The Tornado, One Year Later - We're Not Not in Nashville Anymore (republished)

This post was first published on March 6, 2020, three days after the March 3 tornado ripped through the Nashville area and carved a path right through our neighborhood.  It missed our apartment building by only a couple of blocks.  

One year on, I am absolutely still traumatized.  I have signed up for every severe weather alert known to humanity.  Last weekend I received the following alerts for flash flooding:  The emergency alert everyone gets based on geolocation, the Weather Channel app alert, and a phone call, text, email, and app notification from Metro emergency services.  Last time there was even the slightest possibility of tornadic activity within 50 miles of my house, I spent the day wearing a bicycle helmet, clutching a bag full of flashlights and chargers, cats in their carriers and a leash on the dog, frantically refreshing the @NashSevereWx Twitter.

Am I overreacting?  Maybe.  Probably.  Would I still feel this way if Covid didn't shut down the world less than 2 weeks later?  Maybe?  But maybe if we had been allowed to heal and rebuild as a community, I might not feel like I'm trapped in amber like that friggin' mosquito in Jurassic Park, destined to remain here until some crusty old scientist visiting from another planet uses me for an experiment 3 million years in the future.

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I used to own a pair of red patent leather flats.  They were brutally uncomfortable but this was a time in my life when I hadn’t yet learned to prioritize comfort.  I wore them constantly at first, repairing the flaking leather with red nail polish, repairing my bleeding feet with bandaids.  Sometimes, on frustrating or boring days at work, I would make sure no one was watching and I’d click the heels together a few times, wishing myself home, wherever home was at the time.  

The shoes traveled with me from New Jersey to Idaho and back to New Jersey.  Then Utah, South Carolina, and finally Nashville, where I wore them exactly once before laying them to rest among the banana peels and eggshells in the kitchen trash.  After 13 years, I had outgrown the shoes. My feet hadn’t changed, but my attitude had. I was done trying to shoehorn myself into footwear and situations that didn’t feel right.  I’d rather look like a clod, but a comfortable one, in my old Doc Martens. I didn’t need those shiny red shoes to click my heels and wish myself somewhere else. Nashville was exactly where I wanted to be already.

I have loved living in Nashville.  More than in any of the many places I have lived, I feel at home here.  I feel like I am in this world, not just peeking in on someone else’s world through a cracked window.   In East Nashville, especially, there are weird people doing weird things, normal people doing normal things, constant sources of delight.  Space for all of us.

That’s not to say that life is perfect here.  Nobody knows how to use a turn signal, traffic is terrible, we desperately need a transit plan, bachelorette parties are a constant source of minor irritation, the rent is too damn high.  But the good far outweighs the bad when I pause to consider how fortunate I feel to live here.  

Sometimes we don’t pause to consider our good fortune in the moment, and it’s only in hindsight that we remember.  I wasn’t thinking much about Nashville at all when I went to bed the night of Monday, March 2nd. I was keyed up from looking at too many articles about coronavirus.  To try to come down and stop catastrophizing, I stayed up a little too late reading, promising just one more chapter, then just one more. I wasn’t worried about getting enough sleep, though.  The next day was Super Tuesday, and my library is a polling location, so I was looking forward to a quiet, kid-free day to accomplish some planning and organizing. I had no way of knowing just how little sleep was in store, or how little it would matter.

Around 12:30, we were roused from a deep sleep into a state of chaos and confusion.  The tornado siren was blaring, our phones were buzzing with weather alerts, police cars and firetrucks wailed as the sky lit up like 4th of July with continuous explosions of lightning.  Then a surreal hush fell as the air went eerily still and the sky took on a greenish tinge. Suddenly, a tidal wave of wind poured in from the west, bending small trees almost to the ground.  Just as quickly, the wind reversed course and seemed to suck all the air back like an ebbing tide at warp speed. It was at that moment the building across the street lost power.  

It was all very disorienting, like stumbling into the second half of a horror movie, all inscrutable plot and disturbing visuals.  We had no place to go except possibly the closet or the interior hallway of our 5th floor apartment. We were unsure what to do about the animals, or ourselves, so we milled around indecisively, foolishly looking out the blinds and refreshing the weather radar on our phones, as if either would provide us with any actual answers.  The animals were strangely unbothered by all of it. The cat seemed mildly interested in what we were doing awake at that hour. The dog, who is medicated for anxiety and fears everything from vacuums to plastic bags, flopped on his back angling for a belly rub.  

The tornado siren eventually decrescendoed into silence, and the weather app downgraded the status of the storm.  We never lost power. We tried to sleep. In hindsight, the wall of wind reversing directions was the tornado passing directly to the south of us, missing us by a mere few blocks.  From our north-facing windows, we had no idea what destruction lay behind us.  

Our alarm clocks sounded, as always, at 5:00.  I stumbled into the bathroom, exhausted and bracing myself for a day of making small talk about the night’s crazy weather with the elderly poll workers as voters trickled in.  At 5:01, my phone buzzed and flashed the school district’s robo-call number. School was closed. I was surprised.

I began looking at photos and stories people were posting on the Nashville subreddit.   I had grossly underestimated the severity of the storm. At first it was just shocking to recognize so many of these places that sustained major damage.  Then it hit me how very close the tornado’s path came to my own apartment building. Just a couple blocks, really. I started to feel ill, and the feeling still hasn’t left, days later.

I knew I shouldn’t have done it, I knew it was wrong, gratuitous, a form of ruin porn.  But I had to see what happened to my community, so I took a walk that morning. I wasn’t the only one, and I suspect we were all there for the same reason, feeling sick and helpless as we gaped at the shattered windows, collapsed roofs, uprooted trees, poles snapped in half like discarded toothpicks.

When you see images of destruction in far-away places, even places you once visited, you feel sadness, sympathy.  When you see it up close in the place you call home, it’s visceral. In less than two years, I have come to consider Nashville home.  I feel connected to this community. The sight of destroyed buildings is shocking, devastating, and yet I know it's selfish to feel the way I do.  In reality, the structures that were damaged or destroyed are peoples’ homes and livelihoods. For me, they were places I appreciated for aesthetic reasons, or places I liked to spend my money.  I am so lucky. I feel so guilty.  

I will never forget some of the things I saw on Tuesday, or continue to see each day now.  I will never forget that doused campfire scent of smoldering dampness coupled with the smell of ozone as if the air itself was still charged and tense.

I saw what had once been a gorgeous Victorian house with the front sheared off, like a horrible doll house, revealing the interior.  Ripped insulation dangled from the ceiling in one bedroom, in another a ceiling fan spun lazily in the breeze. Inexplicably, people were in the house, standing dazed in the exposed 2nd floor bedrooms as if a child placed them there in haphazard poses and then abandoned her play.  What is wrong with all of us that we just had to go look?  Why were we milling around, looking, when we should have been helping?  What could any of us have done?    

The most practical thing we could think to do was to vote.  We found out our normal precinct had been relocated, so we trekked on foot to the new one.  Poll workers and voters were in good spirits despite the circumstances. Four precincts had been consolidated into one gymnasium in a community center.  It was a warm day, and the power was inconsistent. A line of hundreds of people snaked across the basketball court, sweating in the stagnant air. All of us stood and shuffled, shuffled and stood, waiting for over two hours to cast our votes.  Elderly people, parents with small children, pregnant women, no one complained. All of us were alive, all of us still had the future to think about even if the present was bleak.    

The next day, Wednesday, I ventured down the street to a volunteer center set up at the high school.  They were at capacity, so I left and bought as many canned goods as I could reasonably carry and returned with donations.  I was still in a daze. I should have done more. I didn’t know what to do.  

Thursday, I arrived at the volunteer center early, and was put to work sorting donations.  It was something, but it wasn’t enough. Today is Friday, and I will be back out there. Tomorrow, Saturday, we are honoring long-standing plans to volunteer at a food pantry in North Nashville, one of the harder-hit areas in the city.  I know they will need more help than ever. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do something. I’m grateful so many others are helping. I’m doing my best. My best is not enough. I want to scream.

If I still had those red shoes, I wonder if I would put them on and close my eyes and click my heels, wish us back to Monday before the tornado picked up our city and carried us away to this new reality.  Truthfully, though, Nashville is still here, right where it has always been. It might look a little different on the surface now, and carry some scars that won’t easily heal, but the things that make this city special haven’t been carried away in a funnel cloud.  It’s best not to even think about those red shoes. Wishing won’t fix anything. It’s time to lace up those Docs, because there’s work to do.