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<p class="byline-dateline"><span class="byline" itemprop="author creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" >By <span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="ROBERT ZARETSKY" itemprop="name">ROBERT ZARETSKY</span></span><time class="dateline" datetime="2017-08-28T19:36:39-04:00" itemprop="dateModified" content="2017-08-28T19:36:39-04:00">AUG. 28, 2017</time>
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="560" data-total-count="560">HOUSTON — Overnight, everyone in our neighborhood has become Ned Merrill, the protagonist in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer.” We live in a Houston suburb where most houses come equipped with backyard pools. With the arrival of Hurricane Harvey, the pools have been made not just redundant, but nearly contiguous. While we are not (yet) like Merrill — swimming from house to house, having drinks and learning about one another — the storm has us wading from house to house, taking the measure of what nature, and we ourselves, have wrought.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="614" data-total-count="1174">As the cascade of images from the storm reveals, Hurricane Harvey has been a horror story for millions of Houstonians, both those who live inside the loop — defined by the highways that encircle the city — and the ones scattered across the suburbs outside. In fact, perhaps more so than any other American city, Houston is defined not by its urban core, but its suburban extremities. A study this year reported that, along with Dallas, Houston has <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/25/texas-suburbs-are-once-again-among-fastest-growing-cities/">the fastest-</a><a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/25/texas-suburbs-are-once-again-among-fastest-growing-cities/">growing suburbs in the nation</a>. Yet this storm has turned not just the lives of countless Houstonians inside out, but so too the very idea of suburbia.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="531" data-total-count="1705">Consider cars. If our neighborhood did not exist, Detroit would have to invent it. Cars created the suburbs — indeed, some historians see the suburbs as the gargantuan offspring of an unholy union between the Eisenhower administration, carmakers and real estate developers in the 1950s. But one need not possess a conspiratorial mind to see the car as the necessary and sufficient condition to the making of suburbia. Since Friday, though, the only cars I’ve seen are the dozens that have been abandoned on the flooded streets.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="842" data-total-count="2547">Bereft of cars, we are now forced to depend on public transportation. But not Houston’s Metro buses, mind you. They, too, have been rendered useless by the storm. Instead, public transportation now takes the form of Coast Guard helicopters, police boats or the hundreds of private boats that, Dunkirk-like, are now harnessed to the commonweal. As we splashed on Sunday toward our bayou, which continues to ooze across the neighborhood, we passed a neighbor in a kayak. (Along with a generator, a kayak is now on our must-buy list.) When my 18-year-old son, Ruben, pleads with me to be allowed to drive around the neighborhood, I am reminded of a line from the Arcade Fire song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Euj9f3gdyM" title="The Suburbs Video">The Suburbs</a>”: “In the suburbs I learned to drive/And you told me we’d never survive.” Now, as I tell Ruben, he won’t survive if he insists on driving.</p><div class="newsletter-signup variant-1-hidden " id="newsletter-promo" data-newsletter-productCode="TY" data-newsletter-productTitle="Opinion Today" aria-labeledby="newsletter-promo-heading">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="422" data-total-count="2969">That song, the title track on the album, has an apocalyptic tone to it, hinting at the reckoning that the postwar suburban world will eventually confront: “And all of the walls they built in the ’70s finally fall/All of the houses they built in the ’70s finally fall.” Our house, built in the ’70s, is still standing. Yet our McMansions now find themselves with real moats, at times patrolled by real alligators.</p><div id="story-ad-1" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="440" data-total-count="3409" id="story-continues-1">And while the structures still stand, the certainties we once held are sagging. Mesmerized by the promise of consistency, we now are wrestling with not just a hurricane, but the radical inconsistency it portends. Rather than white noise to everyday life, the weather reports have become existential thermostats. We study the forecasts of our local meteorologists the way the ancient Greeks parsed the pronouncements of the Oracle at Delphi.</p>        <a class="visually-hidden skip-to-text-link" href="#story-continues-2">Continue reading the main story</a>
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