You had to be there

 

The picture above is a satellite image of Tuscaloosa, AL. ��See that jagged brown scar sliced diagonally across it? ��That’s the path of destruction, visible from space,��left by the EF4 tornado that tore through on April 27th, 2011.

I suspect that 4/27/11 is for Tuscaloosa natives a lot like 9/11/01 is for New Yorkers. ��You don’t have to have been living in New York the day the Towers came down, or in Tuscaloosa when the tornado ripped through, to be horrified by the tragedy. ��But you also will not,��cannot, fully understand what it was like to be there. ��What it is like to��have been there. To have your own life in peril. ��To recognize your own city streets buried beneath rubble. To lose��your friend, your spouse, your parent, your child, that day.

I am an outsider to both tragedies, although much��closer to��9/11. I had a lot of friends in New York,��had spent a fair amount of time there, and my husband Pete had lived in the city��just a year before 9/11 (you could look down his street and see the WTC, and the copy of��Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that we read out loud together was bought from the Barnes and Noble in the WTC mall).

I had no personal connection to Tuscaloosa until Pete got a job at the University of Alabama, over a year after the tornado, so my own experience of 4/27/11 can only be through the echoes. ��The stories of friends who were there. ��The sight of that path slicing through places I now know�� The reactions people have to bad weather. For instance, the kids’ school dismissed students an hour early today due to the possibility of inclement weather this afternoon and evening. ��This is a common occurrence. ��At one point I joked about it to a friend who worked for federal emergency management in Jackson, Mississippi:

“Jeez, haven’t they ever seen a thunderstorm before?”

“Dude, they had an EF4 tornado a couple years ago.”

I wasn’t thinking. ��I wasn’t there.