We Hold Our Breath

April 17, 2023
Essayist Fields’s evocative debut explores the development of his native Houston, Tex., against the backdrop of the many storms that have inundated America’s fourth-largest city. When Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, Fields’s complicated feelings and “illogical love” for his hometown came rushing back as he set out from Iowa to rescue his mother. Noting that Houston was “gouged out from the sucking bowl of a swamp,” Fields traces the city’s evolution from a slavery-dependent agricultural economy to the hub of the U.S. oil and gas industry, highlighting how its lack of zoning and laissez-faire approach to regulations has led to its current environmental problems, including floods, chemical leaks, and air pollution. However, Houston’s “anything goes” attitude about land use has also made it a welcoming and affordable mecca for “the nation’s highest concentrations of immigrants from Vietnam, Pakistan and several other countries.” Fields also profiles noteworthy locals including oil heiress Dominique de Menil, who built a public art sanctuary in the center of the city in the 1970s; self-taught abstract painter and fisherman Forrest Bess; and air monitor Juan Flores, who leads “toxic tours” through Houston’s petrochemical corridor. The result is a vibrant, multilayered portrait of a city full of contradictions.

May 1, 2023
A Houston native explores the city's relationship to the storms that have posed a perennial threat to its existence. In 2017, Fields, who works as a fly-fishing guide on the Missouri River, drove from Iowa to Houston. Though ambivalent about returning, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey had "unlocked a spell of sudden and lucid conviction" that compelled him home. That journey became the basis of this book, about the people, such as land speculator Augustus Allen, and historical forces--like early-19th-century American expansionism--that created Houston from a "sucking bowl" of swampland. Accompanying Fields on his travels was a friend and fellow former Marine named Nigel. Together, they toured post-Harvey devastation by boat, observing how destroyed neighborhoods "seethed, in the humid, post-storm heat, like giant and filthy altars to loss." As the narrative develops, the "deep water[s]" against which Houston had always fought become a metaphor for personal pain and suffering. Fields reveals that Harvey provided "the neutralizing circumstance of real emergency" that allowed him and the "fierce and restless" bipolar mother from whom he had grown distant to "see each other freshly, without baggage." At the same time, obligations created by the hurricane helped the author revive closeness with Nigel, who had tested him with years of maddening inconsistency. A year later, Fields returned alone to observe the lingering aftereffects of Harvey on the oil industry that had enriched Houston but also created refineries susceptible to toxic emissions, especially in the wake of massive storms. During such storms, writes the author, "most refineries and processing facilities shut down their monitoring systems, turning a blind eye to malfunctions." In this brief yet memorable book, Fields creates an unsentimental yet poignant story that examines the complexities of one man's homecoming. With eloquence and grace, the author investigates the interconnectedness of place, history, and identity. A thoughtfully elegant, reflective work.

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