The Ant Mill
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When the temperature drops below freezing, people in Texas act like the confederacy is under attack again. Maybe it's some kind of cultural memory - not that dissimilar from memories of famine genetically encoded in people in China.
Any kind of inconvenience has to be treated as an adversary around here. Less formidable adversaries are quashed easily. When homeless people started camping beneath bridges in Austin, they were simply banned from being there. But the weather is a formidable enemy that Texans have no cultural memory of dealing with - although, all the winters I've been here have had at least one moderate winter storm. We quiver and hide in our homes, praying that the frail electric grid holds up for three days. The name ERCOT, which stands for Electric Reliability Council of Texas, trends on Twitter. It is the organization that governs the Texas electric grid. Much like how social science is not a science, the Electric Reliability Council provides nothing resembling reliability. In coffee shops and other warm encampments, people murmur "ERCOT.. ERCOT.. ERCOT" several times a day, like a Hindu priest chanting mantras. If you say it enough times, it is supposed to hold up the electric grid.
The streets are deserted on such days, and the less fortunate take over. The homeless come out from whatever crevices they were banished to. I was walking around the Greyhound bus station in downtown San Antonio yesterday and felt like a tourist among the several hundred unhoused. They were there out of necessity, I was there for a stroll and a hot toddy. Some moved around vigorously to get warm, while others seemed to have lost the will to care about the cold. Now and then, the stationery individuals would suddenly burst with activity. Perhaps the wind chill reminded them of their existence.
I am well prepared for this cold in a long coat, a soft-shell jacket underneath, and a sweater that makes me look like I was extra in the Tarkovsky movie Solaris. The number of warm layers I own has grown yearly since my first year living in the United States. That first year - I wore a raincoat through the winter. When it snowed in Houston in December of 2017, I was wearing a raincoat and waiting for a bus to take me to the other side of the sprawling city. A colleague, a British bloke, spotted me pacing up and down the sterile frozen bus stop that day. He presented me with a pair of mittens and a beanie the next day. It was neatly packed in a Ziploc bag. Maybe he had a reparations fund for previous citizens of the Commonwealth.
It's not that I did not know about the existence of down jackets and fleece. There is a certain kind of stupidity that washes over oneself when confronted with a lack of money and the helplessness of new environments. I was drowning in that when I bought my Nautica raincoat in 2017. When someone asked me if I was warm enough, I rubbed the outer and inner layers of the jacket together and said, "Yes, it has a lining." I wore the same raincoat on an ill-advised hike up a 14,000-ft peak in Colorado. It was summer, so I assumed it would be sunnier and happier. I don't remember much because of the inevitable hypoxia that beset me. I remember stopping an older woman clad in a purple down jacket who was on her way down. I asked her if the peak was close. She scanned me up and down before replying with a sigh, "The peak? The peak is far, honey."
On my walk in San Antonio, I saw a homeless man wearing a raincoat similar to the one I owned. He was making his own heat, walking around the block that sheltered the Greyhound buses, followed by several of his compatriots. They went round and round the block. The men looked like ants who had lost trace of where the food was, and now they kept circling the block, following each other in an endless loop. Warmth? Warmth was far from here, and the dull Greyhounds were not taking passengers.