ThoughtsSometimes this blog is me being silly, and sometimes it's me being serious. I have some humorous anecdotes to post about my trip to Tennessee, but first I wanted to post this entry that I wrote in the midst of my travels last week. It's not meant to be a downer, just something thought-provoking. Hopefully. In any case, it's the type of thing that runs through my mind at times while visiting places now home to such destruction.
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What do you say to someone who only days ago was thrown around inside her van with her three children when a tornado sucked their vehicle off the road? How about when they show you that they walked away from that with only scratches? Or when they describe the experience as "suddenly everything went white and fuzzy, and I know I was upside down for a minute because I felt it"?
How do you process the feelings of seeing tornado-ravaged countryside? Homes crumbled like they were nothing? Giant trees snapped like matchsticks, the branches broken at awkward but sharp angles, dotting a landscape that now looks like a horror film background? Pieces of people's lives now stuck in trees and strewn across fields and in muddy roadside ditches and streams? How about when you see someone's collection of baseball cards blown across an entire field?
How do you react when you see the inside of a home from the outside? Its contents now on display because the front wall and roof were ripped right off - as if it were a dollhouse with removable parts? Did you notice how serene it looks inside - the piano where it's probably sat for years, the kitchen with a bar opening up into the living room, the couches and recliners facing a missing wall and now overlooking the decimated field behind the home? Were you able to picture all the family gatherings that took place in this home?
How do you describe the smell of homes being burned because they're too far gone to be rebuilt? What about the flower display in front of the home where someone's mom died? How about the contrast between those flowers and the giant hole where the house used to be, complete with flames because what's left is being burnt?How do you do it?
posted by H at
11:22 AM
1 Comments:
Probably most people don't, because for most of us, it's in one eye and out the other, so to speak. We're bombarded with so many images of disaster in the media, we have to inure ourselves to it, in a way.
I think the hardest part for me would be to be in a situation like yours where you don't live there and didn't experience it, but in the same vein you don't want to seem like some disaster tourist just gawking at other people' misfortune. I know you personally wouldn't but I would wonder if people thought that about someone like me (who would have no other business being there.)
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