Houston needs a new flag.
With a flood. And an armadillo.
It’s not easy being a Houstonian. Here we sit, soaked in our soggy bayou homeland, scraping the contents of the neighbors’ float-away trash cans from our front lawns and wondering if there’s an automotive potpourri strong enough to mask Flooded Car Smell, thinking the thoughts that only Houstonians can think: The rain isn’t over. The Astros’ slow start concerns me. Are those noises in the attic waterlogged squirrels or waterlogged rats? And the Rockets, ohhhhh, the Rockets.
Houston frequently is like a sophomore-level philosophy class, Existentialism and the Hopelessness of Human Experience. Even in this throbbing, teeming, unreasonably large city — these numbers are based solely on a recent unhappy experience driving from Pasadena to Cypress, but Houston is approximately 2.4 billion people, occupying an area roughly the size of Montana, whose freeway system was designed by the guy responsible for those Mad Max movies — it’s easy to feel abandoned and alone.
We need something to unite us, something to fill us with a sense of community, a feeling that, to quote Zac Efron, “We’re all in this together.” And I’m not talking about another charming H-E-B commercial, where J.J. Watt is dressed in a toga or J.J. Watt is having a cookout or J.J. Watt is making supper with his mom. Sure, J.J. Watt is a shining example of wholesome American manhood, but he’s also a Houston Texan, and we all know, deep in the pit of our souls, that the only reason the Texans exist is to break our hearts, which puts us right back in that sophomore philosophy class, dressed in a ratty Nirvana T-shirt and feeling morose. We need something hopeful, something happy, something that says to Houstonians everywhere — Kingwood to Alief, Acres Homes to River Oaks, Meyerland to Champions Forest — that we are united, we are Houston. We need a new flag. Our old city banner, an enormous white star on a field of blue, the city seal nestled in its center, has been around since 1915. The seal, which features a horse-drawn plow and a steam locomotive, was adopted in 1840. Back in 1840, steam locomotives and farm implements announced Houston as a cutting-edge, forward-thinking boomtown, poised confidently on the cusp of greatness. Today, a steam locomotive and farm implement-adorned city crest is a little like listening to your grandfather spouting off about how there ain’t a dame in today’s Hollywood who can hold a candle to Delores Del Rio: It’s dated. It’s out of touch. It’s a little weird.
The flag has to go. But what should replace it? Houston is so vast, so diverse, so many things to so many people. Is it possible to find a symbol that speaks to every Houstonian, that unites us in an Efron-esque sense of goodwill and shared purpose?
This week’s “historic” rainfall (Shake it off, TV weather people: if it happens once, it’s historic. If it happens every single year, it’s just rain) gave us the perfect symbol. You’ve seen it — it’s all over the Internet. Somewhere in our Xanadu on the Bayou, an intrepid Houstonian was spotted, knee-deep in rainwater and soaked to the skin, a yellow slicker hanging haphazardly on his shoulders, surrounded by flooded cars and floating debris, toting a waterlogged armadillo to safety.
That’s it. That’s our new flag. Because wherever you live in this far-flung metropolis, you know what it feels like to be soaked to the skin and up to your knees in rainwater, carrying a stranded armadillo to safety. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? It’s the closest thing we have to a universally Houston experience.
There will have to be some changes. Flags are like heavy- metal-band logos: If a ninthgrader can’t easily reproduce it on the cover of his science notebook, it isn’t any good. The image needs cleaning up. And Armadillo Dude is wearing an Air Jordan T-shirt, which isn’t Houstonian enough. We’ll need to change it to something more representative of the local zeitgeist, a silk-screened AK-47 above the legend “COME AND TAKE IT,” perhaps, or better yet, a No. 8 Texans jersey, because you can’t obsess over your dark places, but you can’t completely ignore them, either. And there needs to be an inspiring motto, something in Latin maybe, to add some class, the vexillological equivalent of Rothko Chapel or the Menil, something we never use but we’re really proud of, something like Ipsum humidum. Amicos armadillos. (“Very wet. Friends of armadillos.”)
Imagine the armadillo banner, draped behind Mayor Turner as he holds next year’s round of flood-related press conferences, its very presence a gentle reminder that this has happened before, and we got through it then, and we’ll get through it now because we’re Houstonians, and we endure. Imagine all 2.4 million of us, crammed onto the 290, hurtling toward Cypress. We’ll still be driving like maniacs and making obscene gestures at each other, but we’ll be more sociable maniacs, making friendlier obscene gestures, knowing that we’re all just people, trying to make it in this crazy world, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later, every one of us is going to be knee-deep in flood, giving the rescuer’s gift to a confused armored rodent. We’re Houstonians. That’s what we do.