The South and I

The semester is finished and it gave me a wicked flu/cold for a going away present.  As the plane started to descend and circle the airport in Birmingham this afternoon, the “gift” kept on giving.  I felt like my ears and sinuses were going to explode.  There was a 2-year-old sitting in front of me who also had a runny, chapped nose and was covering her ears, screaming at the top of her lungs.  I closed my eyes and focused on breathing to distract myself. I’m not a Buddhist, but this is supposed to help, right?  As the pain got more intense I opened my eyes and looked out the window to gauge how long it would take us to land before I followed the 2-year-old’s lead.

My jaw dropped.  There it was.  This thing I had only seen on network news as the visual backdrop for arguments over global warming.  An alarmingly long and wide path of a tornado.  It is one thing to see it on a tv or computer screen, but to witness it in 3-dimension while moving through space (4-dimension?) was…I have no words.  The plane went completely silent. Even the 2-year-old sitting in front of me.

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The sun starts to set while my mom and I pass Dadeville on Highway 49.  She tells me we’re about to drive through where a tornado crossed over the road.  This close to your house?  Really?  The camera is on my lap. I roll down the window.

Destroyed homes have been shoved to the side of the road for FEMA removal.  Devastating and fascinating at the same time. This image burned into my brain also takes place in 4-dimension along the highway.

3 weeks later is an interesting space.  Much of the debris has been cleared or at least there is a plan for what remains.  Trinkets of people’s lives are strewn across open patches of land with strange, naked trees.  A car.  A fence.  I can start to see the scars in the land, made by monster tornadoes, some of them by man. [Read more…] about 3 weeks later. 4d meditations on a tornado.

The last 36 hours have been surreal for me, just as they have been for any Southerner living in the another part of the country.  I am blessed that all of my friends and family are accounted for and physically uninjured (emotional injuries are another story).  There was some property damage…a home destroyed..but I have all my loved ones intact.  My heart hurts for everyone who does not.  My heart also hurts from seeing 3 different video versions of an F4 tornado destroying a community I love and where I lived for 4 years.  For social networking purposes I could embed all 3 videos into this post but I simply don’t want to look at them anymore.  Watching the news & YouTube alone has made me a witness to this event over and over. I only got to hear my mama’s actual voice a little while ago.  Some of her accounts from the local news coverage I wish I could (un)hear.

Speaking of the tv news, how bizarre was it to wake up early this morning in hopes of getting information on the nightmare in my beautiful state of Alabama only to find it sandwiched between bytes of the Royal Wedding?  At first I was infuriated, cried, and threw a pillow.  Then I paused.  Went numb.  Not all of the American public would see a deadly outbreak of tornadoes as a newsworthy priority compared to the weddings of royalty.  We repeat this “prioritizing” everyday with revolution & violence in the Middle East & starvation in Africa. Even tonight I heard of people (actual Alabama residents) who were upset that the American Idol results show wouldn’t be broadcast at it’s usual time to make way for local news coverage as the death toll climbed over 200.

So at this point (around 30 hours later) I am emotionally exhausted, intellectually fried, fingers fatigued from texting & clicking the mouse, and bewildered that I can’t wrap my brain or heart around the magnitude of what occurred in Dixie.  Per usual my mind goes to weird places.  For a moment I caught myself pondering how many of my loved ones were seeking shelter in a basement/bathroom/pantry at the same time.  Every area they lived in was effected and supposedly tornadoes just kept popping up all afternoon/evening.  The first video I saw was shot by a (foolish) college student from his apartment building.  I caught myself trying to figure out the tornado’s proximity to my old apartment via his vantage point with the camera and the view of Bryant-Denny stadium.  What does the Paul “Bear” Bryant statue look like now compared to when I photographed it 6 months ago at the Iron Bowl?

When fast, violent crises occur I think we tap into something different.  Communities of strangers spontaneously form.  Today this is most evident on Facebook.  I actually found out something was up with the weather when my friend Eddie posted a photo of a green sky on his profile page early Wednesday afternoon.  The Groups/Pages formed on Facebook in relation to this event have a purpose…they are verbs.  There is a group where people can post photos of pets they’ve lost or ones they’ve found after the storms have passed in the hopes of reuniting them with their owners or arranging shelter.  The Pray for the Tornado Victims page publishes a vast amount of organized information for volunteering but has morphed into something else.  Southerners have been using it to post where people are trapped so they can be rescued by emergency responders.   In turn emergency responders have posted needs such as requests for “experienced chainsaw operators” to meet at specific places.  Much of the phone & Internet service in Bama went down, however texting and FB on mobile devices somehow stayed alive. Thank goodness. That was the only communication I had with my parents.

I’m most amazed by Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.  Southerners are no stranger to things getting “left behind” by storm systems.  When I was in high school the eye of Hurricane Opal went straight over my hometown.  Lo and behold when we woke up in the morning there were some tropical birds flying around.

The same phenomenon has occurred in Alabama and all over the Deep South.  Once again, I first noticed it on Facebook when my friend Mario in Gadsden posted a picture of his son holding a Druid City Hospital Parking tag from Tuscaloosa, over 100 miles away.  More and more photos and posts popped up of people finding everything from photographs, cleared checks, tax returns, and even a quilt in their backyards from Mississippi to Alabama to Tennessee to Georgia.  I’m sure this storm system will continue to rain it’s archive further north and east into another states.  Like the other FB pages, this site has a purpose.  The people who post their findings actually want to get them to their rightful owners.  Hopefully their rightful owners are alive.  They even post their contact info.

Pictures and Documents after the Tornadoes is one of the most significant cultural productions I’ve experienced.  Natural disasters do not discriminate.  These tornadoes hit both trailer parks and nice housing developments. A racial-socio-economic rainbow of victims.  These Southerners, in their genuine compassion for their brothers & sisters and curiosity for these artifacts drifting from the sky, have created a big, collective portrait of The South.

I am going to post some photos below, but do yourself a favor and go to the site.  But know this isn’t an exhibition that will go into a gallery in NYC.  The curators intend for the artwork to go back to those who created it. [Read more…] about The South scattered.