I’m swiping this photo from my dad, who has a knack for catching my children at their funniest. It’s a small taste of the hijinks that took place here in our absence. Our trip was terrific, but oh, it’s good to be home!
The view from our window on the runway in Atlanta, where we sat for over two hours. And consequently missed our connection in Phoenix. Sorry, Mom & Dad & kids. I’m writing from the hotel where we spent the night. We’re on our way back to the airport to catch an early flight home.
(Incidental note. Unable to concentrate for longer spans, yesterday all I could read were the beginnings of things—first chapters I’d downloaded to my Kindle. The new Rob Lowe autobiography; Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which had both Scott and me in giggles; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; and Melissa Coleman’s This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone.)
Updated to add: I forgot my favorite of the first chapters! The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O’Connor McNees. It is off to a most intriguing start. If I’d had a 3G connection at the time, I’d have been sorely tempted to click that “Buy the book” button.)
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On Monday our travels took us through the little town of Phil Campbell, Alabama. This community is struggling to recover after the devastating tornadoes a few weeks ago. We were told that some of these small towns have been almost completely wiped out and may never come back. That’s a terrible thing to hear, but when you see it, the enormity of takes your breath away. No photo or video can come close to conveying the suffering and loss of the people who live here.
I can’t express how shocking and scary it is, these ravaged streets, nor how monumental the work of recovery. Yesterday we found ourselves in what used to be Hackleburg, Alabama—an EF 5 tornado killed 29 of its 1500 residents, destroyed the Wrangler plant that employed hundreds of Hackleburg citizens, and flattened the town. I’ve never seen anything like it. Enormous old oaks snapped in half like toothpicks, or (somehow even scarier) completely uprooted, lying on their sides with giant stumps and roots ripped out of the earth. Houses crunched and crumpled like old soda cans, or—worse—gone altogether.
I gave up on pictures. The frame is too small; you can’t see how this one little rectangle of rubble is a small segment of a half-mile-wide field of destruction that used to be somebody’s tree-lined street.
I felt uncomfortable, anyway, to be taking them—but Scott said no, it’s important that people know what happened here. It’s been almost a month since these tornadoes, and as you can see, these communities are a long way from recovery. On Monday we were in the archives of a neighboring county where I’m doing research, and the lovely women who work there told us how hard-hit some of these small towns were, and how some of them are just plain not going to come back from this. “When a town ends, that’s history,” one of them said sadly. “That’s history happening right there.”
Last night we came back to the hotel a bit shaken by what we’d seen in Hackleburg. Even weeks later, when you know there’s no tornado on its way back to strike again at that moment, you feel vulnerable and exposed. I kept thinking of the smoke monster in LOST. We’d crest a little ridge and see a swath of flattened trees on either side of the road, the tornado’s path marked out as clearly as a crop circle, as Scott put it. As I uploaded the day’s photos—most of them taken in old cemeteries around the county, quiet, peaceful places untouched by the terrible winds of April—we watched the news out of Oklahoma and Texas with dread and horror, worrying especially about a particular friend who lives near Dallas. I was so relieved to get her “we’re safe” email an hour later, especially after seeing tornado damage up close.
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