This Is Only a Test (5 page)

What we know of the woman's last moments we know only from Halevi's photos and witness testimony. The woman was believed to have been drinking that day and, prior to the drowning, reportedly mumbled, “Let the ocean take me.” Yet when the water
did take her—gripping a beer bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other—people began wondering if her death was intentional and, more to the point, whether Halevi might have prevented it.

Halevi's photos have become a staple in the media ethics classroom. Is it the photojournalist's obligation to intervene on behalf of a stranger? And, if so, is this form of intervention a moral imperative shared by all? The story is complicated further when we learn that Halevi's seemingly close proximity to the victim is an illusion, the result of a telephoto lens. In reality, he was nearly fifty feet away from the woman, and when he spotted two men (one of whom happened to be a lifeguard) rushing to her aid, he held firm, his finger on the shutter release. While some view Halevi's inaction as opportunistic (if not outright ghoulish), others defend him, arguing that lifesaving was best attempted by a trained lifeguard, and that Halevi's role that day was to perform the function for which
he'd
been trained—to keep the subject always in frame, to shoot until the film ran out.

My camera was out of batteries the day Tuscaloosa was destroyed by an EF4 tornado

In the days that followed, we who survived took to the streets, uncertain of how to act.

We began thinking in terms of what we had and what we could do.

I have an axe, so I must chop this fallen tree
.

I have hands, so I must move this rubble
.

We embraced our role as witnesses to disaster, carefully surveying what remained of the worst-hit neighborhoods, trying to deduce how words like “velocity” and “trajectory” had transformed whole houses into shells.

One morning a few days after the storm, a friend and I walked through one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods; armed with her camera, we tried capturing some portion of the storm's destruction. We felt it our obligation for the same reason we chopped trees and moved rubble:

I have a camera, so I must take this picture
.

Though we had little control over the relief efforts, we knew how to point and click.

First, we snapped photos of a lake filled with debris, of car windows shattered. We snapped a few of the downed power lines, too, their coils curled like black snakes along the tree trunks. Never meant to be souvenirs, these pictures were our humble attempt to do something useful. As writers in grad school, we had been trained to believe that stories mattered, that remembering mattered, and that if we did a good enough job recounting these stories then we might matter, too.

In one instance a police officer asked us to “take it easy” with the pictures, to respect the victims' privacy. We complied. After all, how were we to explain what we'd convinced ourselves were the subtle differences between exploitation and documentation, particularly to someone who had witnessed so much of the former?

Twenty-four hours after the storm, I watched as a carnival atmosphere consumed what was left of our town—people clogging the streets in SUVs, the passengers half-hanging out the windows. Everybody clutched iPhones and video cameras, capturing what little remained. They “oohed” and “ahhed” as if watching a fireworks display, took selfies amid the storm-ravaged topography. They gobbled up gigabytes, uploaded all they could.

Little was salvaged, but everything was saved.

On May 22, less than a month after our experience, Joplin, Missouri, endured its own disaster. An EF5 tornado decimated the town, and as I watched the news footage over breakfast, I was overcome by a sickening déjà vu. Hadn't we seen this one before? Hadn't it already played out?

Feeling mostly helpless, I thought about all that I still had.

I have a pen, so I will write a letter to Joplin
.

My letter ran in a few St. Louis newspapers, warning Joplin residents that as a tornado survivor myself, I knew for certain that “this will get worse before it gets better.” The letter was well received, and for a week I received phone calls from radio stations and journalists throughout Missouri, asking me for interviews about my experiences in Tuscaloosa. I obliged, always willing to open my mouth, though I hardly knew anything. My own house had been spared, after all, and at the storm's conclusion, when I walked outside to assess the damage, all I found was that there was nothing to assess. We remained wholly intact, right down to the potted plant on the porch.

Yet the people of Joplin had hardly been so lucky, and my letter to its citizens—gloomy content aside—went momentarily viral, enticing Missourians I'd never met to Facebook me, Follow me, and call upon me for answers. Columnists quoted the letter; pastors, too.

“People really love it,” one interviewer informed me. “We've gotten all kinds of calls from churches who can't wait to read it at Sunday service.”

I was the wrong spokesman, and yet I just kept speaking.

I told them that the death counts would continue to rise, and that when the cell phone reception returned, it would only bring
bad news. I was no prophet—just a guy who couldn't shut up—and in an attempt at solidarity, I went so far as to assure the people of Joplin that our towns would be “forever wedded by our shared season of misfortune.” But what did I know of misfortune?

Days later, when the letter reached a producer affiliated with Diane Sawyer's
World News
, I was asked for an interview yet again. And yet again, I was happy to comply.

I have a voice, so I must share our story with the world
.

The film crew situated me in front of a few leveled houses half a mile from my own upright house. For five excruciating minutes as the camera rolled, I rambled on about “town pride” and “camaraderie” and “communities coming together.” I sprinkled in a few uplifting catchphrases as well, working in “but there will be brighter days ahead” more times than I'm comfortable admitting.

In retrospect, my intentions seem obvious. I was a cheerleader for the living—proof that some of us were still okay. Yet I could fulfill this role only when I refrained from looking at the destruction behind me. Eyes forward, chin up, I stared into the camera and assured the nation that Joplin, like Tuscaloosa, would undoubtedly endure.

Diane Sawyer's
World News
never aired the footage. Once again, I had been spared. I had nothing of value to add, and as I turned on the news the following evening, I was relieved to watch B-roll from other people's stories, instead. I received my message loud and clear: People had heard enough from B. J. Hollars.

If the interview had gone longer, I might've described to Diane Sawyer's crew how my wife and I rode out the storm in a bathtub, our only inconvenience a dripping showerhead. I might also have
admitted that we watched a romantic comedy that night, burning the battery from her laptop, while just out of earshot, people cried for help.

“
Maybe
your town will recover,” I should have explained to the camera. “I guess I really don't know.”

Marc Halevi was likely equally uncertain of the outcome from his photos of the woman in the surf. Could hardly have predicted the debate he'd spur from what developed on the beach and in the darkroom. Perhaps writers and photojournalists are alike in that we can only seem to find answers in the aftermath. Yet as reporters of truth, perhaps our first responsibility is simply to tell it, to scribble and to click. When we start down the path of parsing what
portion
of truth we feel obligated to tell—abridged or unabridged—perhaps we do a disservice to our readers and viewers. Simply put, reporters of truth (be it through words or pictures) are bound to a different set of rules than fiction writers and illustrators. We work at a disadvantage because we don't create the stories, nor are we capable of divining their endings. In nonfiction, “happily ever after” is always a possibility but never a guarantee, though this in no way diminishes our need to recount these stories regardless. “The truth is in the telling” (or so the adage goes) and as a writer, it is my job simply to tell it.

At least that's what I thought in the moments before all my self-righteous rules went out the window.

You see, less than forty-eight hours after I completed a draft of this essay, a young man drowned in the river behind my house. As I began my first early morning jog in my new town I noticed a bevy of police officers and rescue personnel peering into the river. To my right, a boy in a still-wet swimsuit leaned over a car's
driver's-side window to share news with the girl inside. I overheard what I could while jogging past, though in truth, I didn't hear much.

The story revealed itself later: How the young man and an acquaintance attempted to swim from the nearby island back to shore. How the pair became separated in the dark water. How one made it back but one didn't.

No telephoto lens captured anything.

No lifeguards were called in to assist.

The next morning, my wife, dog, and I walked the riverbank directly across from that island. We were not looking for a body, but we found one—a middle-aged man tromping his way through the brush. I asked him if there had been any updates on the search, to which the man replied that no, they had yet to find his nephew.

“Nephew?” I asked.

For the next ten minutes we spoke with the victim's uncle, and he told us many things that I will not repeat here.

Perhaps a better writer would repeat them, would take my earlier advice and simply “tell it” via scribble and click. But for me, the story—still ongoing—isn't yet ready to be told. Or at least I'm not ready to tell it. There is nothing to save, only something to salvage, and what good can words possibly do?

Let the body first be pulled from the river
, I think.
Maybe I'll tell it then
.

1.

It is our first night in a new town and we sleep soundly. Brush teeth, crawl beneath sheets, and listen to the crickets just beyond the bedroom window. There is a river beyond the window, and in that river, a boy. A boy who—we will learn the next day—has the river inside of him, too.

2.

Our lives begin in the water. In utero, a fetus relies solely on its mother's water-based womb. Oxygen is not yet introduced through the fetal lungs, but through the umbilical cord—a more direct route. Nevertheless, with the snip of the scissors, this route closes for good.
Dear Child, if you wish to live, you must try to trust your lungs
 . . .

3.

On the third day, God divided water from earth and two days later he filled them. “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures,” he cried, “and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Despite his miracle, God's work remained incomplete. On the sixth day God created humans, endowing us with lungs and free will. Sixteen hundred years later, he drowned us like dogs in the Flood.

4.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, thirty-eight dogs were drowned in the name of science. Professor E. A. Schafer of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society held them beneath the water to gain insight into how life leaves a body.

5.

Holocaust (n.): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, esp. caused by fire . . .

6.

Since God chose water, do we call it a mass execution instead?

7.

French royalists were no strangers to mass executions. In 1793–1794, those loyal to the crown were often condemned to death by drowning. By year's end, revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier had water on his hands. In the city of Nantes, he ordered the drowning of an estimated four thousand royalists in the Loire River. Carrier dubbed the Loire the “National Bathtub”—a nod to the guillotine, which was dubbed the “National Razor.”

8.

Others, too, had water on their minds. When man could not decide if a witch was a witch, the witch was hurled into the river. The tests were always conclusive: the innocent sank while the guilty stayed afloat.

9.

In Archimedes's book,
On Floating Bodies
(250
BCE
), the founder of hydrostatics notes, “Any body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.” Translation: Anybody smaller than the body of water in which the body is placed is capable of floating. Translation: Adherence to the principles of science may be an admission of witchcraft.

10.

By the eighteenth century, drowning victims were not treated with hands clasped in prayer, but hands clasped to a chest. Though resuscitation seemed like witchcraft, God himself had given us the clues. In Genesis, he breathed life into Adam's nostrils, and humans took careful note.

11.

On December 14, 1650, Anne Greene—sentenced for murdering her stillborn child—was hanged in Oxford, England. She refused to die. Greene's friends tugged on her dangling legs to hasten Death, but Death refused to be hurried. When at last it was believed that Death had taken mercy on her, Greene's body was placed in a coffin. But even there she retained a spark of life. In an attempt to extinguish it, a merciful man struck her hard on the chest, but the blow only served to further restore her. Let
the record show that they could not kill Anne Greene, despite their best efforts. However, this incident was not viewed as the world's first successful resuscitation attempt, but as a miracle. It was God's hand—not the merciful man's—that was credited with saving her life.

12.

Yet men wanted credit as well. In 1767, citizens and physicians in Amsterdam created the Dutch Society to Rescue People from Drowning. Their mission: to promote resuscitation in drowning victims. Their primary promotion involved awarding medals to those who saved a life. The medals depicted a cloaked woman with a hand clutching a drowned man. Yet it is the cloaked woman's other hand that matters, the one that halted the scythe-wielding Death like a stubborn crossing guard.