HOUSTON — You couldn’t really see through the windows during Hurricane Harvey (we need to stop giving these things cute names). Our place on the edge of Houston’s Montrose neighborhood is set high enough above the fast-flooded Route 59 that we didn’t suffer the same fate as that road and most of the city around us. Three days in, our landlord reassured us that we were situated atop a massive storm drain. So what little we could see, we watched.
We have one of those windows you see stuck onto old Wendy’s locations that still have the salad bar. Sort of a ’70s solarium that has stood up to decades of baking and soaking in the Houston humidity through generations of caulk. It leaks the way a fresco of Mary cries — just sometimes. For four days it wept, and it felt like the whole house was driving through a car wash.
On TV we had a limited, glitchy view of the outside world through our shaky satellite signal, which chewed up the faces of talking heads as it stuttered and halted, stalling the floods the only way it could manage. The anchors and the cameras had to retreat upstairs to conference rooms. It was as though the water was pushing through the seams of the broadcast.
But really, the only windows that showed us anything useful were our Internet browsers. There was the view from inside — our local social-media circles, work groups, and local bulletins and alerts — and there was the view from outside. You can guess which one was more helpful.
“What a crowd, what a turnout,” said Twitter over and over, echoing President Trump’s unhelpful comments to a gathering of supporters and (also!) flood victims. “Why didn’t Houston evacuate?” wondered Temporary Storm Pundits in thinkpieces made more useless only by their unsuitability as flotation devices. (Hint: flood + cars.) “Texans voted against flood relief for other states,” tweeted a list of people I will keep folded in my pocket. “Zoning is important and Joel Osteen is bad.” Yes. Yes, we know it is and he is.
Literally drowning over here, guys.
Meanwhile, there was the other Internet, the one for which we thanked every bar on our phones. Friends and “friends” and strangers and neighbors and nearby public posters turned Houston social media into a viral emergency resource. Friends went live in their living rooms to report conditions, or posted galleries of photos documenting the rise of the water line up their driveways and through their front doors. Others went live at shelters to give updates on what supplies were most needed and where volunteers should report.
Friends shared public Google Maps updated live to reflect flooded and destroyed roads. Databases from rescue groups circulated across social media, allowing thousands of residents trapped at home but connected to the Internet to call for help. (The New York Times has a stunning visualization of these distress calls.) Calls for rescue also spread across Twitter, amplified by benevolent retweets from around the world. Instagram and Snapchat Stories gave hunkered-down and flooded-in friends quick glances of one another’s status, and soggy carpets.
And the thousands of shares of small business owner Cort McMurray’s Facebook post “Five Things Non-Houstonians Need To Understand” functioned like a wall of sandbags against an influx of unhelpful analysis and commentary from elsewhere. “We really aren’t thinking Red or Blue right now,” one point reads. “We are taking a royal beating, all of us. Disasters don’t care about ideology.”
When you grow up in New England, “storm” conjures an event you can stand up to. When it snows really hard, you simply wait for it to stop — or maybe don’t — and, armed with shovel or blower, you go out there and physically attack it. Snow is thrown or blown or plowed or hauled off. Take that, snow, you might mutter.
Water’s not like that. When it rains and rains, the rain wins and you lose. And when it keeps raining, say, for five days, you keep losing. You can’t carry the water. It carries you. Or it just kicks you out of your house. It’s overwhelming. It will probably rain like this in Boston someday and you’ll see what I mean. (Sorry.)
Lately, Houston’s been accumulating all sorts of “Next Great American City”-type accolades. It’s the most racially and ethnically diverse city in the country, the fourth largest and rising. In many ways, Houston offers a vision of what cities in America might look like in the future. Harvey gave Houston an especially cruel view of the possibilities that await in that very same future, but I worry the rest of us might not have the view we need. We might not really feel it until it’s up to our knees, until it’s coming in through the windows.
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.