Gunner Quinn
Some of the recent rough weather in March spawned a lot of high winds and tornadoes. After seeing some of the stories in the media, a buddy and I decided to pack up our chain saws and take a little road trip.
It was o’ dark thirty and we were in pretty jolly spirits as we pulled out of the driveway. We were drinking coffee from thermoses like the coffee gods intended, not from those newfangled insulated travel mugs.
Spring was springing, the pastures were greening up, the peach trees were just starting to flower, and the bees were so happy they could hardly stand it. We talked about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of the recent news, how the world was shaping up, and whether the JFK files would really be all there was or if they were still holding back some.
We shared some experiences of being old geezers. Recently I was drawing up some plans for a new shed. As I was thinking about whether to use treated lumber in one section or not, the thought crossed my mind, “Am I going to live long enough or will the untreated lumber work just as well?” Wow, that was the first time I ever had that kind of thought. My buddy told me about how many different ways there are to screw up making coffee with a coffeemaker, all of which he’d experienced first hand. Everything from forgetting to add water before hitting the on switch, leaving the pot on the counter after using it to fill the water reservoir, or losing count to how many scoops he’s already added. Mind you, there are only three scoops of coffee needed for his small pot. He was just starting into the 18th way to mess it up when I decided to stick with my French press until the day they haul me off to the geezer home kicking and screaming.
At 6:45 AM we drove past an old-fashioned diner and slammed on the brakes, made a hard left, then did a power slide into a parking space. Thirty minutes later we were well fed with the breakfast special, good coffee, and a slice of pie. With refilled thermoses and with two pieces of pie to go, we continued on to our destination.
Our intent when we left home was to drive to one of the tornado disaster areas to see if we could find an older (than us) couple who needed help getting trees cut up and moved out of the way, or any other kind of assistance we could render them. We already had our approach scripted out, “Could you folks use some help from two of the founding members of the Old Farts With Chainsaws Club?” We were hoping to spend the day helping someone clean up their tornado mess.
As we got closer to the area, we weren’t seeing a whole lot of damage. We were beginning to wonder exactly what it was we’d seen on the internet. They must have cherry picked a few of the worst scenes and made it look worse than it really was.
Then we went over the crest of a hill. As we headed down the other side all we could say was a calm, “Holy sh*t.” We’d both seen photos all our lives of various kinds of storm damage, but we weren’t prepared for what we were experiencing first hand as we moved closer to where the tornado had touched down. It was another one of those experiences in life you can’t fully understand until you’re standing right in the heart of it.
We heard lots of chainsaws singing in chorus, hard at work making sawdust, but we didn’t see anyone that looked like they could use our help. We finally found a house with large downed trees in the front yard so we stopped and asked if they needed any chainsaw work done. “We’re good to go but I think those guys up the road could use more help.” We had passed by that group of 12 of 15 during our initial search for someone who needed help but didn’t have any yet. We were so focused on finding a yard with trees down and just a few people that we had overlooked what exactly that group was working on.
We parked between their fence and the road. We noticed as we got out of the truck that the concrete barb-wire fence posts had blown over. I couldn’t imagine how something that heavy and with so little surface area could possibly blow over in a storm, no matter how big was. But there they were.
We were walking towards the guy who looked like the head honcho to see if he could use two more pairs of gloves cleaning up. We suddenly realized we were standing in front of the foundation of what had once been their house. If there was ever a surreal experience, this was it. Beyond the house foundation, there were two large slabs of concrete where the shop and barn had been the day before. The metal corral posts were all bent in different directions. It was hard to grasp it all.
A guy named Jeff standing next to me told us the story.
When the storm-warning screeches started blaring over their cell phones, everybody in the storm area went into the usual “oh-oh” mode. Over the years however, the storm warnings had become somewhat like car alarms: you get used to hearing them so often you generally end up stepping out onto the front porch to take a peek at the sky, then not paying much attention. This time though, the family went with their gut and after grabbing a few things, headed to the storm shelter at the school where they joined a lot of other families. I imagine waiting and wondering there was something akin to being in a WW II bomb shelter. You’re hoping you and your family will all live through it, and if you do, that your home will still be standing the next time you see it.
When word came that it was finally safe to go back outside, the family drove back to their home. There was nothing left. The house, the barns, the shop, all gone. Can you even imagine how they must have felt seeing everything they owned just blown away and scattered over 20 acres? Their pickup and two cars they’d left in the driveway when they headed to the storm shelter were completely demolished. One of the cars had become airborne and landed right-side-up in the center of a pile of cinder blocks. Another car was upside down with the left front and right rear wheels broken off and nowhere in sight. Every single tree on the property was laying down, twisted and splintered. The main power line to the house was a tangled mess on the ground.
We’ve all seen the pictures over the years, and perhaps felt a general sort of empathy for the strangers whose lives had been so upended. But for me, I’d never been able to really internalize it, it was just so many photos of a disaster happening to a group of poor unfortunate people somewhere. But as Jeff was telling us the story, and we were standing there surrounded by splinters and debris and personal belongings of the family, it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Here I was actually in the middle of it, seeing first hand the disaster and seeing the faces of the family, and I lost it. I pulled out my bandanna and tried to pretend like I was blowing my nose but nobody was buying it.
Jeff told us to dig in, start throwing anything burnable into whatever pile we were closest to, and all metal objects into another pile. Clothes had their own pile. Any other items which had survived, and there weren’t many, were put on a table so the wife could see what was good and what wasn’t.
All day long a skid loader with a claw on front was moving all the little piles to the one big pile. In one area a full sheet plywood was found, with every single nail nearly straight and still in place on 16” centers. Somehow it had blown off in a single piece and landed with no damage. Nobody could figure out how it was even possible, or why it hadn’t ended up three counties away. I’ll be trying to figure that one out for a long time.
Many of the house and barn boards were broken into small pieces 4’ or less in length. Among other things, large splinters had pierced the car widows and body, metal roofing panels, and even went clear through a tractor battery. Inside what had been the shop, 20 or so 5-gallon buckets of hydraulic fluid and used oil had all exploded in the tornado, forming a pool of oil on the cement slab. I found a lizard wallowing through the deep oil with most of his tail gone. I did my best to clean him up before turning him loose in the grass across the street. Oddly enough, I didn’t see a single piece of window glass anywhere on the property, not even small pieces.
My buddy and I had brought some food and water along but hadn’t taken a break to eat anything as long as everyone was still working. At 10:00 most of them went to an open-air church service being held in the remains of a nearby park. We went and got our pieces of pie out of the pickup and enjoyed them with the last remains of our lukewarm coffee. It was heavenly.
We got back to work and a little while later the church group all returned and jumped in again. Around noon, a group of church ladies drove up and started spreading out a veritable lunch buffet on some fold-up tables. Around three o’clock an older couple walked around and handed each worker a to-go box containing fried chicken, a roll, and coleslaw. Chicken never tasted better. Other volunteers brought snacks for everyone. A young lad filled in for Gunga Din and kept us watered all day long.
After lunch I was still piling wood into its pile and metal into another when I came across a little teddy bear. Anybody who can find a teddy bear in the middle of the remains of a tornado-destroyed house and not start blubbering is a tougher man than I am. I knew the little girl was safe and sound, having survived the storm because her mom and dad had the foresight to follow their gut, leave everything behind, and head for the storm shelter. I couldn’t stop thinking about someone that young, having so few personal possessions, losing it all in five minutes while she and her family were huddled in a storm shelter. I pictured her all excited being reunited with her teddy bear, but how was she going to adapt to losing her house and having to start somewhere new? How was she going to cope with it all? Hopefully, she’d trust in Mom and Dad and understand that as long as they were all together, little else really mattered. They could rebuild, they could get back to some sort of a normal, and new dolls can be bought and loved as much as the old ones.
After putting the teddy bear on a table with what few personal possessions could be found, I turned around and saw the mother looking through the pile of torn clothes to see if anything was salvageable. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, I wanted to thank her for letting me help today, and I wanted to wave a magic wand to make it all better again. But I knew if I tried to say anything to her I’d start blubbering again. I’m sure that’s the last thing she needed right then. I just nodded my head and hoped the sad look in my glistened eyes conveyed the message.
About 6:00 that night, the sun was getting pretty low in the sky and the team of workers had thinned down to just a few of us. The church guys drove the 150 miles back home to hug their families like they’d never been hugged before. My buddy and I decided we should probably head towards home. Walking back to our vehicle, we passed the house foundation and the woman was talking to a few people. We stopped and with my buddy doing the talking, thanked her for letting us help today. I pulled out my bandanna again and pretended like I was blowing my nose again. Nobody bought it that time either.
My grandpa passed a faulty gene on to my dad who in turn passed it on to me. It makes the tears start gushing when we think about the three G’s: Grandpa, goodbye, and gratitude. I spent a lot of time that day just thinking about the gratitude I felt for the many times over my lifetime someone had bailed me out of a bad situation. The gratitude I felt while tossing wood and metal into piles that day was very emotional. I couldn’t begin to name all of the times someone had helped me out when I needed it most. The times I needed help so badly I was afraid to even make the call, and when I finally got the courage up, the person on the other end of the line said, “You bet, I’m on my way!” The time as a young family man going to college when one of my children had a serious injury. It required an expensive emergency room visit and a few days later someone stuffed a $100 bill under our front door.
Or the time my grandpa-in-law drove 150 miles to tow me home after the distributor in my pickup went into self-destruct mode and something on the shaft had broken. Even the little things like the time a couple picked me up as a teenager hitchhiking through Minnesota. I found myself stuck at a rural freeway onramp for 7 hours with an empty canteen. They drove me 85 miles and offered to let me stay the night. I thought of the 10,000 little things people have done for me over the years.
I was grateful for the opportunity to help out a family who had been through such terrible destruction, but who was just barely starting on the hard journey that lay ahead of them. While my help that day was a mere drop in a large bucket for them, it did me a world of good. It felt good to be part of the human race helping someone who was in a serious bind. It felt wonderful to “pay it forward” for so much of the help people and strangers have given me in the past. But my contribution felt so trivial in comparison to what that family would be going through for who knows how long into the future.
My buddy and I always do a lot of talking and joking whenever we’re together, and more so when we’re on the road. But on that long drive home, we could hardly say a word. I was finally understanding what the word “numb” refers to. I couldn’t stop thinking of the unfortunate family whose home and destroyed possessions we had just spent the day tossing into giant burn pile! I couldn’t get my mind off that little teddy bear. I couldn’t stop thinking about the church group who had driven 150 miles and put their shoulder to the wheel to show there’s more to keeping the sabbath than singing hymns and praying for the unfortunate.
My buddy and I talked about these things off and on but then we’d trail off again into our personal thoughts trying to understand and make sense of it all. Even now it’s hard thinking about what they lost, but hoping they were the kind of family who could chin up and be grateful they were all still alive and together, that possessions don’t really mean that much when it all comes down to it, and that with a strong family, anything is possible.
Normally my buddy and I would have been thinking about that breakfast diner all during the drive home, but when we got there we drove on past. The church ladies and the other culinary volunteers had fed us well.
While this sort of post-disaster volunteering happens to a degree even in large cities, it’s only in small towns where the majority of the community will pull together and help out those in dire need. Many people were donating directly to the families by handing them money. Somebody probably already had a GoFundMe account set up for the families and contributions were rolling in. Others were no doubt looking at the best dates to hold an auction for the benefit of those who had lost so much in the tornado.
These are the kind of places we want to be if the Schumer ever Hits The Fan. Or even if it never does.
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