VILONIA — Driving along U.S. 64 into this Faulkner County town, population 2,106, a red-and-white sign outside the Vilonia Church of Christ reads, “There is no education like adversity.”
Across the highway, two large trees lie uprooted. Down the road, temporary storage units are parked outside a damaged brick house. Big patches of blue tarpaulins are draped atop one roof after another.
Closer to town, Mona Peach sips a soft drink while workers rebuild the barbershop that once belonged to her mother and then her. A mile or so away, Mary and D.C. Rowlett are starting over after 32 years of marriage.
Scars of the adversity mentioned on the church sign are scattered along the highway and beyond. Yet two months after an April 25 tornado ravaged Vilonia and Black Oak Ranch Estates, a rural subdivision of mostly mobile homes - leaving fivepeople dead - residents are rebuilding their homes and their lives.
The Vilonia-area tornado and the subsequent flooding hit among a series of storms and floods that ravaged much of Arkansas that week. More than a dozen people died, and most of Arkansas’ 75 counties were declared disaster areas.
Three weeks after the storm demolished the Rowletts’ rural mobile home, D.C. Rowlett returned to hispart-time job at Wal-Mart, only to break his arm the first day back.
Rowlett, 67, recalled feeling as if “there must be a black cloud following me.”
“You lose everything you’ve got, then you break your arm,” he said.
Even so, the Rowletts know they are fortunate. Three of the people killed in the storm died near their home.
“We’re blessed to be alive,” she said.
“There’s not even any debris in our yard,” he said. “We couldn’t salvage anything.”
Well, almost anything.
Mary Rowlett found her gold wedding ring in a field where the tornado had tossed their mobile home. “God put it there,” she said.
Nearby was her blue-onyx pendant still hanging from its silver chain.
D.C. Rowlett found the bent-up black case holding the flat-top guitar he’s owned 30 years and plays at Center Point Free Will Baptist Church. The guitar “had a little dirt on it, but it didn’t have a scratch on it,” he said.
Unlike their neighbor, Craig Garvin, 63, who died in the storm, the Rowletts found safety in their son’s storm shelter, along with at least seven others who crammed inside it as the tornado destroyed at least 60 homes and damaged scores more in the Vilonia area.
Now with the help of insurance and federal disaster aid, the Rowletts are building a two-bedroom house beside their son’s Vilonia home.
LIFE-CHANGING MOMENT
With the help of her sister, Vaiva Pack, Peach started rebuilding Mona’s Main Street Barber Shop two or three weeks after the storm and hopes to reopen in early July.
Peach lost most of her work tools but salvaged one barber’s chair, the first dollar she ever made at the shop and the sign advertising the business where she’s worked for 35 years.
Peach plans to move temporarily from the small camper she has called home lately into the back of the shop. This time, it will include a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen where she can live while her adjacent two-story cedar-log home that was heavily damaged is rebuilt.
Dozens of people turned out in the days after the tornado to help Peach saw and haul away downed trees, including a huge oak that once shaded her yard. Volunteers also pitched in to sweep her house’s glass-strewn floors and sort through the debris.
Now, she wants to share that good will.
After her house is rebuilt, she plans to open the new barbershop’s living quarters to elderly women on fixed incomes who need someone to check in on them occasionally.
Peach already has a 70-year-old woman in mind as her first guest - Peach doesn’t plan to charge any rent. A friend suggested the idea, and “It resonated in my heart,” she said.
Peach is excited about rebuilding. “It [has] helped take my mind off the destruction,” she said.
Still, she’s sad that the house she worked so hard to remodel over the years must be demolished. She had made it one that passers-by admired and sometimes even stopped to compliment as they drove through Vilonia.
“I never had any money, so I did” the house renovation “a little bit at a time” and with friends’ help, she said. “Staying here [in the camper] gave mea chance to say goodbye.”
For now, she still occasionally walks over to the house, does laundry there and sometimes relives the night the twister lifted the house - and her - off the ground, then sat them back down amid total darkness.
“A moment like that changes your whole life,” said Peach, 51. “Sometimes I just go sit there and reflect.”
That’s when she remembers “the fear of not making it,” then the sorrow of losing so much and finally “the joy of starting over [with] the future instead of reliving the past.”
Before the storm, she said, she “took life for granted.”
Now, though, “I wake up every morning and look eastward at the sunrise” and recite Psalm 118:24, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
She had done that before the storm, she said, but now the verse means more.
PAST ADVERSITY
Peach and the Rowletts have faced hardships before.
In 1997, Mary Rowlett lost a son who was only 42.
“We know you can pick up the pieces and go on,” Mary Rowlett said.
For now, the Rowletts are living in one of Vilonia’s few apartments. After the tornado, 33 people applied to live in the one the Rowletts ended up in.
They had no furniture left, but their apartment is fully furnished with chairs, beds, tables and more, all donated, except for a television they bought.
The day after the tornado, “We woke up that morning without even a toothbrush and with no medicine. People helped us,” Mary Rowlett said.
Peach was already rebuilding her life when the tornado struck.
Just six months earlier, she had given up drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Then days before the storm, she returned home from a vacation to discover someone had burglarized her house.
Peach has “cried a lot of nights ... but I try to be thankful,” she said.
“I keep asking God what’s my purpose,” she said.
After the storm, she sat down on her broken deck and prayed. Should she leave or stay?
After the prayer, “Everything started falling into place,” and she stayed.
Touching a tattoo of hearts, flowers and her sisters’ names on her left arm, Peach said maybe her purpose is “to be a light ... to people with tattoos,” to “what society considers the lower class of people.”
She pointed to other tattoos and said, “[They’re] all over me,” and all of them deal with family.
“I got them back when I was high,” Peach said, laughing. “Thank goodness I got family instead of skulls!”
She hopes her recovery, first from her addictions and now the tornado, will encourage others in need.
God is “no respecter of persons. God can change anybody, even somebody like me,” she said.
GOODS, ANIMALS LOST
Despite all the help the Rowletts, Peach and others have received from family, friends and strangers, struggles persist.
Peach, for example, is still trying to get an insurance payout on her house and its contents.
And about a dozen people charged with storm-related theft have cases pending.
Items police believe were stolen by looters include a dead man’s watch that was later returned and a goldand-silver necklace with an inscription indicating it was a gift to a mother.
Some people were homeless for a short time after the storm and set up camp in their cars or trucks to guard their possessions.
“That was the case right off the bat,” said Vilonia Fire Chief Keith Hillman, who worked more than 100 hours the first week after the tornado.
The storm also left many homeless animals, from horses to dogs to fainting goats.
While some were reunited with their owners, others got new homes with the help of organizations such as the Faulkner County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
That group still had about 15 animals, mostly puppies, earlier this month, director Lydia Grier said.
A wandering llama was taken to a llama farm. A donkey was reunited with its owner. Grier and her son are caring for some of the dogs.
Grier estimated her and other organizations spent at least $15,000 on rescuing and caring for the animals and related costs after the tornado and flooding in the Vilonia area.
Like their owners, some pets were fortunate.
The Rowletts’ gray-and-black yard cat, Wendy, vanished for a couple of weeks but eventually turned up outside a camper their daughter’s family set up where the Rowletts’ mobile home had been. The tornado had hit her home, as well.
Peach’s aging Boston terrier, Honey Bunny, was in the house with her when the twister hit but also survived and is living temporarily with a relative.
Despite all the devastation, Peach and the Rowletts said they have experienced the kindness of friends, relatives, strangers and God.
“A strong faith in God has kept me going,” Peach said as she stood inside her nearly rebuilt barbershop and living quarters. “Everybody kept telling me, ‘God’s got [something] bigger and better. Well, here it is.”
To this day, D.C. Rowlett does not know the name of the woman who gave him a sterling silver ring after the storm.
“I know your wife lost all her jewelry,” the woman told him. “This ring belonged to my grandma. ... I want your wife to have it.”
“It fits perfectly,” Mary Rowlett said.
“God and old-time America are alive and well right here in Vilonia,” D.C. Rowlett said. “I’ve seen disasters in my life. But I’ve never seen people come together like this.”
Indeed, leaving town, motorists can see the other side of that sign outside the Vilonia Church of Christ: “The darkest hour has only 60 minutes.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/27/2011