Wait For Yesterday

TEXAS MEDITATIONS Wait for

By Michael Gos Yesterday

Indianola, Texas

Indianola is a strange place. I’ve been to lots of Texas ghost towns, but here, there are not really any ruins, not even foundations of old buildings (well, there is one foundation remaining, but it is underwater). There are a few homes, a parking and picnic area on the beach, and even a fishing

“resort.” But we were here to find a couple of monuments we’d read about that memorialize the town’s past.

There is only one road, Ocean Drive. We drove up and down it repeatedly, finding nothing. We stopped and talked to four people we saw, but got no useful information. Two of them, who lived right there on the beach, had not even heard of the monuments we were looking for. But how hard could it be?

So we drove up and down, again and again. Eventually, we stumbled across our goals.

The first, though further down the road than we expected, was fairly easily seen. It is an Arte Deco sculpture of Robert Cavelier, Sieur de LaSalle.

Growing up on the south end of Lake Michigan, I was as familiar with La Salle.

He was a part of our Indiana history studies in junior high and there are lots of streets, businesses and neighborhoods all over Chicago and the northwest

Indiana named for him. I was surprised to learn that, in 1685, he also explored the Texas coast and claimed it for France. The Louisiana Purchase would later make this spot a key port in Texas for immigration from France, Germany and eastern European countries.

These new immigrants built a city which they named Indianola. By 1875, it had become a major port on the Gulf Coast. But then things got interesting.

That year, the town was wiped out by a hurricane. It was quickly rebuilt, only to be destroyed again by the storm of 1886. While there were meager attempts to rebuild it yet again a bit further inland, fire ended hopes for that, and Indianola slipped into history. The second monument, harder to find, is a memorial to the city that once thrived here. It tells the story of how the city began, grew, and died.

I sometimes wonder about the people of Indianola and the thought processes that led to the decision to rebuild. The land is so low that the one set of remaining ruins, that of the courthouse, are only sometimes visible under water.

Surely, they could see that this would happen again . . . and again.

I have noticed that, as a species, and especially as Texans, we tend to react, quickly and assertively, to events in our lives, especially events we see as negative. It was impressive watching our neighbors move immediately to clean-up after Hurricanes Ike and Harvey. I admire that. In Texas, we don’t wait for someone in Washington, or even Austin, to save us. We jump in and do it ourselves. That is what makes Texans special.

But this kind of “go-get-‘em” attitude can have negative effects as well.

Not taking time to think through the likelihood of repeat events, or other consequences, caused the people of Indianola to lose money, sweat and lives, in what turned out to be a futile effort.

My take on this is that, for all practical purposes, for the people of the city, the hurricane of 1875 didn’t really happen. Of course there was a storm, and of course, the damage and deaths were real. But I think, for most of the people, the storm was only a blip that was in the past—not real, not a part of their lives now. It was time to move, to get busy.

Our apparent need to hurry and take action after events gets us on task and keeps us that way. Being busy means we are focused on the job at hand. It occupies our thinking. As a result, we never give ourselves an opportunity to really process what has happened. We make hasty, often bad, decisions and then have to deal with problems they cause—the unintended consequences. Until we can process an event fully, it hasn’t really happened, not yet. We see only ghosts of the event, not the thing itself. Without understanding, we can’t act effectively and, as a result, we are susceptible to all manner of negative results. I’m not saying we should sit, paralyzed, after negative events, only that we need to fully think things through before we make major decisions. In the case of Indianola, clean up? Absolutely. Rebuild? Let’s think about this. Are we sure this is the best move?

It is easy to assume that this kind of problem happens only in cases of “bad” events because most of us have ample experience in these errors of thinking. When teaching my students about the philosophy of stoicism, the idea that we are disturbed not by events, but by our opinions of those events, I ask them how many have ever been devastated by being dumped by someone they loved. Every semester, at least three quarters of the hands go up. I then ask how many of them still see that event as a tragedy. The most common response I get is “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” The passage of time between the events themselves and my question allowed the students to process, and really understand, what happened. For them, the event has now, finally, really happened. These students are perfect examples demonstrating the fact that the key to understanding is to wait for yesterday. It didn’t “happen” until you’ve sorted it out.

This idea also applies to events we see as positive. Great experiences are especially enjoyable to ponder, even re-live in our minds. That makes us more likely to think about them. But thinking about, and understanding, are two different things. Reliving for pleasure does not provide insight. All events are really complicated tangles of little mini-happenings that work together to masquerade as a single event. They need to be examined, disentangled, and only then do we really understand them. That doesn’t happen immediately. And if we haven’t taken the time to do that, for all practical purposes, the event hasn’t really happened for us yet. We need to be patient—and wait. It will happen—and then it will finally be real.

The people of Indianola did finally “get it.” But at what cost? It took two hurricanes and a fire for them to finally learn to wait for yesterday. We have much to learn from their mistake.