Houston: My First Landing

WHEN Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the first word he said was “Houston”.

I managed to grab a cheap flight from Auckland to Houston for less than $500. It was going to be the beginning of my travel around the United States, with the particular intention of witnessing the presidential election firsthand.

And what an election it would turn out to be: monumental.

I arrived at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, or simply the Houston International Airport. With a population of over six million, the Houston metropolitan area is the second largest in Texas (just after Dallas- Fort Worth), and the fifth largest in the entire United States. So, I arrived into American city culture at full throttle, engines pumping.

Houston sits on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, a creek with several tributaries, draining a watershed of which Houston lies at the dead centre, and which meanders down into Trinity Bay, a sheltered inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.

Houston is one of America’s fastest-growing cities. In 1900 the population of Houston was only about 45,000. The city really took off after nearby Galveston was devastated by a hurricane in that year: at which point it was realized that a more inland location, but not one so far inland that ships couldn’t get to it entirely, would be a safer place to invest in the future. Houston, set a little back from Trinity Bay, fitted the bill; though it was itself prone to flooding, what with all those bayous meandering, in no hurry, through a flat landscape into an estuary that could itself be backed up with storm surges.

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The Hurricane Harvey floods, since I left, have been the worst to date; but there have been many devastating floods even before that. In one 1930s flood, the downtown was under an incredible fifty feet of water, at least as measured above the normal creek level. It would be an exaggeration to say that Houston has been constructed in the middle of a Texas equivalent of the bed of Australia’s Lake Eyre, but the region seems to have some similar characteristics.

In a heroic feat of public works, which had already been requested and approved before the Galveston Hurricane but was now treated with greater urgency, Trinity Bay and Buffalo Bayou, navigable for schooners, would be transformed into the modern Houston Ship Channel, navigable for large ships to within 13 kilometres of the very centre of Houston. A once-sleepy Houston never looked back after the Ship Channel was upgraded. Above the navigation limit, Buffalo Bayou was left in its natural condition, and these days it has esplanade parks and cycle tracks on both sides in the inner- city area.

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The trams are very affordable: you can ride them all day for $3, or at least you could when I was there.

Filled with art museums, soaring skyscrapers and restaurants, the inner city of Houston was a place I really enjoyed visiting.

We tend to think of Texas as a land of hardy individualists. But the reality is that a city like Houston is quite well-planned; and, on top of that, owes much of its prosperity to government investments like the Ship Channel in addition to the various forms of private enterprise that came along later, after the government had literally cleared the way for it to proceed.

I got a taxi from the airport, using my Uber app. The taxi driver was from Pakistan, a lovely man who talked to me about the Urdu language of Pakistan and its differences from the Hindustani of India (mainly the alphabet, which in Pakistan is a Persian one that Iranians could read). He told me he had once worked for Homeland Security: which surprised me a little bit; and instantly brought back unwelcome memories of possible having been snooped on in Russia when I was there because of my Greenpeace connections. Anyhow, I was just here for the election and a good time.

I stayed in an Airbnb room for the first few nights in a district called Lawndale, about six kilometres southeast of downtown. The area was very multi-cultural and there were a lot of Latino and Mexican people living there. The room was run by a couple who I will call Janet and John.

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Janet showed me to my room which was nice and clean, so I was thankful after the long flight.

I was surprised that most of the guests stayed in their rooms: they seemed to associate the outdoors with mosquitoes and bugs. They ran their air conditioning constantly, even though was the beginning of winter.

The very first night I arrived I was straight into it. I went to a Democratic fundraiser at a place called Art and Music. As a naïve outsider, I was surprised to find that most of the attendees spoke Spanish and were from Mexico or other Hispanic countries.

I met Kim Ogg, a woman running for district attorney in Harris County, which includes most of Houston, on a platform that included decriminalizing marijuana, and Ed González, a former police officer who was running for Sheriff.

The 2016 elections were not just for President of the United States but for a whole host of other offices as well, including legal and judicial ones such as district attorney and sheriff, or chief of police, which the United States is almost unique in putting up for election. The United States holds elections for a wide range of offices every two years, and every four years, they happen to include the President of the United States. The election for US President is much the only American election noticed by outsiders, but by no means the be-all and end-all of their democracy.

There were about twenty women there and we all had a laugh as we played a game called “Stump the Trump”. As part of the fundraiser, they filled a piñata in the shape of Donald Trump with lollies and everyone had turn beating it with a stick for $20. The fundraiser was an excellent experience and I got to meet the Ms Ogg, Mr González, and a few other people who were running in the election. I texted my host family and asked did they want a Democratic sign outside their house, and they really took affront to that!

I had a few conversations with locals: things along the lines of the minimum wage, which was a shocking $7 an hour, although someone told me they were only paid $2.35! That made me feel bad and I made sure I tipped — which is something we don’t do in New Zealand.

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My first impression of Lawndale was that it was a really nice community, and Janet and John showed me around. I was driven around, and they pointed out housing developments to me, property developing was on the boom a bit here and they pointed out a house to me which had just been renovated and sold for $400,000. John took me for a drive to Bohemeos, a restaurant in the historical suburb of Eastwood. It was my kind of place, music, art and good coffee.

The woman who operated the shop played the guitar, and she had two sisters who were born in Mexico and lived in Texas. It was awesome sitting there and listening to the music from the guitar. I ended up walking back to my accommodation and it was a bit nerve-wracking because of all the dogs wandering around the streets. It probably wasn’t the safest place to decide to go for a walk, after all.

I had to decide how I was going to get around Houston, Uber had been working fine but I had concerns in general about my safety travelling around especially on my own and at night. So, I did a few Google searches and found that Trip Advisor gave a few good suggestions.

I decided I would just relax, enjoy what Houston had on offer, get my act together and get my Amtrak railway pass. The pass was easy enough to get, although it was pricey $900. But that was an all-stop pass, so I could get on where I liked and get off where I liked. I thought I might look for other accommodation as well.

I ended up going to the Houston Art Fair, downtown. It was amazing and included art based on mugshots of famous people taken when they had been arrested (mostly because of protests I presume). My favourite was one of Jimi Hendrix; but then, I’ve got a painting of Jimi Hendrix on my own wall at home.

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Texas seems to have a tradition of Mexican grills, lots of small restaurants with reasonably priced food, I went to the Lakeside Restaurant and that was nice.

The Art Gallery cost about $25 to enter but the art was fantastic. My favourite was rice-paper done in circles in different colours. I also saw some amazing sculpture art works by a couple of artists who grew up in Houston, Mark Flood and Will Boone.

Before I left, I was in the house talking to Janet about my wonderful day when John came in fuming. I got told off because I had left a door open on accident and let mosquitoes in. I couldn’t relax when I got back there, the door wouldn’t unlock, and I got locked in on my last day. What I did, was I got up early in the morning because I thought I had better get ready to leave. I had my SIM card, and the GPS was going fine.

So, I woke up early and got the car, and I hung around the Houston mall waiting for it to open. That was interesting — I ordered a large yoghurt — and it was so large it was like the size of a small container of popcorn like what you get at the movie theatres in New Zealand.

I had decided to visit Galveston and got a sudden urge along the way to make a detour to NASA’s Space Center Houston. I soon realised it was one of the best impulses I’d had.

The Space Centre Houston is a space museum and education centre, close to the Johnson Space Centre which is where much of the more serious business of NASA is done. There is also another Space Center in Florida, the Kennedy Space Center.

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The space center was well worth visiting, and it was interesting to learn about the visions they had of limitless solar energy on the Moon and industries that might one day be powered by it, including spaceships that might easily be launched from its feeble gravity by electric catapults called mass drivers, including satellites to capture even more solar energy in space and perhaps even beam it back to the Earth.

But all this is only feasible if there is water on the Moon, both to drink and to chemically convert into rocket fuel. The rocks that were brought back from the moon by the first astronauts proved that the Moon’s craters were formed by meteorites and comets, rather than volcanoes. This made it likely that there was water, in the form of ice from comets, at the bottom of polar craters where the scorching rays of the sun could never reach. All the same, ice was only proven to exist there much more recently. If it had been found back in the early 1970s, I think we would have kept on going back to the Moon.

Although NASA has achieved massive scientific discoveries with its unmanned space probes since 1972, I do still wonder whether the word ‘Houston’ may once more be spoken on the Moon, not too far hence. Perhaps it might.

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