It missed us.
I mean me. My family. My immediate neighbors. My neighborhood.
A mile or two down the road they weren’t so lucky. You’ve seen the photos and the video. They—maybe you—got carpet-bombed.
I was sitting in my office downtown when the sirens went off. I was editing a piece; it was a tough edit and I hadn’t quite cracked it, hadn’t figured out how to shave off a quarter of the submitted words while retaining the particular flavor of the writer’s voice. The sky had a lean look to it but I wasn’t worried, even when some of my wiser colleagues moved to our building’s basement.
Weather moves the needle; it gets attention. And so it is tempting for media outlets—for TV and radio stations and daily newspapers—to play up weather. More than once this year we’ve heard dire forecasts of storms that turned out to be mostly heavy rain with some wind. Sure, the climate has changed, extreme events occur more often, but wind and rain we can handle.
More than once this year I’ve scoffed at the weather weenies.
I won’t say I was completely unconcerned. I was glad Karen was home. I checked the radar. I went back to wrestling with somebody else’s prose. I think I got it into shape. I sent a draft back to the writer for review and packed up and went home, a little annoyed that someone I’d intended on meeting with had been called away to help out with storm coverage.
It wasn’t until I got home that I realized what had happened. A friend texted me: “Are you OK?” We’d barely had any rain. It was breezy. Two miles upriver the tornado jumped from Little Rock into Burns Park, ripping like a buzz saw. It didn’t touch us, but my neighbor said he watched it track to the northeast.
Some people will tell you His eye is on the sparrow. Some people will tell you that everything happens for a reason. I do not believe in an interventionist God who would, if I asked Him in the right way, turn evil away from my door. I believe in bad luck and happenstance.
It wasn’t grace that saved us, but some incalculable natural algorithm. It was atmospheric pressure and convective action. This storm was not directed by any intelligence. It was not biblical or retributive. Pat Robertson could not have prayed it off.
By the time I got home, it was mostly aftermath. People were crawling from the wreckage. Frantic dogs were running down blasted streets. Already we were helping one another.
Some philosopher might suggest disaster is necessary to make us appreciate how resilient and selfless and capable human beings can be. My feeling is that we could do without it, though it is heartening to see the reflexive helpers who unfussily pick up chainsaws and go to work clearing away what needs to be cleared away. People manning donation stations. People making donations.
Let’s not get schmaltzy about this. Tragedy is not an occasion for inspiration. Most people see this as just what you do—if someone needs your help, you help. A lot of us are that way. It’s one good thing about our species. When it gets real, we usually dig down and do what we have to do.
My Facebook feed is full of prosaic heroes doing the necessary things in the wake of catastrophe. I’m proud of them for stepping up. Maybe no one deserves a cookie for helping out, maybe it’s just common decency, but sometimes we need to be reminded that common decency is fairly common.
Living where we live, lethal weather is a fact of life. We might not have to worry too much about earthquakes (though when the big one comes, watch out) and hurricanes, which by the time they get here are sapped of their fury. But the twister is endemic to Arkansas, ever since Tornado Alley began shifting eastward about 40 years ago.
From 1950 to 1984, most tornadoes occurred west of us in northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota; since 1985, the bulk of tornado activity has shifted geographically northeastward to the Mississippi River Valley and the Mid-South. As a result, tornadoes have become more dangerous and expensive, because the population density in the new Tornado Alley is a lot higher than the rural areas of the old one.
But tornadoes can and do occur everywhere in the continental United States. We average more than 1,150 a year—more than Canada, Australia and all European countries combined. Not because we deserve them—not because we are cursed—but because the geography, topography and climate of the United States makes for a ’nader factory.
Low-pressure systems pull together warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cool dry air aloft from the Rocky Mountains or the high desert in the Southwest and mix together in the relatively flat middle of the country to produce thunderstorms, which in turn can breed tornadoes.
(We might not be the world leader in tornadoes if places like Brazil, Russia, and Australia kept better records. But Russia isn’t going to tell us about its tornadoes, and most of the tornadoes go un-reported elsewhere.) I’ve dodged a few tornadoes; I was at a conference in Shreveport when the big one came rumbling through Little Rock in 1999. That was a time before cell phones and I was frantic to find out if Karen and the dogs were safe.
The only time I ever got out of a speeding ticket was when I was in college in Baton Rouge in 1978 and a twister took out half of Bossier City; a Louisiana State trooper pulled me over for doing 96 in a 55 mph zone while trying to get back to my parents’ house after I couldn’t reach them. He let me go, and told me to keep it under 80.
I didn’t do anything to earn it, but I was lucky before. Now I’ve been lucky again. Most of us were. The worst thing that happened to us was a little inconvenience, or maybe a mild case of survivor’s guilt.
Stay safe, y’all. And keep it up.