As I entered the city of Galveston 10 days after Hurricane Ike hit, the first thing that shocked me was the mile-high piles of debris. The beaches were wastelands, a messy assortment of chairs, boards, desks and trash. Some buildings were completely gutted. Some houses were flattened. A rank smell of rotten food and waste filled the air.

A few miles away in Houston, the debris was not much more than a few sticks. When I first arrived 10 days after the storm, armed with my camera and questionnaire and ready to document disaster, I was a little disappointed. Branches were down and much of the city was still without power. However, no one paid much attention to the branches, which were mostly already cleaned up. Class at the University of Houston started the day after the hurricane, though any deadlines for papers due were extended into the next week.

I then realized that disaster strikes in degrees. Although reports of Ike said it wasn’t as bad as expected, perspective is the key. Judgments cannot be made about a disaster when the degrees of damage to people’s lives are as different as the debris in their yards.

For some, the debris has long since been removed. Others still woke each morning to piles of branches, or worse, of ruined furniture. For some, the debris of the storm constitutes their homes.

Everyone had a story to tell, and I wanted to hear them.

Just like some of the city had power and some did not, the Houston experience of Hurricane Ike was divided. There was Sean Haddad, the University of Houston freshman from the suburb Sugar Land, who slept through the hurricane. There was the college student that professor Richard Armstrong watched throw a party, climb onto his roof, scream to the winds, and never lose power. There was Armstrong’s own experience: He turned his several days without power into a romantic retreat with his wife where they read by candlelight. He said he wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Across the city, the lack of power left neighborhoods eerily quiet, except for generators humming a low chorus. Those without power were frustrated — my taxi driver, a West African immigrant, pointed out the hypocrisy of this in a city of energy and oil.

Houston wasn’t destroyed, but I wanted to see the wrath of the storm. On my second day, I drove to Galveston. It took three and a half hours to travel the 45 miles. Roadblocks slowed the traffic of repair trucks and residents who wanted to see their homes.

Dave Scelera had driven five hours to see the state of his summer home in the area called San Luis Pass in west Galveston. His home could only be reached through several roadblocks.

He and his son were attempting to nail a tarp to the roof of their beach home. They had realized they could never use it again, and when they left that afternoon, they would probably leave it forever. The Sceleras lost their summer home, others had lost everything. I spoke to dedicated workers outside of the shambles of their restaurant. They had been there to clean up for three or four days, but you could hardly tell. The restaurant was still a catastrophe. The deck was only accessible via a ladder. But the workers there had no choice. They were going to rebuild.

In searching out the hurricane stories, I learned to grow wary of newspaper headlines. How can one over-arching statement describe the varieties of human experience? I had to go to Houston and Galveston to find out what it was really like.

One glance at a pile of debris couldn’t tell you what’s in that pile.

And neither can the experience of a hurricane’s passage be summed up with one phrase: not as bad as expected.

— Daldorph is a Lawrence junior in journalism and French.