Galveston in the Time of Future-Past
Strolling down the boulevard on a twilight eve, the melodies of playing children, long forgotten, seemed to dance across the soft-white waves. The voices of the dreamers shone through the broken sunlight, to be slowly carried away, then lost to a gentle wind. October's haze had cast a heavy blanket of serenity over the island, as if to keep whatever once belonged there locked inside forever.
Here, on this grand boulevard, one stands atop a gift of life, a treasure given by one generation to all those that would come after. It righteously proclaimed for all time the right of future generations to have a community in this place, in defiance of a merciless and captivating sea.
The marks of wear and tear as pictured on this mighty Seawall and on its mural demonstrate all that it has taken on behalf of the city and its people so that Galveston might live. And all the more of the ocean's wrath will it have to take across the decades to come, so that the island might continue to be a source for life, and this should also be worn with pride.
The old and still grand harbor may yet help carry the city's smaller future, though even here there is an unfamiliar tranquillity. A spirit of pride looms large over the remnants of what was, even over the structures of idle resignation that box up the streets of a forgotten downtown. Signs of life, hope, and intellectual activity abound in the most unlikely corners, enduring features of the long ago that have somehow escaped history and made their way to reproduce themselves in the here and now.
The stillness of future-past hangs uneasily over this place, this tropical seaside isle abundant in potential, in search of its present-day identity.
Galveston reveals itself to the world, and to its residents, as an incomplete tapestry, as it shoulders the burdens of its incomplete history. It presents itself in graphic essence as a once major city that was cut off at the knees in an instant, emptied of its dreams, and frozen in time.
Yet inside that fossilized remnant, the substance of the old city that was, is growing a new and living city with smaller dreams, a new-old Galveston that continues, almost in defiance of time itself, to project its delicate luminescence across the sea.
Copyright © 2006, Hurricane Roadmap Project. This tribute was published in the op-ed section of the Galveston Daily News in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, on October 20, 2008.
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