I’ve never really experienced a natural disaster first hand. I was very young when the Northridge earthquake destroyed parts of Los Angeles, and I must have blocked most of it out of my mind. It’s true that I’ve sat wide eyed with my jaw to the floor as I read the news, or watched the TV as other parts of the world were hit by mother nature at her angriest. And like most people who feel helpless and useless under these circumstances, I’ve donated money to the red cross. I prayed for other people’s families, and homes, but never my own. Maybe watching through a screen allows the mind to disconnect, or maybe its just too painful to absorb. Maybe it’s self preservation. Last Wednesday my flight was scheduled to land in Huntsville Alabama, right around the time the tornadoes hit. What I saw last week changed my life forever.
Scared we were going to miss our connecting flight to Huntsville, we deplaned the flight that landed us 20 min late into Memphis with great urgency to find that our flight had actually been delayed 2 hours. This put our minds at ease, and we decided to eat lunch and regroup. He ordered a burger and I put some makeup on my tired puffy eyes in the bathroom. I was exhausted and our travel time had gone from 6 to 8 hours, but I was still smiling. As we headed towards our gate, a woman with a brisk walk told us that our flight to Huntsville had been cancelled due to weather. We moved faster. At this time, the most frustrating aspect of our journey so far was that the airline offered no form of compensation for flights cancelled due to weather. I decided to take control, and not let a couple hundred miles stop us from reaching our destination. Besides, who doesn’t like a road trip? I googled the distance, and it seemed as though we could make it in around 4 hours. I asked them to take my bag off the plane, and was informed it could take up to 2 hours. I shrugged, and headed towards the signs that pointed us in the direction of rental cars. No company would rent us a one way car. We waited as bus after bus stopped and I asked if their company would please rent us a car. We were turned down every time. I called a company and begged the operator to help us. She finally gave in, either because I wore her down or her shift was almost over. We picked up our car and headed back to the airport to grab our luggage, but as we exited the lot the wrong way, we ran over two rows of spikes. We continued on our way, already discussing how often we would have to stop to fill up the tires with air. About an hour in we got a phone call from his mom. She and I had been communicating via text in a casual manner prior to this call, but now the worry in her voice was evident. She said the weather was getting worse and she’d keep us posted. We kept driving, since the sun was shining and the weather was gorgeous where we were. Besides don’t all moms tend to give undue importance to stormy weather? It wasn’t until she called back an hour later and told us to pull over in the next town, that we listened. We pulled into a Holiday Inn and made it less than ten feet into the lobby before stopping dead in our tracks. The news was on, and every pair of eyes was glued to the TV. The hospital in Tuscaloosa had been destroyed. I was suddenly terrified, mostly because of all the other terrified faces. These people were used to tornadoes, so this must be bad. The woman at the counter offered us peach cobbler and chicken dumplings, but by the time my stomach was calm enough to eat there was only a tray filled with leftover baked beans. I’m not picky, so I tilted the tray and scraped what I could into a plastic bowl. I pulled out yahtzee, my favorite game, and we played for about 3 hours in hopes that everything would blow over (no pun intended). Because there were no rooms at that hotel or any in the surrounding area, we decided to keep driving. We would be going through towns that had already been hit, and with no power, no light and tons of loose debris in the road, we knew the drive would be scary. Another hour and a half on the road and we were back to laughing again. In fact, we didn’t notice that things were deceptively quiet. There were no cars on the road, and we drove with the windows down. A Black Eyed Peas song was playing on the radio, and we were getting close to home. At that point we were going on 15 hours of travel time and its safe to say we were a little slap happy. Trail mix and baked beans were all we had to eat all day. Then out of nowhere we hit a patch of water on the road. All I remember was thinking it looked like a waterfall in front of our car. We couldn’t see, and we were spinning. I don’t know how many feet we went, or how many seconds it took to stop, but it felt like forever. When we finally stopped moving I started crying. You would think we would have stayed there for a while to catch our breath, but behind us I could see headlights approaching and I suggested we just keep going to avoid being a part of a 10 car pile up. We kept driving into what quickly turned into a nightmare. We were in two feet of water going 5 miles per hour as parts of trees and chunks of wood floated by. The houses to our right were totally gone. Cars were upside down and huge billboards that once lived so high up in the sky were bent in half. With no street lamps it was difficult to see in the dark, but it didn’t take sight to feel the trauma that lingered. Steadily making our way through the debris, we came upon two men in yellow windbreakers waving their hands at our car. We stopped and rolled down the window. They told us we had to turn around, because not even 18 wheelers could make it through the water ahead. We pleaded with them, begging for an alternate route. We were so close and the day had been so long. They shook their heads and scoffed as though we were accusing them of making things more difficult. Defeated, we turned around and headed back in the direction we came from. It was a silent ride. We slept in the first motel we came upon, which was about an hour away, and the next morning we woke up only to go through it all again in the daylight.
