Hurricane Harvey dumped more rain than any other storm in American history, but now most of Houston is dry. Only certain pockets of the
city, some of which were built inside floodplains and reservoirs, are
still underwater; as the reservoirs continue to spill into the bayous,
anywhere that hasn’t drained by now is likely to remain flooded for
weeks. In these areas, there are still occasional rescues of people by
boat—stubborn holdouts, living above the water line, are gradually
running out of food—but most of the boats are used to grab essential
medication, pets, family heirlooms, a change of clothes.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, in 2005, the storm lasted two
days. As a parable, however, it has lasted ever since. The vast majority
of deaths and damage were suffered by poor people, who lived in
low-lying areas that were quickly flooded when levees and dams were
breached. Twelve years later, geography is destiny in Houston, too. But,
in what may be America’s most diverse city, the outcomes have been more
various. The immediate destruction—so far, Harvey has killed forty-seven
people, compared with Katrina’s eighteen hundred—has been spread among
classes and races.

Yesterday morning, I stood at the flood line on Memorial Drive, which is
sandwiched between the Addicks Reservoir and Buffalo Bayou. A group of
locals gathered in a parking lot, waiting for boats. One man sat next to
empty animal crates; he was hoping to retrieve his sister’s cats. A Ford
F-250 pulled up, with a motorboat in tow, and out climbed Claus
Gundlach, a tall German executive in the steel industry with silver hair
and a long, handsome face. He and his three daughters had come to help a
neighbor collect valuables that she had abandoned a few days earlier.
Suspected looters had been spotted nearby; a man named Carl Webb, who
has stocked up on food and weapons and has no plans to leave home, told
me that, after he threatened to shoot them, they sped away in a
flat-bottom boat with a two-hundred-horsepower engine.

Gundlach’s boat was useless: the slope on Memorial Drive was too shallow
to launch from the parking lot, and backing the truck in to an
acceptable depth would put its exhaust pipe underwater. Dressed in
fishing waders, and carrying several empty plastic tubs, he invited me
to follow him on foot. The water was brown and stank of raw sewage.
Plant leaves were coated in a nasty, fibrous film. “Officially, we’re
not supposed to be here, because the water is so contaminated,” Gundlach
said.

We turned left onto Legend Lane, past a sunken Porsche Cayenne, and
eventually reached the house of a woman named Mary. Her dining-room
chairs were stacked on a table. Shoes floated down the hallways. The
electricity was off, but in the kitchen a battery-powered clock was
ticking on the wall. On the back porch, an armadillo had taken shelter
in a flowerpot.

Inside the study, as Mary sifted through files, I asked her about a
large, framed photograph, which leaned against some boxes on the ground.
It was an old portrait of a young girl. Mary turned around.
“That’s—that’s my mother,” she said. Her voice quivered, and she began
to shudder. “She was born in San Antonio. It was a childhood photo. I
forgot to rescue that.” Water had filled the bottom third of the frame.
“It’s like losing her all over again.”

Upstairs, Mary’s daughter Alexis, who is twenty-eight, was in her
bedroom, trying to decide which clothes to salvage. Gundlach’s eldest
daughter, Celeste, was helping her.

“What about the shoes under here?” Celeste asked.

Alexis demurred.

“Are you sure?” Celeste asked. “‘Cause these look pretty fancy. These
look like Vegas shoes.”

“I’m not going to take those to Vegas.”

“You’re not?”

“I mean, I guess,” Alexis said. “Throw them in there.” She turned to me,
and said, “When the water came in, all I packed was my Lululemon and my
Louboutins.”

A few minutes later, Alexis noticed a large tray of silver cutlery on
the stairs. “Mom, do you want to take the silver, or do you want to
leave it here?” she asked.

“Take the silver.”

Celeste started to lift it. “Dear God,” she said, struggling with the
weight.

“Celeste does crossfit, so she’s fit for hurricane rescues,” Alexis
joked.

“My arms are shaking,” Celeste said.

Alexis grabbed her Ashley Black FasciaBlaster, a small bar with
claw-like knobs, which is used to knead out cellulite, and we went
outside. “If you don’t have a sense of humor about it—” she said, and
trailed off.

“You’ll have a nervous breakdown,” Mary said, completing her daughter’s
sentence. “Mother Nature doesn’t discriminate between economic classes.
And she always wins.”

Gundlach’s house was farther down Legend Lane. The water was at least
six feet deep, and the air was thick with insects. He had perfect
knowledge of the topography of his neighborhood, and he plotted a path
along the highest invisible surfaces—over submerged steps, clinging onto
trees, avoiding mailboxes and cars—so that the water never reached our
armpits, where it would pour into our fishing waders. Eventually, we
came to the fence next to his garage. He climbed up it and, standing
atop a wooden post, leapt onto the roof. I passed Gundlach a ladder, and
he climbed down to his back porch. The deck had come unmoored, and it
sank as he stepped on it. Gundlach has flood insurance, but he estimated
that the damage to his home would easily top half a million
dollars—double the coverage of his policy. After inspecting the house,
he led me out of the flooded area, and we drove to a friend’s house,
where his family had taken refuge.

In the preceding days, Gundlach’s daughters, all of whom are in their
twenties, had made several trips to their flooded home. They had rescued
numerous heirlooms: their great-great-grandfather’s cigarette box; their
great-grandmother’s sapphires, rubies, and pearls; their mother’s
favorite serving bowl, used when the family is together at meals.
Gundlach’s wife, Roberta, is an artist, and they had managed to retrieve
several of her paintings, too. But the flooding in Legend Lane is not
expected to recede for another two or three weeks, and there was more to
save. “Upstairs, the heat and humidity will ruin virtually everything,
even though it kept dry during the storm,” Gundlach told me. And
upstairs there was a Matisse.

After lunch, Gundlach’s friend, a Houston philanthropist named Pat Burk,
showed up with a small kayak that he had just bought at a sporting-goods
store. Gundlach thanked him for his generosity; Burk laughed, and said
that it had cost less than the last bottle of wine they’d shared.

We drove back to Memorial Drive and parked in a new development, called
Memorial Green, which was still under construction. In this part of
Houston, the houses are large and the garages capacious, but the views
are minimal. Many of Houston’s most prosperous new suburbs were built
with little consideration for climate change or for the Addicks and
Barker reservoirs, which are designed to divert excess water away from
the city center. Several people who live on Legend Lane told me that
Memorial Green, which borders their back yards and was built several
feet higher than the rest of the neighborhood, had exacerbated the
flooding in their homes. “They built an island,” Gundlach said. “I’ve
lived through four hurricanes, including Allison, and this street has
never been flooded.”

Celeste set a ladder next to the wall bordering Mary’s back yard. After
Gundlach climbed over, she passed him the kayak. One of his other
daughters, a twenty-six-year-old graphic designer named Lauren, who was
also dressed in waders, went next. I followed her, along with the
photographer Philip Montgomery.

When we reached Gundlach’s garage, Carl Webb—the man who had threatened
to kill suspected looters—paddled over in a red kayak. He had a
9-millimetre Sig Sauer pistol under his lifejacket. Gundlach, Lauren,
and Montgomery went inside.

Webb told me that the neighborhood was expected to remain flooded for
several more weeks. “Are you going to stick it out?” I asked. “Yeah, of
course,” he said. “Why not? It’s my house. And there are others down the
bayou who also maintain vigilance against looters. The police have told
us that it’s our responsibility; they do not have any floating assets,
and entering any of these subdivisions from Buffalo Bayou is relatively
easy. So we are standing guard.”

Inside the garage, the water was only half an inch below the top of my
waders. As I walked through, I slipped off a ledge, and my suit began to
fill with brown water, thick with sewage and oil and insects. The water
was no lower inside the home, although you could see from the brown line
on the walls that it had crested a foot higher.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, a half-empty glass of red wine sat on
the mantle. Roberta’s paintings were strewn around the room, and Claus
and Lauren tried to decide which ones to save.

Lauren pointed to a small lithograph in a large elegant frame. “That’s
the Matisse, Dad. We need to take it,” she said.

“Oh, shit. We have plastic bags, right?” He walked over to inspect the
work. “This is a Matisse?”

“Look,” Lauren said, pointing to the signature. “Henri Matisse.” It was
dated 1936, and there was a certificate of authenticity on the back of
the frame.

“Oh, man. I don’t know how much that little boat can carry.”

A few minutes later, I spotted a similar frame holding two small
etchings, numbered 11/60 and titled “Chevaux dans la Prairie.”

“That’s a Degas,” Claus said.

“You have to rescue that, too, right?”

“Shit,” he said.

Lauren and her father filled two garbage bags with clothes and art, as
well as a pistol. But the frames for the Matisse and the Degas were too
big to fit. Lauren lifted up the Matisse and started walking down the
stairs, balancing the frame on her head. I carried the Degas. At the
front door, the water was up to our necks, and it filled both our suits.
When we reached the garage, we loaded the artwork onto the kayak, and
Gundlach dragged it up the block.

As we approached the shoreline, where the water was only knee-deep,
Montgomery stepped out of the path that Gundlach had charted, to take a
picture. Suddenly, he plunged into an invisible ditch. For a moment, he
managed to keep his face and camera above water, and I leaped over to
grab him. But then he went under completely, and I fell in, too.

The Gundlachs took us back to their friends’ house, where we showered.
Lauren washed our clothes. As we sat in the living room, wearing only
towels, Roberta leaned over on a couch, sipping a glass of red wine. “We
don’t normally work like this,” Montgomery said.

“We don’t normally live like this,” Roberta replied.