by Paul Theroux
“And you’ve been visiting him in prison all that time?”
“Almost every week,” he said. “I was twenty-one when he was convicted. I’m thirty-two now. I still visit on a regular basis.”
“Mind if I ask what he’s in for?”
“It was drugs,” he said. “He was cooking meth over here,” and he pointed to a shack that was even more ramshackle than the nearby house. “Hey, he wasn’t no dealer. It was just for himself and his own purposes.”
“But a meth lab,” I said.
“A little bitty ole meth lab, a couple of jars in a room! It was nothing. But someone turned him in—someone who had a grudge against him, probably who wanted some of the product.” He shook his head and gave another ready smile. “It was his first offense! Eleven years for that!”
Seeing his wife glare at him, the young man picked up some cans and pitched them into the drum, where they rattled and clanked, but he was still talking.
“He was a skinny dude with long hair when he went in. Now he’s a big fat old guy, from sitting all that time. With short hair.”
“What’ll happen when he gets out?”
“Not much. He can help me fix up the house, but that’s about all. He won’t be able to get much of a job. With a prison record you ain’t got prospects.”
“It seems a very long sentence for cooking meth for himself in that old shack.”
“Oh, yeah. All those years, and a wasted life. It don’t seem fair.” He kicked at the grass and guardedly looked around at his wife, stooping and snatching at cans. “But he had to pay the price.”
I wanted to talk more, I wanted to know more, yet I felt fortunate in this young man’s candor and good humor and forbearance. I was a stranger who had driven out of the damp low clouds and parked at the edge of his property, and within fifteen minutes or so he had told me these details of his life.
“My wife thinks I’m jack-jawin’ here,” he said. “I got to get back to work. You take care.”
I headed back to the highway that is mentioned in Derek Walcott’s evocative long poem, one of his best, about race and history in the South, “The Arkansas Testament”:
The dusk was
yielding in flashes of metal
from a slowly surrendering sun
on the billboards, storefronts, and signs
along Highway 71 . . .
Old Testament Weather: “Baseball-Sized Hail”
The storm that had been talked about for days came as a “severe storm warning” news flash at six in the morning, as I woke in a grim motel outside the town of Alma in the west of Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border, the far western corner of the Deep South. Storms are frequent here, twisters especially, barreling across the region of the plains known as Tornado Alley, unimpeded by any mountain range, gathering speed, flattening the grass, battering the corn stalks, whirling into splinters any dwelling in its path, crushing the house trailers, felling the trees. Multiple tornadoes were forecast, with high winds and heavy rain, and the words that caught my attention: “baseball- and golf-ball-sized hail.”
“I think the trouble is that America just happens to have hyperbolic weather,” my friend Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I spoke of the weather mentioned in the hyperbolic mock ordeals of travel writers in the United States. And he went on: “I’d never seen such biblical thunderstorms as I saw in Montana—they seemed to be straight out of the Old Testament. Tornado alley. Great droughts. The Mississippi floods of 1993. Or the New Madrid earthquake in around 1820, when the Mississippi was said to flow backwards for a week.”
Maybe the biblical thunderstorms inspired the preaching and the Last Days themes of sermons in the South, the weather matching the Doomsday mood, all of it portending that the end is nigh.
A “tornado watch” was issued. “Baseball-sized hail” sounded deadly, like a shower of white rocks hammering down from the angry skies, bursting through the roof, smashing windows, breaking your skull, fracturing your bones. Another example of Old Testament weather and seemingly the judgment of an angry God, hurling ice down upon your head.
I had been surprised, and sometimes shocked, by the emphatic weather in the South—the extremes of temperature, the strong storms—but even so, the warnings seemed overdramatic. Then, in Alma, surprised in my skepticism, a few hours later the first rain came down, loud and blinding, bringing forth sudden floods. The rain had started when I was in my car, and it was as though I was being soused and isolated in a car wash. I couldn’t see ahead of me, the road was awash, the wind picked up and was thrashing the trees, bending some saplings sideways so sharply I expected them to snap in half, but they wagged and sprang upright and then kowtowed again to the puddled earth, nodding furiously.
Unable to negotiate the road, I pulled off and sat for an hour, the rain cascading down the windows, flashes of lightning giving the nearer shacks a sickly hue, explosive thunder shivering their old planks. I was now isolated by the heavy rain, by the way it shrouded me, by the noise of it clattering on my car roof, by the novelty of a tumbling creek where moments before there had been a gutter of red earth and a footpath. The thunder cracked, erupting in big swelling syllables like a long, booming, and gabbling word shouted by a giant, just after the dazzle of the lightning flash that was green and gold. My goodness, after all this time on the road, an ordeal!
But it was a mock ordeal. The rain passed, leaving pools of water and sodden grass and drooping tree branches—and vapor, like the expelled breath of the storm. And a silence, almost peacefulness, overtook the little roadside settlement where I’d sheltered. I thought it was over, the storm having moved on.
The air was still heavy, the sky dark, an overhanging oppression of stillness and humidity. I had gotten out of my car and, standing in the wet grass, was wondering where to go, or whether I should go at all.
“How you doin’?”
A striding man in a plastic poncho, tugging a dog behind him, waved to me.
“He’s freakin’ out,” the man said. “Got stuck up the road. Headin’ home.”
“Bad storm,” I said.
“This ain’t the storm. This is just the rain. Somethin’ comin’.”
“You mean the tornado watch?”
“Tornado warnin’.”
“What’s the difference?”
“One’s been sighted. Probably more than one. Comin’ this way. Supposed to hit tonight.”
So this was only a prelude. I drove farther up Highway 71, then back to the interstate, and the rain came again, more softly. I drove in and out of Conway, but because of the storm warnings, most of the businesses were shut and people were off the streets. I bought a sandwich and ate it in the car. Beyond Little Rock, the rain was heavier, the wind picked up, and, deciding that I should stay off the road, I found a motel.
“I got to tell you we’re under a tornado watch here,” the woman at the front desk said. She was solemn and smooth-faced, twirling a lock of dark hair with a busy finger as she spoke. Her badge gave her name as Jamie. “Take this.”
She handed me a printed page from a stack of them on the counter. It was headed “Tornado Procedures,” with an itemized list of explanations (“A ‘tornado watch’ means that weather conditions are favorable for a tornado to form”) and directions for sheltering and evacuation.
“I’ll call your room if we’re under threat,” Jamie said. “You can shelter under the stairs with the other guests, or get into your bathtub.”
This sort of dire warning, with specific orders (“get into your bathtub”), suggests to the wanderer a promise that by morning there will be something important and timely to chronicle. Bad news for the civilian is often welcome to the travel writer looking for a tale to tell. Wild weather sounded dramatic, and the worst weather had the effect of tormenting a landscape and putting it in sharp relief, giving it a face and a mood.
Driving the rain-doused roads had tired me. I went to bed and slept soundly. The phone did not ring. When I went downstairs at seven the
next morning, I found three agitated youths, a man and two women, heaving a tangle of paraphernalia into the back of a vehicle—not conventional luggage but black cases, the sort that holds technical equipment.
“Anything happen?” I asked.
“You didn’t hear the news?”
“I was asleep.”
“We was up all night. It was awesome,” the young man said, swinging a microphone on a long rod into the car. “Eight twisters.”
The tornadoes had blown through during the night, taking with them two of the suburbs of Little Rock I’d passed through, looking for—but not finding—a place to stay; the towns of Vilonia and Mayflower had received direct hits.
“We came to within two miles of the tornadoes at Mayflower, where all the destruction is,” the young man said, his voice rising in excitement.
He sounded strangely happy, even somewhat delirious. I remarked on his mood.
“We’re storm chasers!” he cried.
His name was Stephen Jones, a student at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Following the tornadoes, he had entered Arkansas, crisscrossing the high winds and rain, taking pictures of the storm cones and the whirling debris, recording the howl of wind. Photographing lightning bolts was one of Jones’s specialties, and since thunderstorms help create tornadoes, he had taken many such pictures of blazing, sky-cracking light.
“I guess we’re crazy,” he said, but he didn’t mean that; he meant they were passionate. He was still hurriedly loading his car. “We’re heading to Mississippi, maybe get more footage. The twisters are hitting there today.”
“What should I do if I’m in my car and there’s a tornado?”
“Never pull under an underpass or a low bridge. The wind funnels through—it’ll kill you. Safest place? Believe it or not, a car wash.”
And then they drove away, the storm chasers, toward Mississippi and the twisters.
In the aftermath that day, the main headline in Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was “Tornado Deaths Reach 15,” and the article described “the 40-mile-long path of destruction” through north Little Rock and three counties of central Arkansas—where I had happened to be, but I’d been bypassed by the fickle, slithering storm—“before moving back into the clouds.” All the warnings had been accurate: the storm had been as lethal as it had been predicted to be, perhaps more so. It had snaked northeast, springing across the interstate, “mangling recreational vehicles and flipping over 80,000-pound tractor trailers.”
It had bypassed Conway, but nearer Little Rock it had flattened Vilonia and Mayflower, where there was now a 7 p.m. curfew, and heaps of debris, fallen trees, houses reduced to splinters and planks. The newspaper was filled with tales of unlucky people trapped in basements, flung out of windows, dying under collapsed walls. Hundreds of people had taken refuge in shelters, where they remained.
“Twister’s Path: 3000 Dwellings” was the headline two days after the storm. The affected areas were declared a “major-disaster zone.” This storm had been one of the most powerful in Arkansas history, and in some parts of central Arkansas almost eight inches of rain had fallen in three hours. Flooding was general, roads turned into rivers, houses submerged, people drowned. Witnesses spoke of “the rumbling freight train sound” of the twister moving past their houses while they hunkered in basements and safe rooms. This storm that I had slept through a few miles away had now claimed thirty-five lives, including people in Alabama and in Mississippi, where it had been particularly destructive in Tupelo. Swathes of trees in the path of the storm had been scoured from the earth, and ones on the periphery had been debarked.
A greater factuality, and a summing-up, appeared in the Little Rock newspaper on the third day. On the Enhanced Fujita Scale—the scientific measure of tornadoes—the storm was designated a category EF4, with winds up to two hundred miles per hour. The force of such winds can derail a train, demolish an entire house, and uproot trees, sending the trunks flying like battering rams. This was the worst storm in Arkansas since a category EF5 hit in 1929, killing twenty-three people and wiping out the town of Sneed: the place was abandoned and never rebuilt.
Days after the strange selective storm, the local hospitals were still unable to cope with all the injured and dying, and people kept arriving with severe trauma, broken bones, pierced flesh, collapsed lungs—150 victims at one hospital. An accompanying story in this locally well-reported tragedy was a lengthy account of “storm-tossed pets,” such as the Labrador retriever found hanging in a tree—and rescued.
I had slept through it all. That was the oddness for me in this punishing and dramatic weather event that had gripped three states. I had gotten wet feet, but otherwise the storm had not touched me and had hardly inconvenienced my travel. It was a day or two of alarm, of reports, of voices off. The terrible wind came and went, a singular Arkansas drama, and though it was reported throughout one news cycle, it was not headline news anywhere else in the United States.
“This is a weather state,” a man said to me later in Little Rock. “People are crazy about the weather—always discussing it. Maybe it’s because we’re agricultural and need to know. And we do have amazing weather.”
One church took advantage of the tornado to put up a billboard:
DOESN’T THE UNUSUAL WEATHER TELL US THAT JESUS IS COMING BACK VERY SOON?
Citing Luke 21: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
But if you weren’t directly in its path, it was no more than a wet day in the Ozarks, unremarkable except for the sounds of distant thunder. For those who were buffeted by the power of the whirling wind, it was devastating, the commencement of days of funerals and laborious cleanups and sad stories of sudden homelessness.
But it was a remote episode; it was local. It was just more misery in the South, and for most of the United States the storm, with its disruption and death, was so far beneath notice it could have happened in a foreign country.
The Arkansas Literary Festival
During these stormy days, while I drove through the rain around central Arkansas, I happened upon a literary festival in Little Rock, four days of talks and book-related events. Many authors were featured, most of them Arkansans. The Arkansas novelist Charles Portis lived in Little Rock, and I hoped—because I was one of his readers—he might be speaking. But Portis’s name was not on the list of eighty authors who would be appearing at the festival.
Most literary festivals, featuring self-promoting authors with tangled beards and strange hats, eager publicists, and the hoopla of signings and free T-shirts, amount to little more than a frenzied harlequinade. But the mission of this festival was, so its advertising stated, “to encourage the development of a more literate populace.” In a state in which some rural counties had a twenty-five percent adult illiteracy rate, where statewide more than fourteen percent could not read or write, and almost twenty percent of Arkansans did not have a high school diploma, a more literate populace was a worthy aim. Whenever such dire statistics were trotted out, the response was usually, “But in Mississippi it’s worse,” which was the melancholy truth. Yet the intellectual sterility in Arkansas was palpable and made more obvious by the strenuous attempts to deny it.
The Arkansan writer Ellen Gilchrist was advertised as a featured speaker at the literary festival. I had read several of her collections of stories and hoped to hear her. Her short stories, many of them sequential, with a recurring cast of characters, concerned the tribulations of educated, middle-class, white Southern women. The stories were not to my taste, but that wasn’t important: the drawling, sprawling prose of Gilchrist was revealing, such chattiness often more revelatory and help
ful to an outsider like me than a virtuoso display of literary technique. Gilchrist never failed to describe women’s clothes, every color and style, the shoes too—the shoes especially—and the women’s makeup and coiffures. These were descriptive details to which the male writer was usually blind or oblivious. From the literary point of view, her fiction had no weight—at least for me—but the stories I’d read clearly reflected the love, work, mating habits, and marriages of Southern women, which she portrayed with conviction.
The issue of race was seldom raised in Gilchrist’s fiction, though one set of connected stories was narrated by Traceleen, a black housemaid working in the home of one of Gilchrist’s characters from other stories, a dizzy, much-married drunken Southern belle named Crystal Manning Mallison Weiss. Traceleen is sober, reliable, and hardworking, and in one episode, trying to be helpful, she takes over the driving of an expensive Mercedes and unavoidably crashes it, causing its (male) owner to remark, “Holy Christ, Crystal. You let the nigger maid drive my car?”
I longed for the privilege to ask Ellen Gilchrist about this story, included in her prize-winning collection Victory over Japan. Why the sustained and unruffled tone of the black narrator? Whence the farcical situation that develops from the crash? And why does Traceleen seem to accept the word of abuse, or at least why does she evince no reaction at all to this language in what seemed to me a charged situation? And did Gilchrist receive any flack or umbrage for using the word?
But the storm had kept Ellen Gilchrist in Fayetteville, and her talk was canceled, as I discovered when I visited the Main Library on Second Street, not far from the odd, intrusive library and museum in the form of a cantilevered upswung big-rig trailer, the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center, on the south bank of the muddy Arkansas River.
