This Is Only a Test (3 page)

What, I wonder, will the universe decide for you?

Which you will you be?

Will you buy the corsage or the boutonniere?

Which talks shall I reserve for your mother?

Though perhaps since your conception occurred so close to the tornado's birth, you will come out half tornado, instead; a cross-pollination of sorts, your abnormality invisible on one Doppler screen, but wholly visible on another.

Let's pretend, for argument's sake, that you do leave the womb spinning. What are we to do with you then? How do we swaddle your swirling shape? How do we confine you to a crib?

Fatherhood, I'm told, is hard enough without the convergence of cumulonimbus and vapor, though perhaps this is the
unique challenge with which we've been blessed. Our penance for survival.

And let's not even discuss your adolescence where, just for spite, when I say “Don't you even think about blowing down the neighbor's mailbox!” you'll blow down his gazebo instead.

Or his tree. Or all of our trees.

Have I told you about the time your mother and I dreamed up an alternative ending to our lives? How from our place beneath that rusted showerhead, we whispered prophecies?

If we die here nobody will ever know about
 . . .

We barely even knew of you ourselves. Just three days removed from the plus sign on the pregnancy test, the new world stretched before us still seemed unfathomable.

We could not conceive that we had conceived.

What universe, we wondered, would allow for such a thing?

But as our house creaked and our neighborhood swayed, what suddenly seemed most unfathomable was our lives stripped of that future. We'd interpreted the plus sign as a promise, and we expected the universe to make good.

But the universe provided us far fewer tea leaves than oak leaves, and predicting our future on how foliage fell seemed suddenly less than ideal.

Outside that bathroom window, an oak tree as old as the Civil War stretched its limbs and bowed down to us.

As I imagined its roots uprooting, I thought of the old koan:

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

It must.

Because what is the alternative? That we believe only that which we can see and hear and feel? That there is no place in the world for an almost I?

Trust me, Bucko, when a tree falls it makes a terrible sound.

Swear to me you didn't hear it.

May 23, 2011

To the Good People of Joplin:

This will get worse before it gets better. I know this because of what I've observed from my own firsthand experiences in Tuscaloosa, a city much like yours which was ravaged a month prior to your own ravaging. Likely you watched us from afar, which is what we do now, our cities forever wedded by our season of misfortune.

Allow me to share with you a difficult truth:

In the coming hours and days your death count is likely to rise. Cell phone reception will return—which, on the surface, seems like a good thing, though this increased communication will mostly only bring bad news. People will begin to learn who was lost and how, and as their stories are sifted from the rubble,
it will soon become clear that everybody knows somebody now gone. You will begin hearing stories, though unlike the phone calls not all of them will end badly. Like the one where the bathtub blows away but the family remains safely inside; and the one where the dog survives two weeks on broken legs before reuniting with his people.

In short, take comfort where you can.

As the dust settles, people will begin endowing the storm with a conscience. They will talk about how the tornado leveled one house but left another, how it
made that choice
. You will begin fitting nature's lunacy into some strange logic, bring God into the equation and speak of “master plans” not yet revealed to his flock. This is a good technique, and one that we have found to be quite useful here in Tuscaloosa. The fitting together of disjoint pieces offers the same distraction as any good puzzle—an outlet to busy oneself when the mind is in need of rest.

I should warn you, though, that you'll soon be inundated by a storm of another sort.

Everyone will want to help you, and even those of you who were spared the worst of it will receive a knock on your door, someone pleading with you to take a bottle of water.

Listen to me: just take it. This is a small gift from a person who feels as helpless as you do. Better still if you can muster a stoic smile, though you'll surely be forgiven if you can't.

Good people of Joplin, I can't promise you much, but I can promise you this: one month from today, you will not be healed, but you will be healing.

The scrap will be piled alongside the roads, and eventually even the choir of sirens will dissipate. One day soon, cars will once again outnumber ambulances, and in a few weeks' time, you'll see
a child fling a Frisbee and forget that anything more treacherous ever circled in the wind.

This morning, as my cereal turned soggy, I watched the on-site meteorologist from the Weather Channel choke up on the air. He was describing your world turned inside out, your people stumbling, when he momentarily misplaced his own stoic smile and admitted that Joplin looked “very reminiscent of what we saw last month in [pause] Tuscaloosa.”

His pause said what his words couldn't, reminding me of one final piece of advice that I'll bestow upon you now.

You will find, I think, that the inexplicable nature of nature is another hard-earned side effect of your troubles. And more to the point, that seeking answers in the aftermath is a Sisyphean task not worth your effort.

For a month now, I have been trying to write my way out of disaster.

It is still here.

1.

For nine months now, I have been trying to write my way out of disaster. I thought it would be easier than this. Yet no matter how many times I report on that April afternoon in Tuscaloosa—when my wife, dog, and I hid in our bathtub—still, the storm will not leave us.

2.

Once I made them by hand. You can make one, too. Pour a teaspoon of salt into a cylindrical glass and spin the spoon clockwise. Or counterclockwise. It doesn't matter.

3.

I am not the first to have fashioned one. In 1955, New York University's James E. Miller placed a pan of water in a circular box,
positioning air slits on either side. The water was heated, emitting steam, and as additional air blew in, that steam grew into a cyclone.

4.

Do not be fooled by the aforementioned examples of scientific ingenuity: humankind did not invent the tornado, nor has it improved upon the design.

5.

Prior to creating them, we created warning systems against them. In October of 1883, Edward S. Holden issued a call for an “apparatus” that might provide towns a few minutes' warning before a tornado's impending touchdown. He suggested a highly elaborate network of bells, even created a prototype—a wired bell that rang upon exposure to a particular velocity of wind. Perhaps inspired by the recent invention of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Holden envisioned spools of underground wires connecting house to house and person to person, ensuring safety for all.

6.

Despite Holden's dreams of connectivity, findings from a 1972 study by professors John Sims and Duane Baumann noted a division instead: “The number of tornado-caused deaths in the South is strikingly higher than it is in the remainder of the nation.” Sims and Baumann argued that this regional discrepancy was due, in part, to variations in housing structure, though also to philosophical differences on the subject of danger. According to the report, while in the midst of a tornado watch, 24.2 percent of Illinoisans kept an eye tilted to the television, while 0.0 percent
of Alabamians reacted in kind. Instead, Sims and Baumann explained, Alabamians much preferred “the method of using one's own senses—they ‘watch the sky' or ‘look at the clouds.'” It was a strategy deemed “psychologically anachronistic,” a behavior from a bygone era in which the tomfoolery of front-porch reconnaissance somehow overpowered the precision of science. Illinoisans relied on radar for up-to-the-minute weather reports, while seven hundred miles to the south Alabamians preferred confronting “the whirlwind alone with [their] God.”

7.

It is a comfort, perhaps, for southerners to look their maker in the eye, though when I—a northern transplant—rode out Tuscaloosa's storm, I looked to no one. Looked
at
no one, either. I was not alone in that bathtub (I had my wife, our dog, our unborn child), but we with eyes aimed them low, tucking our heads tight beneath the couch cushions.

8.

Thirty years prior, in April of 1981, the Department of Commerce released a public service announcement entitled
Tornado Warning: A Booklet for Boys and Girls
. Featuring the lovable Owlie Skywarn—an owl with a penchant for tornado spotting—the feathered fowl took children on a guided tour of the necessary facts for surviving a tornado. “Keep track of sunshine,” Skywarn hoots. “Your town needs you.”

9.

Towns need survivors to survive.

10.

I thought I was paying a price just by surviving. Thought that if I wrote enough, paid my portion of the tribute, it might just blow away from us for good. It hasn't. We tried leaving it instead, packing our bags and relocating 1,012 miles to the north. Still, it sleeps beside me on the pillow. This very moment, I can hear it rattling around in the vents.

11.

Alabama has a long history of leveling, though few remember what occurred in Tuscumbia, Alabama, at dinnertime on November 22, 1874. How ten were killed, thirty injured, and half the town rattled to rubble. Or what occurred in Leeds, Alabama, a decade later, on February 19, at 1:20 in the afternoon: eleven dead, thirty-one injured, “hail of unusual size . . .”

12.

Let's jump ahead now to March 21, 1932, when again tornadoes tore through the state. Within forty-eight hours, Alabama reported 200 dead, though the number soon climbed to 268. In the days that followed, the stories, like the body count, began to grow. One recounted how three-year-old Douglas Sims was flung into a field after being ripped from his father's arms. As Douglas's parents began their frantic search to retrieve him, one newspaper reported, lightning “revealed the youngster nearly 50 feet away walking towards them with outstretched arms.”

13.

They say that lightning never strikes twice, but this does not hold true for tornadoes. Ask the people of Irving, Kansas, who on May 30, 1879, endured a pair of tornadoes less than an hour apart.
On May 4, 1922, Austin, Texas, too, received a one-two tornadic punch. Though perhaps the dubious honor of most regularly struck town goes to Codell, Kansas, a place that received not two tornadoes in close succession, but three, each just one year apart. May 20, 1916, was a bad day for the people of Codell, but so was May 20 the year after, and May 20 the year after that.

14.

Ask meteorologists, they'll tell you: Tornadoes keep careful calendars.

15.

Meteorologists will also tell you that tornadoes share a lexicon with humans. Tornadoes, much like their victims, are born, die, and live a life in between. They travel in “families” (formed from “parent storms”), and are known to chase one another as if they were the “It” in a game of backyard tag.

16.

On April 27, 2011, the “It” tagged Tuscaloosa.

17.

“You can't stop a tornado,” hoots Skywarn. “You can't keep it from hitting a house or town . . . But people can get out of its way.”

18.

On April 11, 1965, the people of Toledo tried just that. It struck anyhow, bringing with it something strange. The strangeness came in the form of two streams of parallel light, along with a cloud filled with lightning bolts “shooting straight ahead like arrows.” The tornado was said to be encircled by an “electric blue light,” as well as by “balls of orange and lightning” trailing from
the tip of the tail. Do not expect science to explain any of this. One witness added that the tornado's tail was reminiscent of an elephant trunk. “It would dip down as if to get food,” the witnesses described, “then rise up again . . . [to] put the food in his mouth.”

19.

When tornadoes are hungry, they will eat a Krispy Kreme—not the donut, but the shop. The storm devoured the building's shell, but the ice cooler remained intact. And an even greater mystery: each bottle of milk remained upright.

20.

Tornadoes, once, were a mystery. As a result of the devastation wrought by the East Baltic tornado of June 22, 1795, Johann Christoph Brotze—a teacher and historian from present-day Latvia—created a sketch of a sketch of a tornado. He had not witnessed it himself, though he based his work on a curious drawing he'd seen. Brotze's sketch, believed to be one of our earliest depictions of a tornado, revealed mostly what was expected—a cone-shaped cloud narrowing to a tail just beneath a blanket of darkness. Brotze's tornado showed no swirling motion, but instead appeared to be holding firm, a god's muscled torso surrounded by lightning bolts, his head hidden just out of frame.

21.

Tornadoes, twice, were a mystery. John Parker Finley, an accomplished Army Signal Service officer, dedicated much of his life trying to understand them. Most nineteenth-century Americans had never seen a real one, but with his 1887 illustrated book on the subject, Finley brought tornadoes into American households everywhere.

22.

Tornadoes, thrice, were a mystery. A 1967 article in
Science News
admitted that while “hundreds of tornadoes maul the surface of the earth every year, taking hundreds of lives and smashing all but the sturdiest of man's works . . . they remain one of the least understood of natural phenomena.”