Lone Star

Arriving in Houston in July is like getting off the stage at a climate apocalypse boom town. The temperature hovers around 100-degrees, with regular warnings that a combination of factors will make it feel like 105. Always 105. The sun is blazing hot, and while I’ve repeated that cliché my entire life, it is literally true in Houston. The sun is so red-poker, seared-skillet hot, that desiccation seems inevitable. I scan the sky looking to place the glowing fireball; I scan the landscape looking for an escape from it. That old amphibian brain squeaks, “Oh…mistake.” I reach for the water bottle. My skin shrivels. I imagine my bleached longhorn bones strewn across Walgreen’s parking lot. I buy a quart of moisturizing lotion and stay inside where, as Houstonians joke, it’s always 72-degrees.

It hasn’t always been this hot, as my poll of Uber drivers born and raised here will attest. As a child, one said, you could play outside all day in the summer. She shakes her head: Not anymore. Longer heat waves, longer summers, serious droughts, and days and days of extreme heat have increased. People with health issues are at greater risk, of course, but the heat can short-circuit anyone’s physiology: The body doesn’t “rest-and-reset” if the temperature doesn’t fall below 80-degrees after the sun goes down.

I have never missed the country more. I took for granted an evening ritual: The sun slips behind the mountains, the temperature drops, and a breeze rustles the tall hemlocks. Walk out into the meadow as it cools and feel the grass turn slightly damp. Houston, on the other hand, is an Easy Bake oven: In the afternoon, the windows of my high-rise apartment are too hot to touch. Walk out onto the pavement, those “heat islands” of baking steel and barren concrete, and feel it crusting like lava. A grass roots group mapped these islands. One downtown area was 103-degrees on a summer afternoon; twenty miles away in an area with more shade, the temperature was 86-degrees. Their proposed solution: More shade. Plant more trees, create “cool,” light-colored roofs and pavement, nudge more green spaces into the already-built environment. I believe in these practices, and in recycling, green energy, composting, water conservation. I practice these beliefs. I want to do my part to save the planet. But I’ve had to take a hiatus from that, because I moved to Texas.

The state of “go big or go home,” Texas tops the nation in climate disaster stats. It’s a booming economy out here amongst the tumbleweeds, where freedom from government interference and regulation boosters a wild west capitalism feeding on already depleted resources. It’s a state built on this logic: The State Supreme Court banned the banning of plastic bags as unconstitutional; Texas employs more workers in the plastics industry than any other state in the nation. Texas emits more than 13% of the nation’s total greenhouse gases, more than double the greenhouse gasses emitted by any other state in the nation. Texans use more energy than any other state in the nation, despite a catastrophic power failure during the winter of 2021. Of the top 20 counties across the country that will have the most days over 100 degrees in the next 30 years, 16 counties are in Texas. The state’s population, already on a bender, will double by 2050 from 28 to 55 million despite a lack of resources or infrastructure to handle an increase in workers.

Texas shouldn’t be read as a prophecy. It’s not the future. It’s a cynicism drilling deep down into the here-and-now, a model for gutting environmental advances we thought were codified and institutionalized. A proving ground that ethics are easily marginalized, and practices easily erased from everyday life. This is an actual question on Google: Does Houston really recycle? And the answer is not really, or not consciously or conscientiously. Houston is guilty of surreptitiously sending millions of pounds of recycling to landfills. Texas threw away more than 13 million tons of recyclable trash in 2015. The lack of recycling containers in public places is noticeable; there is not a separate recycling bin in my apartment. While some communities have curbside recycling, for some it’s more of a burden. There are 6 “neighborhood” drop-off depositories. All that is required to toss out the recycling is a driver’s license—or a right-to-carry license—in addition to proof of residency.

Guns. Trash. Texas. I am overwhelmed by this place, by its imperviousness to reason, its Smaug-like greed for more that is so much less. I order a “green” Uber, and trundle over to the cancer center whose mission is to make me whole in body and hopeful in spirit. The hospital is always crowded, and we wait patiently in a line that spills out onto the sidewalk. I step across the threshold into the icy air conditioning, sanitize my hands, take a fresh disposable mask, answer the Covid questions, and find my way.

The cancer center is a sprawling complex, with millions of square feet of space across multiple campuses. An orientation class for new patients is encouraged; there is a Pocket Guide that is much in demand. And there are “Landmarks.” A large Aquarium greets visitors to the main building. The Park, with benches and plants and the worst-run Starbucks ever, is down a warren of hallways, blooming under artificial skylights. A garden Gazebo, minus the garden, has been left in the middle of a large waiting room. A Tree Sculpture anchors an information desk. Skyway Habitrails link multiple buildings and you can hustle between them and get in your steps or take a shuttle. I have committed myself to this plasticine place with its heartfelt allusions to the natural world, its dedication to inedible food, and its relentless striving to find a cure. It is my fishbowl, which I share with a pair of sea turtles washed up in Galveston Bay. The young one was dragging its weight in plastic, wrapped around its neck.

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For every office visit, I receive at least one disposable wristband. It’s printed in each office on a thermal printer and then the strip with my name, date-of-birth, and a bar code is detached from the larger piece of papery-plastic which goes in the trash (because of its chemical processing it can’t be recycled, and it might be covered with BPAs). Wrapped around my wrist, it’s attached with a tiny plastic fastener. The nurses work their magic: The knobby end goes through one hole, there is an intricate origami fold, the clasp goes over the top, a snap and I am cuffed for the day. At every nurse’s station is an overflowing dish of these fasteners: Single-use, plastic, ½-inch long strands. Brushed to the floor, crunched underfoot, snapped off and broken at the hospital door as we make our escape in the evening. And then, like ghost crabs, the day’s detritus disappears into the streets, waiting for the next big storm to flush the city into Galveston Bay, a badly polluted estuary connecting greater Houston to the Gulf of Mexico.

Next there is a round of vitals: Blood pressure, oxygen and heart rate levels, my temperature taken with a thermometer covered with a disposable plastic cap, which a veteran nurse can land in the trash with a flick of the wrist. For every blood draw, sometimes more than once a day, there is a disposable tourniquet, a needle vacuum-sealed in plastic, and at least one syringe in plastic wrap, plus the usual detritus of sterile cloth, alcohol swabs and the stretchy bandage wrap woven of synthetic fibers that also escape into waterways. Over-anxious phlebotomists wrap me up like a mummy.

On days that I get treatment, there’s the far more complicated procedure of accessing my port, a permanent IV tucked just under the skin of my chest. It’s a process. A port access kit comes in a sterile plastic container. Inside is a tidy envelope of blue sterile cloth that the nurse drapes over my belly and unwraps like a present to reveal the goodies inside: A dozen or so individually foil- and -plastic wrapped necessities. There is a big needle and its trailing IV tubing, plus sterilizing prep pads, alcohol swabs, gauze, dressing, and syringes of saline. Many syringes. The infusion nurses carry them by the dozen in their pockets and to get my old port up-and-running sometimes requires many saline flushes to clear it out. With each flush a used syringe and its plastic wrap sails into the trash[1]. The IV tubing is a life form of its own: I am draped in yards of blueish line that connects the various drips and immunotherapy meds through the infusion pump to my port. To connect each length of tube seems to require a unique plastic disposable bauble; a green plastic cap keeps the connections sterile.

Everything that has been used to save my life today, about 1-lb of plastic, goes in the bright red biohazard container. I am free to swim away.

[1] A port has to return blood to prove that the vein is open, but mine is a little clotty and it frequently needs cleaning. Every nurse has a trick: One uses the gurney as a tilt-a-whirl and raises and lowers my head above and below my knees till the blood flows. Twenty push-ups against the wall will sometimes do it. Sometimes, a vascular-tech boy is paged. Shy, quiet, all in black, they are the behind-the-scenes fixers. They ignore the droopy middle-aged boob and give the port itself a hard push, then flush it with saline and give the syringe a hard pull and treat my cyborg part like the piece of bad plastic that it is. It works.

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