Editor’s note: We’re welcoming Spring 2022 this week. Though the new season has arrived, we still have two stories left to share. This week, writer/producer Aubrey Calaway shares a very special audio story about Houston’s 2021 deep freeze. We recommend listening to the full story linked above, as it’s a story about silence. The transcript and epigraph are also below.
“She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness.”
-Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
The power went out while we were sleeping. Maybe it was gone by the time the wind tore the hurricane shutter off my bedroom window. We didn’t think to lock them up.
I wake up cold, colder than I had ever been in this house. I put on two pairs of running socks and my only coat and check the thermostat in the hall. 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The power had I don’t know what time the power had shut off, or when it would come back. But until it does, we’re going get colder. I pad over to the bathroom and check the faucet. [drip] The pipes still haven’t frozen.
Downstairs in the kitchen, the noise of normalcy has fled. The hum of the fridge, the slosh of the dishwasher, vanished. I fill a stock pot with water and strike a match to light the gas stove. As I wait for the water to boil, I put on my coat and step outside. The world has become muffled and white. I walk in circles around the yard just to scrape away the quiet. Highway 59 soars by a few blocks over and normally, I barely register its rumble. But nobody is on the road today. The air is still and thick with absence.
Back inside the kitchen, the pot of water is roiling. Mom has come downstairs to make coffee. She slices open a Nespresso pod and pours the grounds in a French press she dug out of a cabinet. We sip and shiver. I check the thermostat. 41 degrees.
Too cold and unnerved to sit with ourselves, we get in the car. I plug in our phones and crank up the heat. We wander around the neighborhood just to witness the empty streets. The radio news cycle had slowed to the familiar rhythm of a natural disaster. Unedited press conferences from city officials drone on. We listen. We don’t have anything better to do.
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Summer had passed by without incident. With the threat of hurricanes over, we let our guards down. We expected a mild Texas winter, the kind that requires sweaters, not coats. Our energy infrastructure was just as unprepared.
Unlike the rest of the country, most of Texas operates on a completely independent, and largely unregulated energy grid. Utility companies with tight profit margins have no incentive to invest in cold-weather resilience. Lawmakers have been unwilling to force them.
And then came the freeze. On February 13, 2021, Winter Storm Uri moved southeast where it joined a mass of frigid air swept southward by a polar vortex. Temperatures dropped, snow-blanketed Texas, and people turned up the heat in their homes. The so-called energy capital of the world began to break down. Liquids froze in wellheads and equipment went offline. In just a few hours, one-third of the state’s power generation capacity had shut down. Left without any other options, the Texas operating agency began rolling blackouts. And everything went quiet. [power down]
10 million people lost power. Hundreds lost their lives. The official death toll of the freeze is estimated to be 256, but others put it closer to 700. Many died from hypothermia. Others were found in their cars, engines running in a desperate attempt to stay warm. They never heard the poison seeping into their lungs. The freeze was the biggest epidemic of carbon monoxide poisoning in recent history. Black, Hispanic and Asian Texans suffered a disproportionate share of the carbon monoxide poisonings. They were also four times more likely to experience power outages than white areas. In Austin, officials sent out early alerts warning residents of outages and directing them to warming centers- in English. It took four days non-English speakers to get the same lifesaving information.
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Mom and I eventually find a Greek restaurant with a generator rumbling out back. We join the line of cars snaking down the street. I clutch the boxes of warm falafel to my chest on the way home. As we enter the back door, I stop and listen. Silence. Still no electricity, and now, the drip from the faucet has gone quiet too. I press my ear against the icy kitchen wall. I listen for what, I don’t know. What sound do broken pipes make? There’s nothing to hear, nothing to do but wait.
We eat, and sit, and watch the thermostat creep closer and closer to freezing. We climb in and out of bed and wander the house. It’s too quiet to read, too quiet to talk, too quiet to be anything but restless. We do our best to keep warm until eventually the light outside starts to fade. [candle audio]. Trembling, we clean ourselves with a bucket of warm water and a rag. I get into bed with my hat and coat on and hope to wake up warm. By the next morning, I could see my breath.
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Two months before the Texas freeze, scholars Marina L Peterson and Vicki L Brennan published an article titled A Sonic Ethnography. In it, they draw our attention to one central question: how do we listen to climate change? “Climate is ordinarily so general,” they write, “that it goes unnoticed. When does climate change become something that moves into the foreground, such that changing weather patterns, or a shift in an ecosystem, are noticed and commented on? How do people listen to the rain, to rising sea levels that erode beaches, flood neighborhoods, and cause coastal highways to collapse? To lungs affected by dust that blows in from the desert with increasing frequency, from Mexico or Saudi Arabia? To air conditioners, running continuously all summer?”
“Listening to the uncertainty of climate change,” Peterson and Brennan argue, “may also involve attuning to silence itself.”
Our winter silence ended after three days. The power came back on, the faucets flowed, and the highway roared back to life. We stopped hearing the sounds of our built environment almost as soon as they returned. But Peterson and Brennan’s work asks us not to be lulled by this. We must listen to the air conditioners that ran not only all summer but well into December this past winter. We must listen to what languages are spoken by officials and emergency responders, and the immigrant communities left in the dark. The silence of Texas leadership.
Only by listening will we be able to hear our future.
Aubrey Calaway is a freelance audio producer and writer. You can find more of her work at aubreycalaway.com.
Thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for use of the following music:
Kvelden Trapp https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/90579
Arlan Vale https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/90581
Flashing Runner https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/90582
Vulcan Street https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/90583
Thank you to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for their support of Weathered. Please visit grahamfoundation.org to learn more about their programs and initiatives. If you’re in Chicago, please check out Exits Exist, an exhibition by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, that features site-specific supergraphics for the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House galleries, works on paper, artist's books, and a new series of sculptures.
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Cold Snap