NEEDLING

Last week and last weekend were crazy mixture panic, chaos, and partying. A large percentage of our customers at the liquor store had unexpected company. One woman was telling me they were five adults, six children, and ten dogs, at her house. Some people had one friend, others had several families, and everybody was drinking heavily. On Wednesday and Thursday, the supermarkets around town were emptied. The water went first. I don’t like tap water, and I usually stock up on gallon jugs of spring or distilled water. On Tuesday, I was running low, by the time I decided to get myself some water, there was none to get. Not a single bottle of water was available in the city. What people hadn’t scrounged and over-bought on, FEMA and the Red Cross had taken. Various employees in various supermarkets told me they didn’t even bother to load the shelves whenever they got a delivery. They took the pallets off the trucks and plopped them down by the front door, in thirty minutes, everything would be gone. Then by Thursday and Friday, the stores started to run out of bread, of dairy products, no more milk anywhere – I don’t drink milk, so that’s fine, and I don’t eat most breads you find around here either, so there... – then went the canned meats, the canned vegetables, and finally the potatoes and the onions. By Friday afternoon, the supermarket next to my work was empty. We at the liquor store didn’t quite run out, but we had a very strenuous week. Non stop. Busy all the time. We at least doubled our sales compared to the week before, and I haven’t quite recovered yet.

My friend’s mother lives just north east of Beaumont, Texas. Thursday, I called my friend to see if her mother had gotten out of there. What? My friend says, she hadn’t read the newspapers, watched television, nor looked on the internet. She knew there was a hurricane right off the coast, but wasn’t it landing in Corpus or Mexico or something? No, I said, it’s going straight for Beaumont or Galveston or around there somewhere. Well, my mom doesn’t want to leave. I think you’d better call her and tell her to get in her car. She left at 4 in the afternoon on Friday! It took her 6 hours to get to Austin, which is very fast, considering I’d been hearing all week from my clients and their unexpected house guests about the gridlock on the highways, that people took more than twenty hours to get from Houston to Austin, so 6 hours to get from Beaumont to Austin is exceptional. Now my friend, her mother, and their two dogs are staying in her tiny efficiency apartment for a few days.

Considering the panic which took place, even here in Austin, where the worse we could have expected was severe winds and rain, possibly the loss of electrical power for a few hours, and at best exactly what we got, beautiful sunshine with slight cooling winds, then I’d hate to see our city on the eve or during an actual catastrophe. People were fighting at gas stations, people were driving recklessly – they do on normal times, but it felt there were double the amount of crazies on the road – people were scrounging for food and water... not poor people, or hungry people, but people driving 50 thousand dollar vehicles were filling there trucks up with dozens and dozens of gallons of water, taking everything they could get their hands on. I overheard one such man on Wednesday afternoon who had literally filled the whole back of his truck with water, “you just cain’t be too ready, it’s just me and wife, but we got to get ready for the worst...” or something of the sort. One customer came into the store, a little upset, a little red in the face, but calming down, and told me about his adventure. He’d just been at the gas station, were he’d had to wait half an hour to get gas, and finally, he was at the pump, opening his gas tank and started going for the gas pump when the man parked on the other side of the pump was going for it. “What are you doing?” asked my client, “I’m getting gas,” answered the other man. “Fine,” said my client, “but stick to your side.” The other man had the pump on his side filling up his gas tank, and was reaching to the other side to fill up a truck load of jerrycans! Why would this man need this much gas?

That’s one thing I did. I saw that one coming, and I filled up my car on Tuesday evening last week. But that’s it, I didn’t stock up for the next three weeks!

People are nuts.