperature hit 84 degrees today, the campaign of care has not let up.

The need for that care remains desperate in a state that’s for so long left so many dangling without a safety net. On Monday, a supply distribution center begged anyone who could to bring diapers and formula (along with drinking water) to mothers who, after days of cradling their babies and praying for heat, waited patiently to meet the next of their children’s needs in a line of cars a mile long. Everyday people with access to restocked grocery stores and cash to spare have been filling their trunks with staples and rushing them to community centers, scraping together humanitarian aid in the absence of a protective government.

Some of the most striking acts of solidarity have been the most intimate. Thousands of people were kept safe this week by the folks next door or neighborhood buy-nothing groups. Families that had stayed alone at home for the entire first year of COVID-19 invited freezing acquaintances into spaces their own kin had been forbidden to enter. In an area first responders couldn’t reach, the only household with power saved a woman’s life by making laps to keep her BiPAP machine’s battery charged.

Here, in a state on a knife’s edge between opportunity and oblivion, I want to ask questions I know you can’t answer, things you wouldn’t pretend to know about the dark and unwritten future. There’s no way of knowing what we’ll be able to carry forward with us, how sustained collective care will be challenged or antagonized, whether Texas would prefer to change itself or to self-destruct. The weather has shifted, but the climate doesn’t feel any safer.

For now, our disaster is still unfolding. The pipes are still getting fixed, the flooded homes are still moldering, the utility bills still lag behind the multi-thousand-dollar panic attacks Texans outside Austin have already been issued. Too many people are still thirsty, still hungry, still not sure how they’ll make up for last week’s paycheck or where they’re gonna go with so little housing available even before so much damage. The virus is still in the air, even if desperation forced recalculations of its fatal risk. We know that many lives are gone, but nowhere near how many.

In this state, in a state of grief, there is an unbearable clarity. It’s as though the webs become bare wires, electrifying, arcs blinding, maybe more than a heart can take. My partner got a phone call today from the woman who fostered the stray dog we adopted weeks before the storm. On the same day we gave water to the plumber who helped our neighbors, the fosterer’s mother, left too long without dialysis, died.