BILL's: The Gulf of Sherman and the shores of Texoma

I don't know what to think of people in this area. Just today, I am driving out of our neighborhood. Our street dead ends into State Highway 56. At this point, Highway 56 is only two lanes, but it is still a State Highway. My little "lane and a half" road joins this right outside of downtown Whitesboro. I am sitting here at my stop sign, waiting patiently for the cars to clear out so I can make a left turn and get up to speed on the highway. But this elderly lady comes down the highway, and wants to turn on my street. Usually this is no problem, but for this lady life came to an end. She stopped in the middle of the highway and started flagging me out to go ahead and make my turn. This is with other cars barreling down on her at 55 mph around an almost blind turn. There was plenty of room for her to get off the road, but she was afraid to make the turn with another car at the same intersection.

The mentality of almost reminded me of another event which almost destroyed the area. Everyone around here remembers the dreaded Hurricane Rita. In September 2005, Hurricane Rita came up the Gulf of Mexico and attacked the coasts of Louisiana, Texas, and the coast of Texoma. I know you heard the story. Hurricane Katrina formed just a month earlier and decimated New Orleans. The evacuees were shipped to surrounding areas like Houston. Then Hurricane Rita formed and came straight for Houston. This created a mass exodus out of Houston up to the north. Shelters were set up from Dallas to Sherman/Denison to not only house the Katrina refugees, but also the evacuees from Houston. A state of panic covered the area. Hurricane Rita was on the way.

In the days of preparation, I spent time helping run radio communications between shelters, organizing with the Red Cross to situate families, and I worked for Dr. Pepper of Texas during the day. Hurricane Rita had built up to a Category 5 Hurricane, at one time was measured with wind gusts of up to 235 mph, and was listed by Lt. Col. Warren Madden as the "strongest storm that I've ever been in." We were in full force on shelters. Almost every one of the shelters had reached it's maximum capacity. Then came the dreaded day. The day I will never forget. To this day the trauma it has caused still has me waking up in cold sweats.

On September 24, around 3pm, as Hurricane Rita was making landfall just a mere 361 miles away in Galveston, I was finishing my work at the Sherman, TX Wal-Mart. One of the things we must do by the rules established by this Wal-Mart is to take our empty hulls the bottles come in and put them in a secured cage against the back wall attached to the outside of the building. Now granted, a small miracle had occurred and the "Dreaded Rita" had been downgraded to a Category 3 Hurricane, but that didn't stop the sweat running down my face. I went up to a member of management and asked politely to have the back door opened so I could take out the empty hulls. I was told that I was crazy. There is a Hurricane coming, no, I would have to store the empty hulls on my trailer. This is one of those semi trailers that you see parked outside of Wal-Marts docks without any trucks on the front end to pull them. They are just there on stilts. I guess Wal-Mart knows best, and a small semi trailer parked on the side of the store with no wind protection would be a safer spot than the cage attached to the backside of the building which is actually built into the ground.

It did make me feel better for all those people who were right in the middle of Rita, getting pelted by the winds and rain, because I knew that all they had to do was to find an empty semi trailer and those 100+ winds would stand no chance against those trailer walls and the stability of the trailer. And being a highway, I know there must be hundreds of those trailers everywhere.

After landfall, it really got scary. Yes, the hurricane lost it's hurricane status within hours of being on shore, but we knew what was next. That storm was going to make it over Dallas, and to the hot waters of the Gulf of Sherman. Here it would start to gain power again. It would develop back to the Category 5 hurricane it was before and possibly worse. And then it would crash head on into Sherman, TX and destroy the whole town, decimating the Wal-Mart and leaving the town in complete anarchy. But I was ready. I had my family ready to run to Wal-Mart and get on my empty trailer. The only thing that stood between us and the end of Texoma.

But then someone looked down on Texoma and flushed his toilet, because just as some stupid renegade weather man predicted, a stray cold front came out of nowhere and took the storm away from us and the Gulf of Sherman. We celebrated for what I swear had to be 21 seconds. Because I knew in my heart that the management of this store was correct in the end of the world coming under the name of Rita.

I still haven't found the Gulf of Sherman. I have spent some time trying to find it so I can lay down on it's sandy beaches as the waves caress my body, and thank God for saving us during those terrifying 50 hours that we were in hiding from the coming storm with no time to escape. 50 hours is not enough time to move hulls out of an attached cage and back to the plant which was a complete block away. I just never could figure out how all those people came all the way from Houston to Sherman in less time. I can only imagine that they had the devil as their co-pilot driving down the interstate.

I have found more hope for my quest for the Gulf of Sherman, though. A few months ago I found out that Royal Caribbean is sending one of it's biggest ships, The Voyager of the Seas, to the area. There is a local vacation planner who placed a full one-page ad in the local paper. It talks of this massive four-story behemoth of a ship and how it will be boarding here in Sherman, and they are selling tickets on to the ship. My search is going to come to an end. All I have to do is wait for that day.... The day I can follow the smoke as the ship comes into port.... I wonder if I will be able to see it from the Wal-Mart parking lot.... *sigh*