FOR mile after mile along the highways, hundreds of thousands of vehicles are nudging their way out of southern Texas to safety. It is a tortuous exodus, but those who are sitting frustrated behind the wheel or squeezed in seats with suitcases at their feet and pets in their laps know they must press on.

They sit in cars and camper vans and trucks, many pulling trailers crammed with the refrigerator, the barbecue or the three-piece suite. Others have boats, jet skis, motorcycles, golf carts — even a private helicopter on a flat-bed truck.

On roof-racks they carry bicycles, bedding and push-chairs. Some have brought not just the contents of their homes — they are towing their entire homes behind them. On the hard shoulder, there are cars that are out of petrol, drivers stopping for a smoke, a mother changing her baby’s nappy on her car bonnet.

The usually bustling malls that line the highway are boarded up. Restaurants have locked their doors, but some have left their neon signs running outside, lit with messages such as “Sorry — closed. Be safe,” and “See ya, Rita”. On the radio, evacuees are ringing in with tales of travel horror. One caller has managed to edge only 69 miles in five hours and it has taken his friend 17 hours to drive from Houston to Dallas.

At Las Palmas mobile home community in Gilchrist, the Schroder family are preparing to join the jam. Nine-year-old Danny has packed up his Power Rangers and Transformers. His brother Christopher, 10, is working his way through an “emergency list” that has his two Harry Potter books marked in bold print at the top.

“They’re his prized possessions,” says his mother, Julie, who is outside their trailer home on a plastic deckchair, sharing a final drink with the neighbours.

“The kids keep telling me what we need to take — but for some reason lightbulbs keep coming up on their list. I say, ‘But there may not be any electricity when this storm comes’ and they are saying ‘Exactly, mom, that’s why we have to take lightbulbs, so we have light’. They don’t get it.”

Her husband, Alan, wishes that he could view Rita’s looming arrival through child’s eyes too. “But I’m a realist,” he adds.He works as a shrimper and fears that he may lose his boat to the storm, and that their trailer home will be swamped if the sea surges through the dunes less than 50ft away. Even if the boat survives, he risks losing his livelihood. “That seabed will be so churned up out there it could take six months to recover. There’ll be nothing left for me out there.”

On the beach there are huge tubes of sand, known as geo-socks, put there earlier in the year to protect the beach from erosion. Mrs Schroder wonders aloud how far they will be flung by the wind and the surge. “If you stick around here too long, you’ll be wearing them,” her husband says.

The Schroders’ neighbour arrives to load his television into his truck. “I came yesterday and got the golf cart and the lawnmower and garden benches and some knick-knacks. Now I’ve just come to get the TV and kiss the rest of it goodbye,” he explains.

Further along the Bolivar peninsula, a narrow strip on which Gilchrist is located, to the east of Galveston Bay, cattle rancher Tinker Hughes is sitting beside the road covered in sweat. He has been working since 5am with five helpers to load up his 150 cattle and drive them north to his brother’s farm. “If this hurricane comes to anything, I won’t have a home so I want to save the cattle. We are going to be the last ones out. If not, we’ll just have to strap ourselves to a telephone pole and hang in there,” he says.

His friends cackle, but Mr Hughes is serious. “You should hear about my wife’s grandmother. She was in a big storm in 1943 right up here not half a mile long the road. The house washed away and she ended up in a tree all night along with the chickens.”

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