Just Go!

This piece is a reflexive essay written as an assignment for the Northside ISD Writing in Northside Training (WIN), a part of the New Jersey Writing Project, designed to teach teachers how to use the Writing Process in their classrooms.  Working with my amazing cohorts and trainers through conferencing and revision throughout its genesis, this is one of my submissions for the course.  

As I watched the news with the red, splotchy forms growing and circulating across the radar, the weatherman speaking of “hook echoes” and “circulation patterns,” my adrenaline began pumping.  My mind took me to a shallow, earthen amphitheater on the Mexican border where a darkening sky that came suddenly over the jagged Franklin Mountains suddenly unleashed torrents of water and howling winds.  My toddler and elderly father crouched desperately next to me with our only protection a thin tarp wrapped around us as debris crashed into our barbecue pit, narrowly missing our backs.  That moment, 20 years ago, had turned me into a severe weather junkie, glued to the TV anytime a weather alert scrawled across the screen.

Loud beeping brought me back to reality and the storm system that had triggered thunderstorm warnings and flash flood watches at home in San Antonio.  It was a long night as storms continued to be reborn seemingly instantly.  The next morning, the radar had become a blood red jagged scar across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.  Experts spoke of a “tornado outbreak” the likes of which had not been seen for decades and stories began to flood the news channels of water rescues, hail and wind damage.  The storms continued to build up and push eastward, and on April 26th, the NWS issued a rarely-used “PDS,” Particularly Dangerous Situation, alert.  I was glued to The Weather Channel all day on Wednesday and watched in horror as the storm approached the heavily populated area around the University of Alabama. Alabama had been dear to my heart after my daughter and I fell in love with the romantic comedy “Sweet Home Alabama,” and I had many good friends near Birmingham because of my business.

Cameras captured the rain-shrouded monster as it barreled through the dusk, and radar showed the debris signature to be over a mile and a half wide. Names of seemingly picturesque subdivisions like Pleasant Grove and Happy Valley scrolled across the screen, along with emergency shelter information for those who couldn’t get to safety.

The details began to emerge:  at 5:10 pm on April 27, 2011, a massive wedge tornado, thought to be an EF-5, had barreled down on the suburbs surrounding Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, narrowly missing the Universities of Auburn and Alabama.  Damage reports would soon come but the initial count was over $2 billion in damages, thousands of homes and structures damaged or destroyed, and 65 dead or missing, with over 1500 injuries.  The tornado had traveled over 80 miles, one of the longest tracks in recorded tornado history, leaving a path a mile and a half wide of sheer devastation.

I watched, mesmerized, for what seemed like hours, long after the threat had passed.  Photos and videos revealed the aftermath:  people wandering aimlessly through rubble, trees stripped of their branches standing like toothpicks in a child’s model, cars dangling from their tops like a Titan playing with his toys, foundations completely barren of the homes they had once held fast, mothers collapsed and sobbing in the arms of a neighbor or first responder.  I fell asleep in front of the TV that night.

I had adopted Isaiah 6:8, “Here I am, Lord, send me,” as my life verse a few years before, and the next morning, one word began to sear itself into my mind.  First as a question, then as a command, and finally, by that afternoon, as a statement. “Go.”  My heart felt like a weight being pulled away from my body– like I was miles away from where I should have been at that moment– in Alabama.  I knew I had to go and I knew immediately who would go with me.

Springing into action, I called upon my mission trip teammates, just returned from having served in Honduras.  Consumed with finding the next mission opportunity, we had jokingly come up with a nickname for our group:  Mission Junkies.  By the end of the day, we had ten on our team.  I received my principal’s blessing to take a leave without pay and start a donation drive on campus.  We made plans to leave in 5 days and began working fervently to prepare, secure lodging, and find an agency willing to let us volunteer.

Five days later, we began the 18-hour drive to Birmingham, loaded to the ceiling with donations of toilet paper, canned goods, work gloves and cases of water, and prepped with gloves, boots and tetanus shots.  Excitement thundered through our veins just as the storm had thundered through the city.

Driving to the epicenter, we passed a beautiful brick sign that said Pleasant Grove, flanked on both sides by pink crepe myrtles, now broken and hanging to the lawn, but the occasional missing shingle and broken window were deceptive.

Suddenly, we crested a hill, and there laid out in front of us like an earthly moonscape, was the valley that was once Pleasant Grove.  Blocks and blocks of unimaginable devastation. Had it not been for the concrete driveways, it would have been difficult to even identify where the homes had stood, as the contents and broken framework blanketed the earth for miles.  A massive tent city with relief agencies and insurance companies had sprung up at a church, heavily damaged but miraculously still somewhat intact.  Within an hour all ten of us had been dispatched to various jobs.

Donations, including ours, had poured in from across the US, and had to be sorted and distributed.  We spent a few hours folding, carrying and stocking.  My daughters even managed to alphabetize an entire room of soups and canned vegetables.  Even though we were being of service, our hearts longed to be in the rubble, and as soon as we got a break, we wandered over to where some of our group was working as a bucket brigade to clear bricks from a home the church owned.

Across the street, a woman sorted through a rubble strewn yard alone, so we approached her and offered to help.  Rain and mud soaked belongings littered her lawn, her appliances were half a block away, and her car dangled from a tree at the end of the block, but we saved what we could, rejoicing with her at a wedding photo and a still-folded drawer of her son’s clothing that had been protected by an overturned mattress.  She shared with us how her husband, a volunteer firefighter, had been called to duty early that afternoon and she was home alone with her son when a small voice told her to go across the street, to the church’s house.

Without even knowing her, they pulled her into the house and into a brick-lined closet with eight people already in it.  She described opening the door after the storm and the surrealness of the scene, everything flattened but that closet.  She told us that those ten people in the closet were the only ones still alive on that block.  That neighbor had been found over there, she pointed.  His wife was in that tree over there, pointing a different way.  The smell of death, unnoticed until then, permeated our nostrils at the thought.

The next few days were a blur– finishing one job to be handed another, hot meals in styrofoam containers from mobile kitchens churning out 1000 meals a day, breaking only so a front-loader or utility truck could move this limb or that beam, squeezing in a few five minute video testimonies from survivors to share withmy students back home, arriving back at the borrowed basement rec room where we were staying so filthy that we had to wait outside for our turn at the shower.

When we packed up to return to San Antonio, the car was much lighter and roomier.  We had left all we had there– even the clothes we had come with– but even more so a huge piece of our hearts. The excited chatter had given way to silent contemplation.   We picked at our blisters and cracked fingernails while processing what we had experienced.  So many stories, so many tears, so many prayers– but underlying it all a spirit of hope, of strength, of collaboration. We had gone to Alabama to answer a call, to just go, not knowing how we could help or what we could do, but once we offered up our hands and feet to be the hands and feet of the church, the details hadn’t mattered at all.

Author’s Note:  The Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado was one of many tornadoes in the largest, and one of the most deadly tornado outbreaks in recorded history.  The National Weather Service recorded 355 tornadoes between April 25-28, 2011, with 211, including 4 EF-5s, on April 27th alone.  The death toll was 348, 238 of those in Alabama, and damages exceeded a cost of $11 billion.

Survivor’s Story