This Is Only a Test

by B. J. Hollars

  21.

  Tornadoes, twice, were a mystery. John Parker Finley, an accomplished Army Signal Service officer, dedicated much of his life trying to understand them. Most nineteenth-century Americans had never seen a real one, but with his 1887 illustrated book on the subject, Finley brought tornadoes into American households everywhere.

  22.

  Tornadoes, thrice, were a mystery. A 1967 article in Science News admitted that while “hundreds of tornadoes maul the surface of the earth every year, taking hundreds of lives and smashing all but the sturdiest of man’s works . . . they remain one of the least understood of natural phenomena.”

  23.

  Perhaps our lack of understanding isn’t due to the scientific uncertainty of the phenomena, but our inability to fit tornadoes into a moral framework. When nature kills, we find excuses for its behavior. When a mountain climber dies, a part of us faults the climber for traversing such treacherous terrain. Likewise, when a sailor drowns, we wonder what business that sailor had in the sea in the first place. Couldn’t you see Death, we think, just lurking beneath those shadowy waves?

  24.

  I swear to you, we took no chances in Tuscaloosa. We climbed no peaks, swam no seas—nobody tempted anyone. Earlier that afternoon, my wife and I humbly sat across from one another at an Indian buffet on 15th Street. A few hours later, that restaurant became a demarcation line.

  25.

  Eight days later, I drove down what remained of 15th Street and was surprised to find Central High School’s football team already packed back into their practice pads. The school had been spared by half a mile. I remember thinking: Look at those boys hustling to make the tackle. And then: Hustling to evade more than tackles.

  26.

  Tornadoes bruise, too, though sometimes they destroy places rather than people—an unintentional mercy. They have been known to force the caps off jam jars and strip the bark from trees, the feathers from chickens. I try to imagine it: a flash of lightning, followed by the image of a chicken recklessly plucked, goose-bumped and shivering on the edge of an empty field.

  27.

  On the final page of Tornado Warning, the still-feathered Owlie Skywarn is pictured with his wings wrapped around a pair of smiling children. “We can’t stop tornadoes,” Skywarn chides. “But we can live through them when we know how.”

  28.

  Trust me when I tell you that on April 27, 2011, Owlie Skywarn didn’t give one hoot for Tuscaloosa.

  29.

  I am struggling to put this into perspective.

  30.

  (I am still struggling to put this into perspective.)

  31.

  In 1884, James Macfarlane, too, struggled with perspective. He had observed many tears in the land, believing them the handiwork of unrecorded tornadoes. “There is evidence in the forests of Pennsylvania that many localities have been visited by tornadoes of which no accounts have ever been recorded,” he explained, noting that sometimes the damage was concentrated in a small region rather than along the typical swaths cut through the trees. According to Macfarlane, the once carefully combed earth appeared oddly uprooted—evidence of an edited country. Why were there no warnings?

  32.

  The morning prior to the tornado, the front page of The Tuscaloosa News gave us our warning. One article began: “Here we go again.” Throughout much of the spring, storms had struck regularly, perhaps causing some Tuscaloosans to downplay the seriousness of the situation.

  33.

  Survivors are always survivors until they aren’t.

  34.

  Fresh off the success of his previous work, Owlie Skywarn returned a few years later, this time in coloring-book form. “Listen for the tornado’s roar,” says Skywarn. “Some people say it sounds like a thousand trains.”

  35.

  Others, like me, heard nothing but the showerhead’s drip, drip, drip . . .

  36.

  In the rec center locker room later that week, I overheard the old men convene their morning meeting. First item on the agenda: discussing the latest body unearthed—a friend of a friend of a friend. “I’ve never been afraid of anything in my life,” explained one. “But next time I hear the wind moving like that, I know I’ll be heading for cover.”

  37.

  Define “cover.”

  38.

  By Friday, April 29, we were still without power, but that is all we were without. We still had our lives, our dog, our unborn child. This is the definition of privilege.

  39.

  In a 1935 edition of Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, John Copley wrote, “It has been my privilege to observe several tornadoes at close range and also to examine the effects of others.”

  40.

  (Please see #38 for a true definition of “privilege.”)

  41.

  “For people getting their animals back, we usually make them show ID, but a lot of them just don’t have it; they don’t have anything,” an animal shelter representative explained to The Tuscaloosa News. “So we’re going on gut instincts and the reaction of the animal.”

  42.

  Hours prior to landing on Tuscaloosa’s airstrip, President Obama trusted his gut and ordered Seal Team Six to move. Then he turned to our town, walked our rubble, whispered, “I’ve never seen destruction like this.”

  43.

  On Monday, May 2, The Tuscaloosa News likely became the only newspaper in America in which the death of Osama bin Laden was not the lead.

  44.

  There is a calculus to measuring destruction.

  45.

  But there is no calculus to a cumulonimbus.

  46.

  No equation to measure the rattling coming from deep inside my vents.

  47.

  All we know for sure is that tornadoes, like essays, demand the proper conditions.

  48.

  But do not ask what those conditions are.

  49.

  Because tornadoes, always, are a mystery.

  50.

  And essays, like bathtubs, provide only temporary relief.

  The Longest Wait

  We have been waiting for you for nine months now, but still you are not here. On the longest days, I make a beeping sound, then turn to my phone, tell your mother, “Hey, I got a text. Says sorry it’s late, but it’ll be here any minute.”

  You’re not.

  You are not here one minute and you are not here the next.

  Are we concerned by your late arrival? Yes, secretly, though the midwives insist that your tardiness is hardly unusual.

  Relax. Babies do not wear wristwatches.

  This seems like sound advice.

  Nevertheless, TV has convinced us that there must be scientific certainty to your arrival.

  We understand that there is to be the breaking of water, the white-knuckled pushing, and then you are ours—promptly at forty weeks.

  Better late than never, I tell your mother, and when that doesn’t work, I say, Hey, at least it’s not an if, but a when.

  We are grateful that you are a when, and we are equally grateful that you held tight when that tornado tore through our town. You were just a poppy seed then, half a thumbnail bobbing in an endless ocean, the definition of vulnerable.

  Your mother, the dog, and I were vulnerable too, taking refuge in a bathroom in a duplex in a cul-de-sac at the edge of a road at a corner of a street in a city that nearly blew away.

  We’ll tell you all about it when you’re older, but it will be hard for you to understand. How the wind picked up, and then picked up everything with it. How the meteorologist shouted “Safe place!” before fading from the screen.

  A friend says, Take long walks! so we climb the mountain-sized hill behind our house.

  We are half a country away from that bathtub now, from that storm, and so we wear boots—not flip-flops—as we slog through Wisconsin’s snow.

  Alabama has become an afterthought, though it is also a befo
re-thought, and a during-thought, and a constant thought.

  Most days I try to forget but I always just remember.

  From atop the mountain-sized hill behind our house, the wind blows colder, cutting into your mother’s face. Yet she—so determined to sweat you out—hardly seems to notice. Your future dog, too, points her nose uphill, completing our weatherworn trio.

  One day, I think, you will make us a quartet, but that day is not today.

  Sometimes, after our walks, I listen as your mother pounds up and down stairs bargaining with God.

  I will walk these a thousand times if you will release it. We have been waiting for so long now. Please, try to understand.

  But we are not surprised when you do not come that day. Or the day after.

  After all, we’ve tried bargaining with God before, praying for strong foundations, for reinforced walls, for trajectories that do not lead to us.

  On Monday there are contractions; we both have them. Mine aren’t the same as hers, just shaky nerves in the minute prior to kick-off. Alabama is playing LSU for the national championship, so we bundle ourselves in team sweatshirts in solidarity for a place we once called home. The previous fall, we lived so close to Bryant-Denny stadium that our windows rattled with the touchdowns. And then, one afternoon in April there was a touch down of another sort.

  The game is scoreless and then it is not: a field goal, followed by another, and another. Suddenly Alabama is up by nine, and while your mother’s mild contractions continue, we distract ourselves with football talk. We decide to wait out the pain for a while, feigning focus on the screen.

  Our dog senses something is awry. She patters down the stairs and hides beneath our bed—the safest place in the house besides the bathroom.

  There is another contraction, followed by another, and we are timing them now, feeling out the space between them.

  At the end of the first quarter, your mother calls the hospital:

  Hi, I have been having painful contractions . . . fluctuating between three and five minutes . . . baby one, but I’m almost at forty-one weeks . . . hopefully . . . not quite yet . . . we’ve just been waiting for so long now . . .

  They keep us waiting longer.

  And so, she collapses onto the couch so we can debate halfbacks and running backs for a few quarters more.

  But with six minutes left in the fourth, your mother decides we’ve waited long enough.

  Her contractions have lengthened, quickened, tightened, and while we’re both anxious to watch the final minutes (well, me more than her), we are less anxious to birth you in our living room.

  We buckle up and drive down Ferry Street, bypassing the Dairy Queen and taking a shortcut through the park. At last, we turn on Whipple Street, parking on the second story of the garage. “Yakety Yak” blares throughout the three-minute drive, which seems appropriate given the lunacy of reproduction.

  While we fill out paperwork, Trent Richardson runs for a touchdown. While we settle into our room, Coach Saban hoists the trophy. We, of course, are privy to none of it.

  “Turn on the game,” your mother suggests as she slips into her hospital gown. We search for it, but the game is now gone, nothing left but infomercials.

  Eventually, a sports channel begins replaying the game in its entirety, and as your mother grips my hand, breathes deep, we stare at the screen together.

  It feels redundant, watching the plays already played and always knowing the outcome. But we like knowing—a contrast to our current state of knowing nothing at all.

  The nurse is kind, and as I doze off in a chair beside the bed, she drapes a warm blanket over my shoulders. The entire room is trapped in half sleep, though when our eyes momentarily bob back to the television screen, we see not a football game, but the footage they’ve been replaying during each Alabama game all season: the foreboding cloud hovering over the football stadium, the tornado that thumped our town.

  “We survived that,” I mumble to the nurse.

  It’s 3:00 AM or later.

  “Pardon?”

  “We survived . . .”

  “Tornado,” your mother explains between contractions. “We survived that.”

  We recite our story, but it makes less sense now than ever.

  How we crouched in a tub with our poppy seed child and were somehow not blown away.

  “It went right by our house,” your mother says between contractions. I nod to confirm it, staring once more at the tornado on the screen, and wondering how—nine months later and 1,012 miles away—it still managed to find us.

  Your mother is in a different bathtub now, a swollen fish trying to push you out. We are no longer afraid of what’s outside our window, but of what’s inside her instead.

  You, you are what scares us. You and nature both.

  The water helps, your mother says, so she rocks back and forth in the tub.

  Hours later, when the real work begins, I will begin to better understand devastation. Will see your mother’s face buckle like her legs never did on that mountain-sized hill behind our house. There are no trembling lips, just promises to God and curses to God and apologies to God as well. We remember our part of the bargain—Be grateful!—and so we are, knowing full well that even an interminable wait is a gift some never receive.

  The midwife says push, and your mother pushes.

  All I say is “It’s coming closer now,” though this time we don’t take cover.

  I tremble as you become you—an I—and your body bursts into cold light.

  First you breathe and then you don’t but then, dear boy, you do again.

  Let us try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends . . .

  —LORD BYRON, as reported in Edward Trelawny’s

  Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858)

  II.

  DROWNED

  The Girl in the Surf

  You may have heard of these pictures before: the ones of the girl in the surf on Plum Island. At least, I’d always heard the figure was a girl, though when I actually saw the photos I came to understand otherwise: she is a woman, and while she is a breathing woman in one frame she has stopped breathing in the next.

  The photos were taken by Marc Halevi, a photojournalist on assignment to capture the highest tides to have reached Plum Island, Massachusetts, in over half a century. Instead, he captured the effects of those tides—a woman drowning.

  What we know of the woman’s last moments we know only from Halevi’s photos and witness testimony. The woman was believed to have been drinking that day and, prior to the drowning, reportedly mumbled, “Let the ocean take me.” Yet when the water did take her—gripping a beer bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other—people began wondering if her death was intentional and, more to the point, whether Halevi might have prevented it.

  Halevi’s photos have become a staple in the media ethics classroom. Is it the photojournalist’s obligation to intervene on behalf of a stranger? And, if so, is this form of intervention a moral imperative shared by all? The story is complicated further when we learn that Halevi’s seemingly close proximity to the victim is an illusion, the result of a telephoto lens. In reality, he was nearly fifty feet away from the woman, and when he spotted two men (one of whom happened to be a lifeguard) rushing to her aid, he held firm, his finger on the shutter release. While some view Halevi’s inaction as opportunistic (if not outright ghoulish), others defend him, arguing that lifesaving was best attempted by a trained lifeguard, and that Halevi’s role that day was to perform the function for which he’d been trained—to keep the subject always in frame, to shoot until the film ran out.

  My camera was out of batteries the day Tuscaloosa was destroyed by an EF4 tornado

  In the days that followed, we who survived took to the streets, uncertain of how to act.

  We began thinking in terms of what we had and what we could do.

  I have an axe, so I must chop this fallen tree.

  I have h
ands, so I must move this rubble.

  We embraced our role as witnesses to disaster, carefully surveying what remained of the worst-hit neighborhoods, trying to deduce how words like “velocity” and “trajectory” had transformed whole houses into shells.

  One morning a few days after the storm, a friend and I walked through one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods; armed with her camera, we tried capturing some portion of the storm’s destruction. We felt it our obligation for the same reason we chopped trees and moved rubble:

  I have a camera, so I must take this picture.

  Though we had little control over the relief efforts, we knew how to point and click.

  First, we snapped photos of a lake filled with debris, of car windows shattered. We snapped a few of the downed power lines, too, their coils curled like black snakes along the tree trunks. Never meant to be souvenirs, these pictures were our humble attempt to do something useful. As writers in grad school, we had been trained to believe that stories mattered, that remembering mattered, and that if we did a good enough job recounting these stories then we might matter, too.

  In one instance a police officer asked us to “take it easy” with the pictures, to respect the victims’ privacy. We complied. After all, how were we to explain what we’d convinced ourselves were the subtle differences between exploitation and documentation, particularly to someone who had witnessed so much of the former?

  Twenty-four hours after the storm, I watched as a carnival atmosphere consumed what was left of our town—people clogging the streets in SUVs, the passengers half-hanging out the windows. Everybody clutched iPhones and video cameras, capturing what little remained. They “oohed” and “ahhed” as if watching a fireworks display, took selfies amid the storm-ravaged topography. They gobbled up gigabytes, uploaded all they could.