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Through the split in the big wagon gate
Editor's note: Bartab blogger Lance Scott Walker did a stint as a volunteer at the Astrodome Thursday. He describes his experience in this entry.
We rolled into the Dome gates a little after 4 p.m., Ryan Chavez and I, a bottle of water under each arm and no idea where to go. I'd made a couple of phone calls to friends who had plans to go down there earlier and gotten a rough idea, though. East Gate of the Astrodome. Oh man . . . East Gate. If the Astrodome were New York City, the high-traffic West Gate would be its Manhattan, the by-association/necessity crowded South Gate its Brooklyn, the North Gate its ignored Queens/Harlem and the East Gate its Jersey City/East River/no mans land. Geographically, that metaphor makes no sense, but so far as the personality of each gate at the Dome, it would stand to say that nobody likes the East Gate.
"The split in the big wagon gate . .." was a phrase coined by Astros announcer Milo Hamilton years and years ago to identify the massive gap in the middle of the outfield in the Dome, through which you could easily drive a Mack truck. That's exactly where we were told to enter. Coming through the open doors, my first glimpse of the floor of the Dome was that of astonishment -- the massive floor was almost completely covered with people, cots, volunteers buzzing around. It looked like a huge flea market out there, complimented by the thousands of orange seats surrounding it all.
We didn't have much time to marvel in it, though. We found a booth to sign up as volunteers and were issued nametags and armbands. A forklift pulled up, stocked high with bundles of blankets all wrapped up and we were instructed by a fat guy with a whistle around his neck to start throwing those bundles up to a guy atop a huge stack of them. A bundle was handed to me and I mishandled it and it smashed my glasses into my face, bending them all out of shape and pretty much ruining them. All in the name of volunteering!
So we got the bundles up and then moved a couple of them down to the floor and a police officer came over to my bundle with a set of wire snips. I held down the metal bands that were keeping the bundle together and he put the snips underneath them and clipped them. Then he pulled them out again and went for the next band, but his hand slipped and the end of the snips went straight into his finger. He and I both stopped cold for a split second, and he literally had to pull it back out of his finger. When he did so it started gushing blood and he shook his head and said "that felt good" and cut the rest of the snips. I all but yanked them out of his hand and said "take that to medical. You know you need to get to medical." He paused and looked at me and nodded and left.
I probably spent the next hour or so just taking blankets and clothes to people. The evacuees were leaning over a retaining fence waving to the volunteers to pick clothes out for them in these huge piles that were all laid out. The thing that threw you off is that they'd always call you by your name ... "Lance, can you get me the shoe that matches this one? I got a job interview tomorrow." I must've looked for that thing for 15 minutes, and this other volunteer lady kept coming by laughing at me for still looking for it. I had to! I finally went back to him all dejected and unsuccessful and handed the one shoe back. He winked.
At about 6 or 7 p.m. they fed everyone and the mood really seemed to calm down. When you walked through the main floor area, everyone would end up asking you for something but everyone was very genial and I would venture to say that only the mothers with children were demanding, but they had to be. I didn't blame them a bit, and it was them and the elderly who I assisted first.
Another pallette-load of cots came in and they had us shuffling back and forth with the folded-up cots in bags slung over our shoulders, bringing them to any empty area of floor to set them up. See, the cots were in these little bags and you had to untie the bag and then slide the cot out and unfold it and stick a loose metal bar through either end for the headrest. I did not know this at first, and I also couldn't figure out how to unfold the cot right because it was folded up all backwards. So I stood there with a young shirtless guy from New Orleans trying to figure out how to unfold this cot for what must have been five or 10 minutes. When I finally got it figured out, every cot after that was like whipping open a butterfly knife.
"Volunteers! Volunteers!" would come the call, and usually when that call came out from behind the volunteer desk, it meant that you had a special/weird mission to fulfill, so I jumped at every one.
"Take that hand truck," the whistle guy explained, "go up to the top of that ramp and find a green Ford Explorer. There's a lady there with a thousand bottles. Go and get them."
A thousand bottles. A thousand bottles of what? We didn't care, and Chavez and I went roaring up the ramp with that hand truck and found a little blonde lady in sunglasses waving us over.
I have a thousand Bibles for you guys to bring down.
So that's what he said. And she wasn't kidding, either. We piled those bad boys up three feet high and an old cowboy with an HLSR badge on his shirt helped us get the thing back down the ramp.
One of the most amazing things about the volunteer group was how varied they all were -- there were dozens of doctors and nurses there from all over, of course, but there were also people just showing up in their work clothes -- people with Walgreen's badges on their shirts, some in suits, one guy still wearing his Burger King outfit.
They called for us to help move a bunch of stuff at the back of the Dome so we could set cots up on these huge landings back there. When the Dome is used for baseball, these landings disappear, but when they move the seats for football, they're opened up, and that's where they had us moving people.
Before we could get anything up there though we had to move these huge rolls of stuff -- what looked like massive rolls of roofing paper or something. I mean huge, and I couldn't figure out what they were until I grabbed one of them near the side. It was Astroturf.
And it was only then that I remembered where we were, and I looked up at the pennant banners still hanging from the rafters and the glass panels in the ceiling, and remembered looking at that ceiling so many times before over the years, and then looking back out over the floor at the now 8,000 or 9,000 people finding shelter in the Dome and I knew that there was something very special taking place.
I'll be back there today.