Fifteen Seconds

Like the Weather - 10,000 Maniacs (mp3)

Fifteen seconds. Less than that, really.

James said he felt restless. His DirecTV reception was popping in and out due several waves of the intense storms. He’s naturally a busybody. Not even early retirement in three weeks ago after almost 30 years of working as manager of the physical plant for a local medical facility could cure his need to always be doing something.

For reasons he can’t explain, he walked down to his basement.

He didn’t hear the storm coming. He’s sure he went down there for some reason. Just can’t remember why.

His pool table and weight equipment and laundry room are all down there. Between that area and the garage adjacent to it, he’s likely spent half his time at home in those areas, but on Wednesday evening, he doesn’t know why he walked down those stairs, or why he walked between the back wall and that pool table.

That’s where he was standing when the EF4 tornado punched through his house at an estimated 175mph. It obliterated his garage. It ejected the entire roof from his house. It brought his chimney crashing down onto the antique cherry dining room table once owned by his parents, shattering it and almost breaking through to the laundry room below.

He almost instantly dove under his slate-bottomed pool table, figuring it was his best chance at survival if the roof collapsed, and waited. Ten seconds is a long time when you wonder if they might be the last seconds of your entire life. That thought was in James’ mind as he crouched under his table, listening to 30-foot tall trees “snapping like they were twigs someone stepped on.”

His best guess is 15 seconds. From the time he first heard his home and property being obliterated to the moment he knew the storm had passed by completely was “at most” one quarter of one single minute.

James opened the door to his garage. His truck was there but now dented and dirtied. His Harley had been tugged a few dozen feet and was damaged. Not much else was left other than toolboxes too heavy to get sucked into the vortex.

He turned back and walked up the stairs to his home. No roof. His kitchen, living room, dining room, all covered in debris and insulation. The only rooms in the top floor left relatively unmolested by the twister were his three closets.

Next, he looked where his front door used to be and saw the neighbor’s house across the road. In the fading light of day, and even with the cloud covering, he could make it out. It usually sits some 50-plus yards off the road, but now it was a pile of rubble that had shifted some 70 feet to the right. It was no longer a house.

He ran across the road to see if they were OK, three younger neighbors he knew only so well, but well enough. James is in incredible condition for a man of 62, and I doubt the sprint over even winded him, knowing that if, by some miracle someone had survived it, they were likely in critical condition.

Fortunately, no one was there. He assumed they must not have been in the house.

What he didn’t know until he got to his other neighbor’s house was that the three roommates had actually been there when the tornado hit. They had huddled together in their tiny bathtub just in time to feel themselves and their house being lifted into the whirl of the storm. They told James all about it as they all sat together in their neighbor’s house, less than 100 yards away yet all but untouched by the storm.

Maybe watching their story will do it justice.

On Saturday, I joined half a dozen family members in helping James, my uncle, move what belongings survived the storm into storage. Folks had been with him and helping since Thursday, and moving the possessions was the final step until judgment from the insurance company and other agencies is rendered.

James is single. He divorced his one and only wife in the early ‘80s. Unlike me, my uncle takes obsessive and detailed care of his possessions. His vehicles get washed and cleaned constantly. His house and property are constantly being improved. He bought a 1,000 square-foot fixer-upper some 20 years ago and made every last improvement on it himself, with his own hands, with no help. He takes great pride in being self-sufficient and in the handiwork of floors, walls, windows, bathrooms, kitchen cabinets. He installed all of it. So when he lost his home, he lost untold hours of sweat, toil and love.

Being there in his home and surviving that EF4 forced James to have a different perspective on the experience. Had he been elsewhere when it hit, he would have come home to discover he had no home, and driving up on a scene like that without knowing it had happened would be tough.

But surviving that moment, living through those 15 seconds, forced him to keep one singular fact in mind in ways he could not have otherwise: he was alive.

He has not once complained or lamented to any of us about what happened to him.

Eight others were not so lucky. That single tornado killed eight others. The death toll in our vicinity stood at 78 as of Sunday. Throughout the Southeast, the count stood at 337, making it the second-deadliest storm in the history of our country and the worst in almost a century.

Crouching under a basement pool table as the world rages and swirls around you couldn’t help but keep the losses of possessions in perspective.

The Neighborly Arc

When the first storm hit, we were gathered in the central hallway of a school building, away from the windows, students lounging against the lockers, already engaged in their phones and computers and speculations and chatter, while the male teachers tried to sneak looks at the maelstrom outside and the secretaries turned into moms, barking at students who dared to try to go outside. The teacher who walked outside and back to his office received their scorn: "Go ahead, but look at the example you're setting for them." No, it was not time for going solo. There was strength, at least emotional strength, in numbers, though none of us took it all quite that seriously until the skies cleared and we saw the trees on campus, on cars, across roadways, effective barriers. Our eyes took it in; our mouths began offering perceptions and stories as our shared experience leaped quickly into legend.

As the second storm hit, I was alone. My wife had run to the basement of a house with no electricity. I did the dumbest of things, standing by the window watching the storm. It was a hollow feeling, facing the torrent alone, but then she had grown up around tornadoes and knew to get to safety; I harbored that irrational desire, having never seen a tornado, to see one.

Then the sky cleared and we went to the mall because I needed a suit. It was normal out there, until I went into Best Buy, looking for a car charger for my phone. There, people huddled at the entrance, staring at a television, looking at a timeline of the exact minute the next storm would hit, and where. The trip home was a race against time. We arrived at the exact moment the weather guy said it would hit, but only a medium rain fell, so we rushed inside.

After the third storm, everyone came outside into the early evening sun. We walked next door to talk to our neighbors about their beautiful trees that had fallen that morning. From both directions, people walked the streets to inspect the damage, carrying glasses of wine and stories--what trees had come down, whose chainsaws we could hear, which way you could get out of the neighborhood, the gas main leaking a couple of streets over. The little girl next door picked her grandmother's flowers that had been beaten down and handed them out. People met each other for the first time. Teenaged children roved in innocent, barefooted gangs like it was summer and they were headed to the community pool. Cars stopped to chat. Everyone had stories about the size the hail that had landed in their yards. It felt like an impromptu block party. Then the wind began to sway the trees again and we went into our dark homes.

On the first full day we had no power, I went to school, seething with rage that school was being held. I thought it an insensitive, uninformed decision made by people who had not had a break in power the whole time and who had no idea what was out there in the city and beyond. But it turned, and it turned largely because my blogmate Billy pushed the idea that we, as a school, needed to be out helping those in need. And everyone embraced the idea, turning the day into a pleasant frenzy of phone calls and contacts and logistics and false starts and red tape that left us at the end with a loose plan to take 600 students to places all over the city the next day, armed with work gloves and trash bags and faculty with chainsaws and woodchippers. And it felt good to be a part of that.

On the first evening we had no power, we had a party. It started at my house, where I had bought ice that morning, knowing it would become scarce, and started grilling onions and mushrooms and hot dogs from a warm refrigerator. But the call came from across the street where they had lettuce going bad that would make a salad and a grill they could start up and wine and a fire in the pit, and we gathered in their backyard around a table. Friends came from other places, dropping in on their way to their own powerless houses, or just joining in because it was Thursday night, when we always got together, and though our regular establishment was closed, we would gather here instead. There were more stories from a day of aftermath and stories of what tomorrow would bring.


On the second day all of the schools were closed but ours (and one other), I saw the tornado I had thought I wanted to see. Well, not exactly. I saw where it had been. I saw where the ceiling insulation and roof tiles that scattered throughout our neighborhood had come from. I saw where the crumpled metal from an interstate barrier that sits up where I park my car had come from. I saw Tiftonia, where a tornado had torn through, ripping roofs off buildings and tearing up convenience store. And I saw it with a group of boys and other teachers as we spread out on the grounds of a recreation center to pick up debris. Boys serious, but having fun, boys trying out the playground they had come to clean up, boys taking on the challenge of flipping a section of bleachers back on its right side, and, most of all, a group of boys walking with certainty back to a bus, knowing that, together, they had left a place looking far better than when they arrived.

At 6:19AM the next morning, what sounded like a gunshot fired through my dreams, and suddenly the lights were on over my head. The moment I had waited for every minute for 48 hours came to fruition, and I eased back into sleep. At 8:30, I was walking my dog across the street when I saw two of my neighbors walking to their car.

What time did you get it? I yelled, as we walked towards each other.
Get what? they yelled back.
Your power.
Are you kidding? they yelled.
No. Mine came on about two hours ago.

You could see their shoulders sink. You could see the neighborliness slip away, a sudden rift between the have and the have-nots. It was back to who's got a new car or whose lawn looks better or who is having a party that whom wasn't invited to. I found myself fumbling, trying to explain how it didn't really do me much good, how I was sure theirs would come on soon, how I would hook up my modem so they could steal my wifi from across the street (an empty promise, as it turned out, since cable service is still out).

By the afternoon, another neighbor drove by as I was cutting my grass. "I am SOOOOO JEALOUSSS!" she yelled as she kept going down the street.

And today, things are normal. On my side of the street. Still no power across the way. Everyone talks of getting back to normal, but I wonder--normal is often closed doors and separate lives and waves from a car instead of conversation and isn't that too bad instead of let's go do something about it. They say there is a silver lining in every cloud. This time, in these clouds, it was just people. People together, people helping. It was good.