My azaleas in Mississippi Photo: Ileana Johnson 2004 |
The first tornado I experienced
took down part of the only mall in Tupelo and caused severe damage in its
vicinity. The hit sometimes looked like a surgical strike and other times it
downed an entire patch of forest on Natchez Trace, skipping and jumping to
other locations for miles. We had straight line winds that often caused more
damage than some tornadoes did.
During my tenure at the local
university, most of the old trees, including a beautiful and venerable magnolia
were uprooted. Several buildings, including dorms, were so severely damaged
that they had to be torn down and rebuilt. Students were missed in their beds
by mere inches by flying lamp poles or huge tree branches, and cars were
smashed by falling trees.
I will never forget looking out
of the window at the menacing clouds in the distance, watching my neighbors’
son get out of his car and, before he entered his parents’ house, one of the
very old trees lining the street fell with a loud grown on top of his car,
flattening it into a pancake.
Spotted tornado alarms would go
off every week and people had to seek shelter in the bathtub or, as in our
case, in the tornado shelter built inside the garage. The former owner, a
doctor, thought that it was a good idea to place the water heater in it as well.
I know he planned it because I found the architect’s drawings in the hall
closet.
Living in the country for a
while, I witnessed tornadoes do a lot of damage to trees and at times unlucky
cows were struck by lightning or picked up by the wind cone – sometimes they
were dropped nearby, sometimes we never knew where they went until other
neighbors would find them dead or alive.
Living in trailers in the south was
an entirely novel experience for a European like me – I’ve never seen one
before. During high winds and tornadoes,
the tin can on wheels, although anchored well, rattled and lifted up as if
trying to fly like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz. During sun-shiny
weather bees, mice, and other critters found their buzzing and stomping grounds
inside the thin metal shell and thin insulation.
We survived Katrina simply
because we lived on higher ground and many hours inland but the wind damage was
tremendous. Our sturdy house was built in 1960 when construction was a serious
business, and homes were not built of spit and toothpicks.
We lived for three weeks without
electricity and covered in 60-year old pine trees that fell around our home and
into the street. The loneliness and despair stemming from the devastation
around us was overpowering.
An entire town in the southern
part of Mississippi was razed from the face of the earth as if it had never
existed. Only concrete slab foundations and pipes jutting out of the ground
remained. The media did not cover that disaster much because the attention was
entirely focused on New Orleans and the people self-trapped in the stadium.
Mississippians, churches around
the state, and the Salvation Army, sprang into action and started sheltering
people, feeding them, providing water, cleaning up the incredible mess, and
rebuilding quietly and efficiently in the same manner they’ve been fighting the
force of nature for ages.
My next door neighbor shot himself
in his bedroom. He had mental issues and the damage from the storm and the
loneliness was too much to bear. Someone bought his house for pennies on the
dollar because nobody wanted to live in a house where such tragedy occurred.
Mother Nature with its spun tornadoes
did not care that it was a really hot or a really cold season, it left us without
water and electricity for days and weeks. We stayed in hotels, showered at the
gym, and helped other people do the same.
We lost refrigerators and
freezers full of food many times over. I can’t remember how many times I’ve owned
microwaves and TVs struck by intense lightning; one microwave I was attempting
to buy from Sears cost me one penny – they could not find the price, it had
been written off the inventory for disposal, so they sold it to me for a penny.
I’ve replaced HVAC systems flattened by
fallen old pines twice and the roof three times in the twenty years I’ve owned
the house. Yet my fig tree survived. To this day it gives an abundant crop of
figs to the family who bought our home.
When the street was impassable
due to fallen trees, our Mennonite neighbors from Brooksville showed up with
chain saws and cleared it in less than a day and hauled off the timber. They
dragged the roots to the dump and filled the huge holes left behind with fresh
soil. Other flying debris which landed in the yard was also carefully cleared.
One of the pleasures of living
in Virginia, aside from its natural and unmatched beauty, is that I do not have
to hear the tornado sirens every week, telling us to seek shelter. We’ve had
high winds that have caused some tree damage and a few tiles stripped off the
roof, but nothing compared to the Mississippi tornado alley we had to live
through almost every week when torrential rains came out of nowhere.
We’ve had highly powerful and intense
hurricanes and tornadoes in the last two centuries but the population density
was much lower and the infrastructure less developed. Billions of dollars fly
out the window with the fury of wind and water, depending on the value of the
homes and businesses in its wrathful path.
In the South Mother Nature
unleashes its fury periodically and people learn to cope with such intensity
because they are resilient and selflessly helpful to each other in the face of
disaster.
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