Kennedy: Life on Earth has always been risky and dangerous

We know that thousands of Texans’ homes and dozens of lives washed away in Hurricane Ike.

Three weeks, two ballyhooed political debates and one stock-market bailout later, we are now beginning to hear what the waves left along the Gulf Coast.

As far away as South Padre Island, doors and appliances are washing up on beaches. In the marshes east of Galveston Bay, searchers are combing trash piles 8 feet high, the remnants of homes that washed away five miles or more from Bolivar Peninsula.

In what used to be the peninsula town of Caplan, now wiped down to the sand, a 72-year-old college professor was sadly poking through the muddy mess that remained of her home of 20 years.

Dorothy Sisk found one of her dinner plates. And her scissors. And a favorite crockpot.

Then a science professor helping her said, "Why, here’s a mammoth’s tooth!"

Just like that, Sisk and fellow Lamar University professor Jim Westgate found a rare, 10,000-or-more-year-old fossil, a molar from a 12-foot-tall Columbian mammoth that roamed what was then the pre-Ice Age plains.

"I would have walked right by it and not paid attention," Sisk said Friday. "My house is gone — all my books, two or three bookcases in every room, things I brought back from all over the world. But we have this tooth."

Westgate, 56, of Beaumont, said he went to the beach only because Sisk had lost her home, and he wanted to drive her through the debris in his Ford pickup.

"I didn’t want this nice little lady professor trying to drive in there all alone in her sports car," he said. "We had to drive back and forth a few times just to recognize her yard. We’re walking up the driveway, and here’s this tooth."

Westgate is a paleontologist and a professor of Earth and space sciences. He knew Sisk, an education professor, from the university’s honors program.

"I’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve never found a mammoth’s tooth," he said. "Ninety-nine out of 100 people would have thought it was an ugly brown rock."

The tooth is about 8 inches long, he said. It weighs about 6 pounds. In photos, it looks about the size of a half-loaf of bread.

He guessed that it had been buried in the coast and thrown up onto the peninsula by the churning waters of Ike.

"When we have storms down here, the waves throw fossils up onto the beach," he said. "They’ve been buried. This must have been pretty well-protected, because there’s no obvious wear."

Sisk is a former U.S. Department of Education official and director of education for gifted and talented students. She had lived in South Florida for more than 20 years before she moved to Texas.

"I never had a bad experience in Florida," she said. "When I came to Texas, I saw this house. It was advertised as the 'ultimate beach house.’ And it was wonderful — right on the Gulf."

When she returned to campus, somebody told her, "Oh, the peninsula’s right in Hurricane Alley."

"But when you go so long [without a problem], you think nothing’s ever going to happen," she said.

She thought she might have to leave home for two days for Ike. She didn’t even take her six cats.

They haven’t been found.

"The foundation is all that’s left," she said, sadly filling out insurance papers and listing her losses. "I’m not sure they would let me build again. I’m not sure I’d want to live there again. The town’s gone."

Sooner or later, everything along the Gulf is wiped from the earth.

Just like the mammoth.