Rain On a Strange Roof

I.

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020

It’s one in the morning when we hear the sirens. Their piercing whine, flung from the football fields across the dark river, wakes the neighborhood in one strike. I’m not afraid—not yet—but I’m annoyed as I struggle awake. These sirens have gone off before in the night, many times, but for storms that were always small, no big deal, the kind to sleep through until morning. Nashville hasn’t seen a bad tornado since ‘98, when “Wide Open Spaces” played from every gas station and grocery store in town.

I consider going back to bed but get up instead to look out my bedroom window. It’s all still there: the thin rain and wet cars glowing under dim streetlights, the cracked pavement and neon-blue cross blazing like an evil eye from the recording studio across the street. A sickly green cast clings to low-hanging clouds, but the sugar maple out front is still. Not even a whiff of air clinks the branches.

Behind me, my phone pings in alarm, throwing a window of light into the shadow-cast room. Danger: Tornado. Seek shelter immediately.

This is new. I stare with waning disbelief at the message and wonder why, in this age of constant news and alerts and emails and pings, no one saw this coming. At least, I’d heard nothing about a tornado the day before. Was everyone currently in the dark, reading the news with shock just like mine? Or did they somehow know, sense a dangerous tang in the air, and choose to go about their day, as though the sheer power of thought could stop the weather.

There were no warnings on radio or TV, no perfunctory line from the barista to “stay safe out there” as he filled my mug with hot drip. No neighbors rushed to board windows or pull lawn chairs and wind chimes indoors. No one seemed worried that day, not at all, and that was what worried me most.

Through the door, I hear footsteps and the click of dog toenails on the hardwood floors. No one in this house is going back to sleep.

I walk out of the room, see that greenish light creeping through the cheap venetian blinds and down the center hallway. Abbie, hands on hips, is listing all the tornados she’s lived through in her deep Mississippi drawl. Did I know that there were over 90 last year in her home county? They’re just a regular thing.

Caroline, in dreamland, hums to herself and plays with a strand of waist-length hair. We’ve lived together for three years, and, like a sibling, Caroline’s current abstraction gets on my nerves. Aren’t you a little concerned? I think, then catch myself glaring, remembering my resolve to be a more tolerant housemate. The two dogs whine at my feet, making clear what they think of that plan.  

Turning, I shoo the dogs away and look out the window, out towards the Cumberland that circles downtown in lazy brown loops on its way to Kentucky. I consider the extent of my twister knowledge, a smattering of Storm Chasers and The Wizard of Oz. Not exactly the most scientific resources.

I slowly curl up the blinds, then gasp at what I see through the glass.  It’s large, massive even, a churning spiral of angry cloud that looks nothing like the narrow twists of air on TV. It looms straight up from the ground in thick grey waves, its endpoint impossible to see through the skyline. The tornado is still across the river, miles away but moving fast.

I don’t need to be an expert to know this is bad.

In seconds, the wind kicks up and shakes the windowpanes like they’re made of paper. A power line erupts in a shower of sparks and every light on the street goes dark.

We don’t have a cellar, and each room has a window that could burst over our huddled bodies. I stupidly think for a moment of diving for the kitchen table that totters on uneven legs.

“What do we do?” I turn to Abbie, the only experienced one in the room.

She nods, afraid but matter of fact. “Coat closet. Now.”

We rush down the hall—fling out luggage, winter coats, dead lamps (when was the last time we cleaned in here?)—until there’s enough space for the five of us. Abbie’s corgi roots into a box of derelict shoes and disappears.

Above, the wind howls and bangs the century-old rafters. We look at each other in the weak blue of a phone flashlight, real fear on our faces now. The walls feel razor-thin.

For the next twenty minutes, anxiety takes over. Surely this isn’t how my story goes—snuffed out by something so common as the weather, my body whirled up and dashed to earth like a rag doll. I’m supposed to hate getting older, write books and songs and fall in love. I’m supposed to make something of myself.

I see our house flatten like a tent of Popsicle sticks.

Abbie’s voice breaks my spiraling fear. She has service. “The news says that the storm’s moved east. Looks like we’re in the clear.”

Huddled in the living room, we light candles and try to refresh our phones. Caroline breaks out an old bottle of Malbec from the fridge, and we share it in our two best coffee cups. The storm has made us friends again.

Rain is streaming down the windows in dense flows, but there seems to be no serious damage outside. The sickening fear of the last half hour is already fading. Somehow, we’re unscathed.

“Well, that was exciting,” I say, waving my phone around to catch a signal. We sit in silence and wait for safety updates from friends. The sirens will sound for the next two hours.

“You get anything?” Caroline asks me.

I shake my head once. “Spinning wheel of death.”

Abbie cries out.

“Look at Main Street!” She hands us her phone, showing a half-loaded image of the commercial area three blocks away. Bricks and shards of metal litter the street, every rooftop and window a mess of jagged glass. In the foreground, a red semi is tossed on its side.

“Oh my god,” we say. We didn’t think it would be this bad.

II.

The next day is clear enough to drown in. I wake up to a strange street, beneath a strange roof; the view outside is undamaged but irretrievably changed. I tear up the blinds, hoping sunlight can clear the sense of danger just missed, of lives now arrayed on a newly-made axis. But it’s still there, curled up in a dark corner, the “before the storm” and the “after”.

I’ve heard that tornados can have a devious randomness to their path—demolishing one home while leaving its neighbor untouched—but it’s disturbing to see this up close.

Two blocks away, the streets are in ruins. Cars are shredded, smashed in half, and sheets of metal twist around broken telephone poles. I’ve come to help, but where to start? I turn my head left and right, taking it in, and catch glints of shattered glass in the cracks of the sidewalk. Any trees still standing are oddly furred with pink insulation, a sad echo of the soft, rosy clusters that will bloom on the flowering cherry trees this Spring.

Later, we’ll learn that the storm claimed twenty-five lives. One couple died in the open as they ran for cover, struck down by flying debris. I’d seen them, once or twice, a pair of stylish millennials serving cocktails in a dimly lit bar, smiling and clearly in love.

Helicopters slant through the sky overhead, over streets littered with news crews and firemen rolling out yellow tape. They try to control the flow of traffic, but it’s no use. Eight a.m., and pedestrians already swamp the sidewalks, taking selfies in broken mirrors and ducking under police blockades. I pick my way through the crowds, spotting more than one with phone outstretched, recording video from an idling pickup truck.

It’s a striking juxtaposition: the destruction and this sudden invasion of privacy. I hear a policewoman say that “looky-loos” have been coming in from across the city, so many that first responders can barely get by.

It’s easy to condemn this behavior. But walking through the rubble, I find that it’s easy to lose myself, too. I’m reminded, by the narratives inherent to possessions smeared across pavement and lawns, that people conceal their worst secrets behind closed doors.

There’s the home on Holly whose entire front is sheared off, curled on its side like the discarded lid of a tin can. Its walls are unremarkable, normal and neat. But inside, the ancient wallpaper is peeling and stained, packed to the rafters with newspaper, old plastic, empty beer cans, broken toys. A hoarder’s house. Next door, a naked mannequin dangles out a second-floor window, open mouth to the sky. Does it belong to a seamstress? Or is it some kind of kink? In the yard, one lonesome guitar is pressed thin as a flower.

I trace the storm’s path the rest of the morning: Photos, dog tags, pet beds, a blue kitchenette sink, torn clothing and shingles and crushed toys and cut glass and garbage and smashed-up wood. A collection of snow globes is smashed to bits—Paris, London, Bangkok, Tibet—their liquid snow seeping into the grass.

All of it tells a story as clearly as the written word. What we value and what we don’t; whether we take pride in the orderly, or let pain accumulate like a pile of old shoes and yellowed paper. These four walls and how we fill them show us who we are and want to be, and who we wish we weren’t. Postcards from a life, short and fragile.

In one yard, there’s nothing left at all.

Months later, when I am in self-isolation with my family in Washington state, sleeping on the hard little rectangle of my childhood bed, sick of the same leggings and sweatshirts I packed for one month that has somehow stretched into six—I’ll miss my home in Nashville. Miss my cherry-red car, the art on my walls, my dog-eared cookbooks and the way the summer light slants through the windows at dusk.

What I’m trying to say is: I miss my stuff. It sounds materialistic and tacky and too candid to say when there is so much more on this earth to cause worry. But I do.

What I realize as I say all of this to my sister—on one of those shapeless, bleary-eyed quarantine days that feel like all the rest—is that I don’t miss the objects themselves. I miss the feeling of control they give, the pleasure of seeing myself reflected in my surroundings. Not my parents, not my housemates, not my awkward adolescence.

This desire to shape a home, to cocoon in all that is safe, familiar, sane, hopeful and warm, is one of the most basic desires there is. And yet its fulfilment—a process requiring time and resources, a space to self-reify with what we briefly own—is an act of supreme and subtle privilege.

Many of the storm’s victims will never rebuild, not even close. It may be a very long time before they feel control, let alone safe, in their own homes. It’s a fact keenly felt that sunny day in March. It stretches down the streets, humming like a high-pitched note.

The residents of East Nashville sense it, too. For every person taking selfies in the ruins of a life, there is a crowd ready to help. I hear them at work before sunrise and see them giving aid long after dark. Volunteers go door to door offering water, trash bags, and hugs. They break out their rusty chainsaws and make peanut butter sandwiches like they’ve trained for this day their whole lives.

“Thank you for letting me help you,” I hear one man say as he moves boxes into an elderly woman’s car. It’s enough to make a cynic’s heart sing.

III.

By Friday, I’m assigned to a work crew. Our power has been out for a week, and the surrounding streets must be cleared of debris to restore electricity. To prepare, I buy my first pair of work gloves in a handsome hunter green and select a practical outfit to match. My arms, toned from typing, look almost useful.

From the volunteer station we’re taken to a low-slung bungalow, where a small group is dismembering a felled magnolia. Tree limbs, still blooming, gather in glossy, jagged heaps on the ground. Each piece must be carried to the sidewalk by hand.

Two hours in, my back starts to ache. There’s a dozen more yards in chaos, but one tree has burned up the whole afternoon. A one-by-one inch dent. The homeowner returns, effusively grateful. Her silver-topped cane taps the pavement. Before us, she couldn’t get in her front door.

We straggle back to the volunteer tent, all smiles. My new gloves are ruined. So much for their attractive forest-green.

A makeshift kitchen has been built outside the fire station on Holly Street. Its metal tower lies in one piece on the ground, plucked from the roof by a giant’s hand. The neighboring churchyard is filled with cops, pastors, survivors. A man rolls up in a red pickup, then pulls out three flats of Dunkin’ Donuts and a vat of coffee. The crowd cheers.

Our team scatters, drawn by the scent of hot dogs and sizzling onions. I see tubs of yellow potato salad, fat biscuits and sleeves of Oreo’s, fresh grits and Diet Coke. Now is not the time for leafy greens. After days of dry hummus and lettuce wilting in our tepid fridge, the hot food smells divine.

I approach, then hang back. I’m not sure that I belong in line. My fridge isn’t empty; my home is intact. I have enough—have no right to take this food.

A woman in a fur coat flipping burgers sees me stare.

“Here,” she says, holding out a paper plate. “Help yourself.”