homeland security

i have lost my bearings. this is a selfish thing to say, considering. considering what all everyone else here has lost. cars and homes and trees, for some. people- children, grandparents, whole families, sometimes. photo albums. love letters. wedding dresses. baby shoes. we are at 26th and maiden lane. looking left i can see the shell of the hospital where my sisters were born, where my grandpa survived his first heart attack, where i wandered the halls of four west, filling up styrofoam pitchers with ice and water, where my grandparents used to go for dinner because they liked the food at the cafeteria and could visit so many friends at once. looking right i see flatness but i know it was cunningham park. i know there is an l-shaped pool with a pale blue floor where i learned to swim just beyond the rise in the land. i know over beyond the hospital were our pediatrician's offices, the waiting room divided into a well side and a sick side. the only part of any of that still understandable as something close to what it was is the hospital. the rest of the world spins loosely around it, unmoored, undirected.

time here is marked in terms of before the tornado or since the tornado by everyone, whether they lost anything or not. because everyone lost something. when we first drive into town there are signs everywhere, both handwritten and the sort you see on highways used by the d.o.t. they provide clear and helpful directions for volunteers. because a month and a half later, volunteers are still coming. at the edges of town there are fields piled with wreckage. i try to recall whether they were farm fields but i can't tell. i think about whether it would be feasible to pile all that brokenness into the strip pits at the edges of town. the rubble is sorted and there are specific drop sites for specific items. hazmat. nonhazmat. the trees, skinned and pale, with fat branches split and splintered, seem not to know they should be dying. they are putting on new, dark green and stubby growth at the trunks. they are shameless in their desire to do something. i remember that we spent our first night as married folks in a b&b here filled with f.e.m.a. folks assessing damage from the last tornado, a few weeks before our wedding. they are here again, in larger numbers, trying to figure out how to get money spent.

every truck in town is hauling twisted metal or shattered cinder blocks or withered trees. there is a large sign in front of what was a church on fifteen that encourages folks to come out and worship with the congregation at the holiday inn. every vacant building houses a relief center with offers of food and shelter and help. it is not possible to drive a full block along the scarred path of the tornado without seeing blue tarps and reddened men on roofs in clusters or in the skeletons of houses. we are here in 100+ degree temperatures and still they work all day, every day, fixing, their skin glowing brighter and brighter. they stop to sleep and to eat big breakfasts in groups of four or five. then they work again. they carry gallons and gallons of water in their trucks.

the three burger kings the town boasted were all blown away but the tornado slide in front of the one on rangeline is, shockingly, still standing. the red lobster toward what was the edge of town when i lived here is intact, but the red has been blown right off the lobster sign and the white words below it are empty of neon or glass. my beloved fred 'n reds sits like an angry toad, unscathed in the middle of chaos. taco bell is broken says my sister when the smaller nephew wants to go to his (and my) favorite fast food place. his little face falls as he remembers he already knows this and will likely continue to be reminded for a while. but the suggestion here is that taco bell can, and will, be fixed. that we will return to a world in which taco bell is right where it should be, on the corner of 26th and main. and this is what is everywhere. a promise to stick around, to fix things. and i mean this literally. large chain stores and small stores alike have printed or scrawled notes on banner plastic or cardboard or on slabs of what was once part of something else. we are here. we are not going anywhere. we are here. like those whos on that dust speck. we are here.

it is not the brokenness that is heartbreaking, not the skinned trees or bare concrete slabs or bumpers and other bits of twisted metal still in branches. it is not the words about survivors and insurance spraypainted onto the sides of walls that were once attached to other walls. it is not even seeing my aunt mary's house foundation, house chunks collapsed in on the tiny footprint of a place i knew to be grand and elegant. it is this insistence on reassuring one another. on promising, as a community, something it's difficult enough to get just two folks at a time to do. especially after news crews have gone home. we are here. we are not going anywhere.

the home depot that was destroyed is open under a massive tent, keeping the town supplied in the building materials it is so quickly snapping up. they would be fools to do anything else. there are pharmacies open on former drug store parking lots, little trailers equipped with everything from blood pressure medicine to prozac. walgreen's has its building nearly rebuilt already. displaced doctors have set up in memorial hall. i overhear one man say to another that he used to work at southtown bait. i know he is local because he calls it southtown bait instead of southtown sporting goods, which is what the building's sign has been saying up until the end of may. the store is on 31st and main street and all my life there has been a giant bass leaping out of the pavement at the corner of the parking lot. the fish is maybe twenty feet long and spectacular in its own right, even more beautiful because passing it always meant we were a block from the glory of anderson's ice cream. before the roof fell in, the man adds softly. he pauses. i still work there, he says. yeah, i do.