Today marks five years since a tornado slammed into my apartment. What was particularly upsetting about this was the fact that it happened one day shy of the two-week anniversary of 9/11. I was already feeling jittery and vulnerable from the terrorist attacks, and then I got a double-whack from nature.
Ordinarily I would’ve been sitting in gridlock on the Beltway when it struck, perhaps even unaware of what was happening (since it cut a very narrow, picky swath through the region). But I’d unexpectedly gotten to work early that morning, so I left the office a bit earlier than usual. Because of that little fluke, I was at home when it hit. I thought it was just an ordinary storm, but then I looked outside and saw leaves swirling in a circle and thought Oh shit—! I frantically tried to shove the cats into their carriers and haul them in the laundry room—the only room without any windows—but they freaked out and squirmed from my grasp every time I grabbed them.
And then it was all over. (I never did get them into their carriers.) I never felt the house shake, never heard freight train noises. I did hear a loud crash (one of the trees falling outside), but nothing else. It was a small tornado, all things considered, but it did kill a pair of sisters on the University of Maryland campus.
I immediately went outside with my camera; the rain hadn’t even stopped falling yet. The yard was full of shrapnel and trees were down everywhere, including in my driveway (narrowly missing my then-brand-new car). The top half of my landlord’s shed was in a neighbor’s tree; the bottom half was draped over the backyard fence. Our fences were either gone or crushed. Only one of the three pillars on the front of the house remained—the other two sailed over the house, over the backyard, and landed in our rear neighbor’s yard. Siding was ripped loose and smacking against the side of the house and part of the roof was gone.
Things were eerie and nightmarish after that. Nighttime in my neighborhood was pitch-black for days, chainsaws were constantly buzzing, repair trucks sealed off my road, industrial-sized fans screamed outside my windows as they sucked the moisture out of the house, fallen trees were piled everywhere, and the whole landscape of the neighborhood changed. After a few days power was restored to the rest of the neighborhood, but the water damage to our house prevented us from reclaiming electricity, so we stayed without power after everyone else’s lights were back on. Moneygrubbing slugs came crawling out of the woodwork, too. Every day our mailbox was stuffed with inserts from dodgy-looking insurance agents and contractors begging us to become their clients. Lawyers stuffed things in our mailbox, too. (But who were we going to sue? Mother Nature?) Our phones rang off the hook with calls from those same insurance agents, contractors, and lawyers. I was petsitting my sister’s dog in the middle of this, and a few days after the tornado I took her to a local elementary school so we could play fetch with a tennis ball in their field. Some little kid walked up to us and handed me a flyer advertising some contractor, then gave me a sales pitch. There was just no escape from it! They harrassed us constantly.
Then I learned that the damage to the house was so severe, my landlord and I would have to move out for three months while the walls and roof were completely rebuilt. Fortunately, I had picked up renters’ insurance three months earlier. Thus began my frustrating whirlwind of dealing with State Farm and a temporary housing agency contracted by them. I was homeless for a week (so I crashed on Angela’s sofa in Arlington), and then I was put in a temporary furnished apartment in a Silver Spring ghetto, where I lived until mid-January.
Anyway.
Lately I’ve gone bananas with my current post-apocalyptic literature-reading spree. Somebody needs to stop me before I yank yet another mushroom cloud-bedecked book off the shelves!! The book I finished last night, Into the Forest, had me gnashing my teeth over how ill-prepared I would be if I were forced to survive after the collapse of civilization. I do have a disaster/evacuation kit that I put together a few years ago (hey, when you live only 10 miles from the White House, and when you’ve been hit by a tornado in a state that almost never gets tornadoes, you’ve gotta be prepared, right?), and I’m quite proud of it, but it’s far from perfect. Likewise, I have a few gallons of water and a decent stash of canned food set aside, but my stores are paltry compared to what I’d need to survive for a prolonged period of time. I need to work on intensifying the kit. However, not much will happen until I’m able to finally buy a house, because my apartment is so tiny, it just won’t hold a boatload of supplies.
Adding fuel to the flames, I decided to torment myself—days before leaving for London—by watching the film Dirty War (about terrorists setting off a dirty bomb in London)—last night, after proofreading a load of manuscripts. After finishing more manuscripts today, I broached an equally-unsettling topic and watched the beautiful and sobering documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.
Hot weekend, ain’t!
song heard most recently before posting: Sister Named Desire—Tori Amos
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