Another Storm of the Century--Nonfiction

Another Storm of the Century: A Voice from Tuscaloosa

     Back in August of 2005, I sat in my second-floor Baton Rouge apartment and watched Hurricane Katrina swirling over the Gulf of Mexico. The monster storm angled ever closer to the Louisiana coastline, headed, it seemed, for New Orleans, my favorite city in the world. Like every other person who gave a damn, I could only watch in helpless horror as the coasts of not one but three states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—crumbled before Katrina’s fury. In my part of Baton Rouge, we lost power for thirteen hours or so. Some of our refrigerated foods spoiled. An hour away from New Orleans, I listened to the rifle cracks of trees splitting in half around our complex and could only imagine what it must be like at the sites of landfall. I ventured outside to check on my car, performing the mime “walking against the wind” routine, only with actual wind; I had to lean forward nearly forty-five degrees and plod along as if I were knee-deep in swamp mud. When I ascertained that my car had survived the floral carnage in evidence all around me, I turned back and found myself high-stepping along like a cartoon sprinter, the hurricane-force winds now at my back. For a moment, I felt as if I might lift off the ground and sail away.

    Later, when the levees broke and flooded the city, I screamed in frustration. As the remaining inhabitants of New Orleans stood on rooftops and small concrete islands just above the putrid waters, as those stuck at the Superdome and Convention Center stewed in their own filth and died while waiting on an absent government to help them, Kalene and I donated to shelters and prayed for the city. We waited fearfully for word from our friends who had been stuck in town or stayed out of a sense of duty. We watched the news religiously and saw Hollywood actors and pro athletes arrive to help, long before the President showed up. We heard tales of lower parish officials welcoming members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who somehow arrived before FEMA. A week after most people had finally gotten out of the city, we saw a good friend who had stayed behind at his university in order to help students with nowhere to go. He had easily lost thirty pounds and told tales of returning fire while unknown assailants shot at him.

     Six years later, New Orleans still needs help. And as I sit in Northport, just across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa proper where I work and spend half of my time, I have to wonder what the state of Alabama will look like in 2017.

     I’ve heard a lot of comparisons between the tornadoes that ripped apart the south last week and Hurricane Katrina. I suppose some of these comparisons are apt. Both storm systems devastated enormous areas of the south. Having lived through both, and having been lucky or blessed enough to experience only a near-miss each time, I would have to say, if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, that Katrina seemed worse to me; it crushed the coasts of three states, put an American metropolitan center under water, and destroyed millions of people’s faith in the American system itself. The death toll was higher; the victims waited much longer for aid.

     But such comparisons are, I believe, ultimately pointless. The fact is that both storms unleashed almost unimaginable power. They both trashed homes and took lives indiscriminately. Argue that Katrina is worse until you’re blue in the face, but I defy you to do so in front of those who lost loved ones to the tornadoes. Tell that to those standing outside the giant piles of kindling that were, just a week ago, solid homes that people had spent lifetimes creating. Suffering is suffering; death is death.

     What I am more interested in talking about today are the lessons that Katrina taught us and how I’ve seen those lessons in action over the last several days.

     It all began so similarly. Again, I sat in my second-floor apartment, watching as an apocalyptic storm system bore down on my home region. With Kalene and our cat Cookie McSnowshoe already ensconced in the illusory safety of a bathtub, our electronics and important files piled around them, I watched the tornado sweep into Tuscaloosa. I was sitting in the center of my couch as the local news showed footage from their tower cam. They panned the camera until the tornado churned in the center of our television screen, the debris cloud clearly visible even in the distance. The wedge tornado split my screen so efficiently that, sitting before its bifurcated symmetry, I knew what an animal must feel like when the hunter looks through his or her scope and centers the target, crosshairs nestled just behind the forward shoulder. It seemed that the storm was coming straight for me.

     “Sweet Jesus,” I said to myself as rain drove against our balcony doors and forks of lightning split the sky outside. On screen, the city lay in the path of the tornado like a model Tokyo waiting for the man in the Godzilla suit to step on it.

     Soon enough our cable and internet failed. I joined Kalene in the bathroom and listened as my father, calling from a South Carolina hotel room on a business trip, narrated the tornado’s path. He stayed on the line, calling back whenever we lost the signal, until he heard that the storm had moved past Tuscaloosa and had headed on to Birmingham. At that point, Kalene and I emerged from the bathroom and into a different world.

     No, our apartment had not been damaged. We never even lost power. But as more and more reports came in about the devastation, we knew that things were different. We often think of our time in Louisiana as occurring in two periods—before Katrina and after. Now we would mark our lives in Alabama the same way. Our cable and internet came back on early Friday morning—probably the only good thing that Comcast has done for us in our five years here—and we saw the first images of what we had only heard about. Whole neighborhoods flattened. Businesses wiped away. A gutted Hobby Lobby stood beside a pile of rubble that had once been Big Lots. The Alberta neighborhood had been reduced to matchsticks. Forests of mighty trees had been crushed flat in odd patterns, like crop circles in corn.

     We would soon learn that some of our friends were homeless. Others learned that their lives had hung by the thinnest of threads. And some, like us, somehow escaped the carnage entirely. The tornado took a right turn and angled away from us. If it had kept on its course, it might have hit our apartment directly. And then they probably would have found me in Georgia, Kalene in Kentucky. We heard tales of young people dying—the three students who clung to each other in a bathtub until the storm was over, two of them surviving, the other found a quarter mile away. The four people who hunkered down in a closet until, the tornado having passed, one of them stood up and realized that he was the only one left, the others whisked away like so much straw in the breeze.

     Why were some killed and others spared? Why were some homes leveled and others not even touched?

     I don’t pretend to have those answers. What I do know is this: what I’ve seen so far inspires me.

     In the finale of Treme, season 1, Steve Earle sings, “This city won’t wash away. This city will never drown.” In spite of all the natural, political, economic, and sociological obstacles in their way, New Orleans and her people have endured. I am now seeing the same resolve all around me in Tuscaloosa.

     Trucks loaded down with bottled water, young workers and college students stacked in like cordwood as the vehicles roll into the teeth of the disaster. The sound of chainsaws and human voices singing their songs of labor as trees are removed from rooftops and living rooms. Low murmurs of comfort in contrapuntal relief with the wails for the dead. The hopeful calls of searchers as they dig through the heaps of refuse that were once houses, everyone hoping against hope to find more survivors. An outpouring of sympathy and money and labor and love.

     These are the best lessons from Katrina—that in this life, the only thing we can really count on is each other. Working together is always better than working alone. Pain shared is pain overcome. Helping one’s neighbors, and even one’s enemies, is the right thing to do, no matter the cost. I have seen a President appear two days after the storm, not a week, and rather than making a long speech in an empty square that he attempted to fill with false promises, he took action. I have seen federal monies allocated quickly. I have seen insurance companies acting responsibly—at least for now—rather than exploiting every possible loophole that might allow them to piss on the injured and the destitute. I have heard of FEMA sightings, which in Louisiana were as rare footprints of Bigfoot. I have seen a people rise from the debris to take the hands of other human beings who stepped outside their own spheres of plenty long enough to help.

     And so, thanks to the human spirit and their people’s own indomitable wills, I believe that my current home, like New Orleans (city of my heart), will endure. It may take time and effort and money, but it will happen. And I hope that in New Orleans and Tuscaloosa and numerous smaller towns ripped apart by wind and water—including Vilonia, Arkansas, where my two youngest children live—we will all continue to do our part. Let us take each other’s hands long after the television cameras are gone. Let us support each other even when there’s no profit in it. Let us look past our ideologies and into each other’s eyes. If we can hold each other’s gaze, we’re probably doing all right.

     To do so is not conservative or liberal, socialist or communist, democratic or republican. It’s the decent, human thing to do.

     And if we can do it in the aftermath of a storm, why can’t we do it when the skies are clear? Why can’t we apply these same principles and acts to the problems of disease, poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, education, and homelessness? Why do we refuse to come together, to take care of each other, until nature tears us apart?

     Some would say that to do so would be to be un-American. If that’s true, we should be ashamed of ourselves. To me, the true American spirit can be witnessed in the former graduate student who’s coming back to Tuscaloosa on his own dime, bearing water and food and a chainsaw, because he cares. We can see it in the lives of those who take in the newly-homeless, who donate their time and money and the strengths of their backs to assure that this storm does not define Tuscaloosa’s history.

     We can see it in each other, if only we bother to look.

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Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com

I’m about to take a week-long (or so) sabbatical from writing while I grade some papers and visit with my two youngest kids over their spring break. In the meantime, in place of any actual blogging, here’s a story I published a few years back. I hope you find something in it that you like.

Golgotha

     Brother Floyd sat in the second pew from the front, staring straight ahead. He would have been sitting on the front pew if it had still been in the church, but the first pews on each side of the aisle were gone. For that matter, so was his heavy oak pulpit. He saw a few splinters that might have been the remnants, but as far as he could tell it had been crushed, brand new sound system and all.

     From the hole in the roof, rainwater dripped onto his head in irregular plops. The entire middle section of the roof was gone, apparently ripped skyward. Brother Floyd had not been there, of course, but he figured that the tornado must have jumped and landed right on the roof. And after it had ripped open the ceiling, it must have sucked the two front pews right out through the hole. Not any other pew, not a single one—just those first two.

     Then there was the pulpit itself. Phallic, monolithic, sacral, it had stood in the same place ever since he had become pastor of Golgotha Landing Baptist Church, a good four years now. In Floyd’s opinion, he had the best of the smaller churches around Pinedale, and he had had the best pulpit. He had loved the perfection of the grain, visible under the dark coat of varnish. He loved how, from the perspective of the congregation in the first three or four rows, the top of the pulpit seemed to touch the base of the life-sized wooden cross mounted over the baptismal pit. He had always found it comforting, the way his symbol and Christ’s seemed connected.

      And now his lovely podium was buried under toilets.

     Brother Floyd had never considered the possibility that one day he would see a pile of toilets inside the church, especially one that covered his pulpit. But there it was—a heap, a veritable mountain of gaping white mouths, some broken, some shattered into fragments, most whole. And now, from that once-comforting perspective, from the second row of his fine little church, the optical illusion had changed. The hill of toilets was so high that now only the very top of the cross was visible.

     As he stared at the pile, two basic thoughts occupied Brother Floyds’ mind. First, why had the tornado punched a hole in the roof of his church and taken only the front pew from both the right and left rows? And second, where had the tornado gotten all those toilets? As far as he knew, toilets did not naturally occur in heaps, waiting to be swept up by the first tornado that came along.

     Lost in these thoughts, Floyd did not hear the doors of the church swing open or the soft footfalls on the carpeted floor. He was not aware that anyone else was nearby until Rudy Dufresne was standing beside him, talking.

     Now there’s somethin you don’t see every day

      said Rudy, pushing his green John Deere cap back on his head and scratching his scalp through wiry red hair,

     That’s the biggest pile of commodes I’ve ever seen.

     Though he was surprised, Floyd did not start or cry out. He turned to look briefly at Rudy and then resumed his contemplation. Rudy said

     Now I once saw four or five commodes thrown together in a junkyard, but there’s probably forty, maybe even fifty here. Never seen that many in a pile

     and Floyd said

     That’s real interesting, Rudy

     and Rudy replied

     I wonder if this is a sign of some kind.

     Floyd did not know, but nevertheless he said

      I doubt it.

     Rudy took a seat on the pew to Floyd’s left, directly across the aisle. He looked up at the hill of toilets for a moment, taking the sight in from Floyd’s perspective. The two men were silent for perhaps a minute. Finally Rudy said

     Say, preacher, that’s what I was comin down to ask you about. Signs. We had somethin weird happen out at my place

     and Floyd said

     Really

     not looking at Rudy, unable to take his eyes away from the sight in front of him, while Rudy said

     Yeah. See, after that twister passed, we came out of our storm cellar to see what was what. I figured the house would be gone, no roof on the barn, crops blown away, tractor all busted up. But you know what I saw?

     Rudy turned to Floyd, cleared his throat twice, glanced nervously at the pile of commodes, wondered what was so fascinating about them. Floyd still stared straight ahead, perhaps not even listening.

     Rudy cleared his throat a third time and said

     I say, you know what I saw?

     so Floyd said gently

     No, Rudy. What?

     and Rudy said

     That goddam twister—aw God, preacher, pardon my French—that dang twister didn’t hit anything on my place but that fool wrought-iron spiked fence my oldest boy put up around his Momma’s flower beds. Took every durn spike, every durn piece of iron except for one post.

     Floyd snorted and said

     Sure is odd, all right. What’s this about a sign, though?

     Rudy took off his cap and mopped his brow with a dirty shirt sleeve, saying

     Well, now, that’s the really weird part. The tornado skewered my rooster on that one spike

     and Floyd said

     Skewered

     so Rudy said

     Yeah, skewered, shoved that rooster right down on it, shoved that spike right up his a—up his hindquarters

     and Floyd said

     And you figure that’s a sign from God.

     Rudy scratched his head again. Floyd wondered briefly if his head really itched or if the gesture were some kind of mannerism that meant nothing in particular. Rudy got up and climbed the two steps to the choir loft, a five-wide, five-deep collection of folding chairs partitioned off behind a short wooden balustrade. Floyd knew what Rudy was seeing, had seen it himself earlier. Not one chair had been taken or even knocked over, though they were in disarray, run together in little wrecks of harmless metal, not one of them dented so badly that a hammer couldn’t straighten them back out. They were all there, all twenty-five.

     Floyd watched Rudy count the chairs, mouth moving silently. He appeared to start over a time or two, probably certain he had lost count, that his initial total could not possibly be right. Finally, Rudy stopped counting and just looked at the chairs. Then he looked from the chairs to the toilets and back again. Floyd knew he was trying to work it all out, to make some sense of it, but he also knew that logic would not work and that the sense of the chairs and the toilets would elude them both. Finally Rudy said

     Say, preacher, how about you and me unstack these chamber pots? I don’t like the look of em.

     Floyd stood up. Hands in his pockets, he looked at Rudy Dufresne, a man who was easily six-three and two hundred thirty pounds, a man currently dwarfed by the biggest pile of toilets ever to land in a southeast Arkansas Baptist church. Floyd could tell that Rudy meant what he said; the toilets spooked him. He said

     Why?

     Dufresne looked embarrassed. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it, looking intently at the pile for several moments, silent. Floyd wondered if he could answer the question, if he knew why. Then, finally, he said

     Because if you see em from the corner of your eye—the white basins, the hollowed out insides—it looks like a mountain of skulls. It’s too creepy.

     Floyd looked at the pile again. Looking at it straight on, the toilets just looked like toilets. Out of place, ridiculous, surreal, absurd—but creepy they were not. Rudy was wrong.

     But Rudy was right, too, because if you turned ninety degrees or so to the right or the left, the toilets became something else. In the corner of your eye, in the country where sight and imagination meet to play tug-of-war, the white ceramic surface of the toilets became a bleached, crumbling pile of skulls, straight out of some fairy tale about a giant who terrorizes a countryside picking his teeth with the femur bones of failed heroes, the empty basins the hollow black staring sockets of death and decay. Yes, Rudy was right. In the corner of your eye, the toilets were creepy. So he said

     Okay, let’s unstack them.

     They stood on opposite sides of the pile, trying to decide how to start. Neither man was sure how heavy a toilet was, whether he could pick one up and move it on his own. Floyd said

      We better work together. If I pull one of these out over here, the whole shebang might fall on you

     and Rudy, coming around to Floyd’s side of the pile, said

     Buried under an avalanche of turdbowls. Not a good end to a rough day.

     Floyd grabbed the base of a toilet near the bottom of the pile, one that looked disconnected from the infrastructure of the stack. Rudy grabbed the top and together they lifted. Floyd’s first thought was that, while it wasn’t as heavy as he might have believed, he was glad he hadn’t tried to lift it himself. Rudy grinned and opened his mouth to say something, and then they heard it begin.

     First there was a low, creaking groan, the sound of metal fatigue or fingernails on a faraway chalkboard. They looked up at the hill of toilets, a hill that had suddenly begun muttering, trembling slightly. They looked at each other again, a gesture of simultaneous understanding. They dropped the toilet and ran in opposite directions, Floyd down the two steps to the church floor and back up the aisle. Halfway to the doors, he looked back over his shoulder. Two or three toilets on top of the pile shuddered and fell, bouncing down the ceramic terrain, crushing pieces of white basin as they hit. Floyd saw Rudy dive into the baptismal pit headfirst, legs disappearing last as if he had sunk beneath the waters that were not there.

     From the back of the church, Floyd watched the quick disintegration of the mountain. Toilets tumbled from the peak, end over end, striking toilets, sending up little clouds of white splintery toilet dust. Toilets from the middle slid outward, shifting over toilets, burying toilets and being buried, screeching plates creating fault lines that just as quickly vanished. Floyd saw Rudy poke his head over the edge of the pit, his eyes wide, his mouth open and hollow. The mountain oozed outward, crashing against the choir loft balustrade, spilling into the first few rows of pews. Soon Floyd could even see a few splintered boards from his pulpit, stark brown against the whiteness.

     After the last toilet had come to rest, Floyd made his way back up the aisle, picking carefully over pieces of the fallen mountain. He stumbled his way to the first pew in line and sat down again, resting his feet on the side of a broken toilet. Rudy had climbed back over the side of the pit and was walking gingerly, leaping from place to place as if on stepping-stones in a brook. Soon he was sitting next to Floyd. For a few moments they surveyed the blasted landscape before them. Then Rudy said

     Well, that was the goddamdest—aw hell, preacher, pardon my French—that was the durndest thing I’ve ever seen

     and Floyd said

     It was pretty impressive.

     For several moments they sat still, quiet, listening to nothing in particular. Finally Rudy spoke.

     So what about the sign?

     but Floyd said

     Sign?

     and thought for a few moments. Then it came to him and he continued

     Oh. The chicken. Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about a skewered chicken

     but, as patiently as he could, Rudy said

     It was my rooster. He’s sittin in my yard right now with a three-foot piece of iron up his butt. I thought maybe it was a sign that my boy was queer.

     Floyd burst into laughter. Rudy sat quietly. After a moment Floyd saw that he was serious and tried to choke off his giggles, finally subsiding after a moment into relatively quiet snorts. Rudy said

     Well, I did

     and Floyd asked

     Why?

     Rudy was silent, mistrustful, as if he expected to be laughed at again no matter what he said, but finally he answered

     Well, a rooster is also called a cock, and that iron spike

     but Floyd interrupted

     I see, I see. Well, like I said, I wouldn’t worry about it much. Seems like God wouldn’t send a tornado just to plant a rooster on a spike.

     Rudy nodded and said

     I don’t think He’d do it just for that either. But did you hear what happened to Bill Johnson? Twister took his barn and then jumped out in his cotton and carved a letter C. I didn’t even know twisters could curve, but the goddam—ah hell, preacher, sorry—the twister carved a big C in the cotton and then jumped over into the woods.

     Floyd considered this information. He looked at Rudy, who had taken off his cap as was fanning himself with it. He still looked serious. So Floyd said

     So you think . . . what . . . that God was telling Bill that he’s an average farmer? Or maybe that the C stands for cotton and so Bill’s got the right crop, or maybe it stands for corn and he’s got the wrong one?

     Rudy laughed and said

     Brother, I don’t know what it means. I guess it could mean any of that stuff or nothin at all. Just like these here commodes. Probably doesn’t mean anything that they dropped through a hole in your roof and buried your pulpit.

     Floyd snorted. Of course it meant nothing. What could it really mean? It was weird, nothing more or less. Such things happened. This was no weirder than that time years ago when it rained frogs in a town up north. Or when a Louisiana duck hunter’s boat was sunk by a turtle frozen in a block of ice, one that just fell out of the clear sky. Or when that man in Mississippi got crushed by a piano while riding a bicycle on a country road, like something out of a cartoon. Meaningless, random, the epitome of rudderless chance was lying at their feet, broken and splintered and sharp. Finally Floyd said

     I’ve never thought that everything has to mean something. Tell you the truth, I’m more curious about why the twister took both our first-row pews and left everything else. That’s the mystery I’d really like solved.

     Rudy snorted and said

     Shoot, preacher, that one’s easy. This is a Baptist church, right? I bet God just thought that all that wood was goin to waste, since nobody sits on the first row anyhow.

     Floyd burst into laughter. He felt it welling deep within him, down in the furthest part of his mind, laughter bright and gleaming and shattered. He laughed until tears spilled from his eyes and ran gently down his cheeks, until his sides burned and his kidneys ached. Suddenly he realized that he had to urinate badly, and that he was currently in the presence of dozens of unusable toilets. That set him off again, laughing.
Rudy Dufresne listened to him. He kept fanning himself with his John Deere cap, his efforts creating the only breeze blowing for miles. The day had become quite still.