After the Disaster by Tessa Fontaine

Beside me, a staircase leads to nothing but open, blue sky. My breathing is ragged, my feet moving quickly. I pass a fork sticking perpendicularly out of a telephone pole, and just past that, the pile of bricks under which there used to be a red lacy bra. These are the familiar objects of my neighborhood. Any direction I turn out my front door, the aftermath of disaster is all around. I pick up the pace.

It is 2012, a year after a tornado has flattened Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and I have just moved from my nice, intact apartment in my still-intact neighborhood to an area half a mile away—a neighborhood that was, and still is, mostly destroyed. Why would you possibly move there, my friend asked. Is it, like, attraction to a car crash?

I wonder this on my daily runs, as I wave at the same construction crews again and again, as I watch bright red poppies bloom in a perfect row along a walkway toward what was once a house, now just an empty lot. I am on mile three of my looping run through the neighborhood, jogging up and down roads that hug the lake and snake around churches. Tuscaloosa was a college town filled with pine trees and brick houses and reverential statues of football coaches, until those things were gone. 

A few houses down from my own, there’s a cardboard sign on a stick jammed into the ground in front of a pile of rubble. It reads: We will be back! There’s a smiley face beside the words. It hasn’t budged in a year. 

Why are you moving to that part of town?  For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure. 

There is plenty of research on our attraction to disaster. A place to rehearse our reaction to catastrophe without consequence, one idea goes. An exercise in human sympathy, a part of our pro-social behavior, another says. The urban disaster, a favorite landscape of the apocalyptic film genre, attracts us because of its vulnerability, still another idea says. The high-rises, concrete, intentionally-sculpted trees proclaim human triumph over nature. But once they’re flattened, there is no clearer indication of our susceptibility. Everything can be lost. 

The sky was blue, and then slate, and then green. April 26, 2011. I was in class, a graduate seminar on William James at the University of Alabama, where I was an MFA student, when the tornado sirens rang out. We were a little giddy, a little scared. None of us were tornado people. The forecasters had been prepping us for days with how big the storm system looked, how worried we should be. Once-in-a-lifetime kind of storm. But unlike the approach of a hurricane where specific towns and counties are ordered to evacuate, there is no precise estimate for a tornado, no way to say you, get out of town. There’s just the waiting and seeing. 

It was not the first tornado warning in the nearly two years I’d been living in Tuscaloosa. They came regularly in central Alabama and never amounted to much, so I’d carried on with my day as usual: teaching freshman composition, writing, heading into my seminar that afternoon, checking my phone every few minutes for updates—though not, like everyone else, about the weather. 

Six months before, back in California, where I’m from, my mom had a massive stroke. No warning signs, no preexisting conditions. A headache sent her to bed, and by the time my stepdad joined her a few hours later, she was covered in vomit and shit. She was in a coma for a week. We have no way to know how much she will recover, if she will recover, the doctors told us. We always want to be optimistic, they said, and we nodded. But we also want to be realistic, they said. With this level of a brain bleed, most people don’t really come back.

Because there was no way to imagine that, we didn’t. 

When they woke her up a week later, she was fully paralyzed, with no cognitive function or ability to communicate. I was twenty-six.

I have written about my mom’s stroke before, about what it felt like to be in the room with her once she was awake, the ledge of her head where her skull was removed, the bulge of brain still bleeding, how her eyes stared off into space and did not make eye contact, how her hand would not respond to squeezes. I have written before about how her swollen brain, bursting open where her skull had been removed, made me think of popcorn bursting from its kernel. I feel horror at having already written that, printed it, and also at the fact that I’m still thinking about it: half-popped popcorn kernel as mother’s skull. I am still there. I’ve written about all of this before, and here I am again, trying to untangle all that remains a knot.

Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, writes, “go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” 

Her brain as a kernel of bursting popcorn. Her shaking hand in the hospital bed. 

The row of delicate Icelandic poppies planted along a walkway leading up to a pile of debris that had once been a house. 

The storm itself is not what haunts. The ghosts grew after, in the days that followed, in the weeks, in the year where I tied on my running shoes each day and set out amid the rubble. Flying back across the country as often as I could to visit my mom in the hospital. Flying home to Alabama and the wreckage. That is where I get lost. Why did you move there? 

The tornado warning siren was compounded by police sirens, a loudspeaker telling everyone to take shelter immediately. We could hear it from Morgan Hall, where those of us who’d been in class had gathered in a nebulous pack in the central hallway, unsure of what to do next. Someone, looking at her phone, said: the tornado has touched down. 

What I hadn’t known before, not having been a tornado person, was that this was the information you were always waiting to learn: has the tornado kept itself tucked up in the sky, or has it touched down to earth? The former could bring bad winds, the latter was devastating.

We opened the outside door to run a hundred feet in the blasting rain to the next building, which had a basement, and that’s when I saw the sky. I had never seen anything like it. Though it was mid-afternoon, the sky was mauve, a deep bruise over the clouds. And behind those clouds, as far as I could see, green. Pond-green. Patches that seemed almost neon.

It was April, and the fresh leaves and little white flowers from the tree outside were smeared across the concrete. The branches whipped to near-snapping. I’d never seen anything like any of it. I remember that moment so vividly, those few seconds first stepping outside the door, because it was the first time I understood that here might be another disaster.

My main disaster, always, was what was happening to my mother. My family, across the country in California, was always in emergency. There was the current question of where my stepdad would live, after months of couch-surfing between neighbors, since they’d lost their house right as my mom had her stroke. He’d hinted to me, our little secret, that he did not think he would live if she died, once she died. That he did not intend to. She was his whole world, his singular focus. So it was also my job to keep him alive. There was my brother, after all, twenty-one and in college, and it would not do for him to lose both parents. What had happened to my family was mine alone to fix, mine to hold while holding the hand of my mom, tubes in every vein, eyes rolled toward some distant corner of the room while I kept my mouth shut, knowing it was too selfish to beg her to come back. 

In her craft book Body Work, Melissa Febos states that her compulsion to write her first memoir, which was about sex work, addiction, her childhood and more, “was an expression of [her] need to understand what the connections were between those things.” This is what I’m aiming to get at; the connections between things. 

Thirty or so of us made it through the pelting rain and wind into the building next door. We took the stairs into the basement, paced, and then sat down in the narrow hallway on dirty off-white tiles that usually gleamed under the fluorescent lighting. But everything was dark. The power was out. We could hear the storm outside, a story above us. The hiss of rain, and then the moaning of wild wind. 

One person had a radio, and turned it loud for the emergency weather information. The tornado had been in the next town over, but now, the voice told us, the tornado was on the ground right here, in Tuscaloosa. We held hands, our hearts thudding. My friend Jess, petrified of tornados, crawled into my lap. 

The wind was as loud as I’d ever heard. Ashley was calling her husband over and over again. He was home with their dog in the part of town we’d just heard had been razed. He was not answering the phone.

The radio told us it was the biggest tornado Alabama had ever seen. It was a mile wide. No, a mile and a half. It was on the ground. All of us in the dark, straining toward the one radio. It was gaining strength, moving quickly, and then: it was headed for the University of Alabama campus. 

Jess was shaking on my lap, pinching my arms. The sounds above us grew louder, smashing, metal torn apart, a machine cranked to high right above our heads. Cracks so loud someone said: gunshots. I tensed my muscles, ready for the roof to fly off, thinking about what it would feel like to be sucked up into the sky. Wondering how my family would survive a tragedy on top of a tragedy. 

Back home, bad luck compounded. The most recent surgery to try to quell the relentless bleeding in my mom’s brain had resulted in sepsis, an infection so serious we’d had to wear astronaut suits and gloves and masks to visit her, and the only purpose of that visit, we’d been told, was to say goodbye. Alarms screamed, her eyes closed or opened in shock, but without focus. Nurses rushing in and out.

And then she died. 

But that was not her final death.

Later, I would learn that when the tornado first touched down in Tuscaloosa, it tore through the Tamko Roofing plant, sucking a warehouse of nails and shingles up into the sky. So the tornado, as it tore through our town, was filled with weaponry. 

Not long before the tornado, Jess had passed me a little love note. She had also recently lost someone important to her, a friend and former love. The note said we were sisters in grief, going through the same experience, and here was a thing she was doing to help with her grief and maybe I should try it. No, I said to her. Don’t try to connect these things. She later told me I snapped at her. It is not the same, I said. I didn’t want connection. I only had space for emergency, and the only way I knew to survive emergency was totally and completely on my own.

In our underground bunker, Jess curled into a ball, crying, the tornado above us. She was so scared, I thought right then, because she had room inside her to be scared. At first it made me angry, that she had space to be afraid. Then I was embarrassed for her. I was all filled up with grief and disaster and so could sit inside a tornado and wonder, with relative calm, what it would feel like to be suctioned up into the sky. 

We waited, tensed. All of us straining to listen. After a few minutes, the cacophonous sounds grew fainter. But the radio had told us there was more than one tornado close by. We weren’t safe yet. We waited. 

And then someone climbed the steps out of the basement, peeked out to ground level. Tree limbs were down, garbage cans and equipment knocked over. But the building stood. She could see no dead bodies. The rest of us emerged, blinking, into the afternoon. It was drizzling but we didn’t care. Someone put on music. We stood in a little pack between dumpsters, and people started dancing, laughing wildly. Hugging. What I remember is the overwhelming smell of pine, fresh, sharp, bringing me back to a memory of camping as a child and using pine needles to make beds for the fairies I was trying to catch. There were all of us here, alive. Ashley’s husband was ok. Jess had stopped shaking. I hadn’t learned yet that the air smelled like pine because all the trees for miles had been split or knocked down. That the cracking we’d thought was gunfire were the trees snapping in half. That the tornado had, amazingly, lifted its toe and stepped right over us, but that on either side of us, just past where we could see, there was nearly nothing left. 

My mom died of septic shock, but then they brought her back to life. Her brain still bled, her right side was still fully paralyzed, she could not communicate, but she was no longer dead. In her advanced directives, she’d written No Resuscitation. 

We still never really knew what function or cognition would come back, what would be forever missing. 

In the days following the tornado, the list of missing persons in Tuscaloosa alone was over four hundred. We heard stories of severed limbs in people’s yards. Of people’s bodies wrapped around tree branches like old mylar balloons. We heard the dead floated in all the bodies of water in town. I thought about it every time I ran by the small lake a block from where I’d later live, because I’d never heard for sure whether it was true. 

Another of the first buildings to be flattened: the Tuscaloosa Emergency Management Agency. It was made of steel and 18-inch concrete walls, built to withstand nuclear fallout. The Emergency Operations Center, which held much of the city’s emergency rescue equipment, crumbled.

Sixty-two tornados hit Alabama that day. 240 people died, plus hundreds more killed in nearby states. It was the largest tornado outbreak in US history. The storm left scars in the earth so deep, they can be seen from space. Later, I would listen to the recording of a call between a policeman and dispatcher in Tuscaloosa. A bunch of babies are trapped in a building, the dispatcher says to the officer. Confirm your address. I am behind the precinct, the policeman says, and the dispatcher is confused, or growing irritated. Where are you, she says, there are trapped babies, you need to go. Confirm your address, the dispatcher says again. 

I can’t confirm the address, he answers back. There are no addresses anymore.

We left our storm shelter, a big group of us convening at a friend’s house with the sturdiest basement. There was no question of going home to be alone for anyone; we were in it together. When we could find the emergency weather reports, they told us we had a couple of hours to take shelter again before another tornado would hit, this one much worse than the first. We bought as much beer as we could carry, made our way to the house, and when the tornado sirens rang out again, all sat on the dirt and concrete basement, in the dark, drinking, waiting for the worst of it. 

But it didn’t come. This tornado was over. It was one of our friend’s birthdays, and eventually, after enough beer in the dark dirt of the basement, we crawled out into the yard, no lights but a hint of moon glow to see one another by, which told us that the storm had passed. Someone played music from their phone. We danced again.

The morning after the storm, the sun rose like it was any regular day. We emerged from the houses where we’d slept, and in a little pack went to go check on friends, on homes we hadn’t been able to access the night before. All of Jess’s windows had been shattered, and there were tree limbs in her living room, storm water and debris. We helped her pull out what could be salvaged, and then kept walking. Our friends and teachers were still not all accounted for. Trees and telephone poles were down across every road, so there could be no driving. What we didn’t understand yet was that we were still on the roads where nothing much had happened. We walked in a pack, shuffling like zombies. Stepped over downed power lines. And then we saw.

In the pictures I’d seen of storm wreckage up to that point, there were recognizable shapes: houses, their foundations or walls semi-intact but blown over, a car crushed, but clearly a car. What we came upon lacked anything recognizable. Nothing in the shape of a house, a car, a store. 

We began walking toward friends’ apartments and houses, to see if they were alive. One of them, we knew already, had huddled in his bathtub while the rest of his apartment flew up into the sky. But we couldn’t make it to that part of town yet. 

We ran into a frantic woman on a main four lane road. She was walking up and down the median and collecting scattered items, shirts and books and little plastic tchotskies. Nothing felt like reality because we could suddenly see the shopping center a mile and a half away, a collection of buildings we’d never considered from over here because it was all the way on the other side of town. All the buildings and trees that normally block the view were gone. 

The woman was unloosed, muttering to herself. A looter, we whispered to one another, hanging back to keep our eyes on her. We knew to look for the bad guys. The national guard hadn’t yet arrived, though a day from now they’d be lining the edges of the neighborhoods with huge guns strapped across their chests. And a day from now, do-gooders would flood in from surrounding towns in pickup trucks, passing out sandwiches, bottles of water, hopping out of the back with chainsaws. President Obama hadn’t yet come to assess the damage, to say that he’d never seen anything like it. For now, there were just us. 

The woman sat down on the curb and put her hands on her head. “Are you ok?” one of my friends asked, sitting beside her. 

“I don’t know,” she said. Her dark hair was messy, ruffled by her nervous fingers.

“Do you need help?”

“No,” she said. “Maybe. It’s my husband. He died two weeks ago. I had a container of everything he owned being shipped back to his hometown. The tornado picked it up from the storage facility and dropped it here.” We looked at the road. It was covered in stuff. Shoe horns. Loose papers. Foam fingers. A twisted, half-intact metal shipping container.

“This is his,” the woman said, gesturing toward everything.

Our zombie pack started picking up the dead husband’s items. There were a few worn baseball caps near one another. I collected them, walked back to the woman on the ground, holding them in front of me. She nodded. I set them beside her, on a small pile of random goods she’d already begun assembling. We carried on like this for a long time. 

“I just got a call,” she said when I brought over a car seat that was not hers. “Someone found his birth certificate.” I nodded, encouragingly. “In Georgia.”

We kept on with her for a while, helping to box some stuff and tuck it back into the wrecked container. She said a friend with a truck was going to come as soon as the roads were opened. 

We did what we could. It wasn’t much. The road was still covered in people’s lives.

After Hurricane Katrina, countless stories were circulated in the media of looters, rapists, gangs of people who were taking advantage of the storm to steal from others. In these stories, the bad guys were usually Black. I have no doubt that racism abounded in the cleanup from the Tuscaloosa tornado. And also, what I saw, again and again, were all kinds of people helping one another. 

The woman left eventually, and we did too. I’m sure she never got all her husband’s stuff. The morning we met her was likely just the beginning of the real difficulty, except it wasn’t the beginning, and that is the whole point. She was already inside her own private tragedy when the tornado came. 

The critic Rebecca Solnit writes about our response to catastrophe in her landmark book A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she explains that, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.” In opposition to the story commonly perpetuated about looters and violence after a crisis, Solnit looks closely at the way communities came together after five disparate disasters, and how most—not all, but most—people chose altruistic collectivism. This, she says, is the kind of paradise of community that can arise in the midst of hell.

I’m spending time here, on the tornado and days just after, trying to get it right, because there is not much I can write about what comes in the weeks and then months to follow. Because this was the day I walked through my destroyed city with my friends and helped slice a tree into pieces so we could clear it off someone’s house. This was the day strangers began walking up the road from far-off to help, carting their chainsaws and axes, when people lugged coolers of PB&Js in Ziplocs and handed them out to every stranger they saw, this day, and the few that came after it, were the times I gathered with my community in this hellscape of destruction and found mostly—almost everywhere—people working from sunrise to sunset to help one another. I was there too, helping, doing what I could. Then I stopped.

“When will you be here?” my stepdad asked. I’d called him the day after the tornado to let him know I was alive. He hadn’t known about the tornado at all. “When can you be here?” It was all the reminder I needed. I didn’t have space for this new tragedy, for altruism, for community. I was still inside my own private disaster. 

So I left. Flew home to be with my mom, days after the tornado. Probably I went because there was another emergency. I don’t remember now. But I do remember, vividly, what it felt like to take off from the Birmingham airport. Watching the trees and buildings grow smaller from the airplane window, I felt it all the way through my body. All my friends were back in Tuscaloosa, making crock pots of chili to share and sorting through donated clothes and chain-sawing downed trees, all of them there together, helping. There would be thousands of people who, like me, would leave the city while it was destroyed, those with the means to do so, but everyone else would be left to clean up the mess. I’d always thought of myself as a person who stayed to help. But here I was, leaving. The pull of my private catastrophe was greater than this public one.

I was extremely lucky, of course. I didn’t lose anyone or my home in the tornado, while so many others did. But I had many friends who also didn’t lose much personally, who stayed all summer in Tuscaloosa and helped with the relief efforts. I was back in California with my mom, waiting to see whether she could make any sounds now that her trach was removed, wondering whether this next brain surgery would successfully reintroduce the bone plate into her skull. My stepdad was falling apart at every turn, my brother did not come home from college, so I was there, alone, to do the work of keeping everyone alive. 

One friend was out early every morning in Tuscaloosa, volunteering wherever she could, at first just rogue, wandering the streets and helping as soon as she found someone she could help. But then the national guard was there, the nonprofits descended to give order to the chaos, and she volunteered with them. Every day she went, morning to evening. Later, she told me about the overwhelming trauma of sorting through wreckage for so many days, weeks. Maybe she found dead bodies, I can’t remember. She started talking to a therapist about it, trying to process the experience, and as she described what it had been like out there, the therapist started crying. Can you believe it, my friend said. The therapist told me she’d never heard anyone describe the devastation of the tornado so effectively. And what I felt, hearing my friend’s story, was jealousy. She had been a part of something so big, so collective, that her grief was shared.

 This, I think, is what pointed me toward the wrecked neighborhood. This is the beginning of the answer. Why did you move to that part of town?

Then it’s a year after the tornado, and I’m living in one of the neighborhoods I’d wandered through with my zombie pack, trying to help. The roads are clear. The power is on. I take long, looping runs past all that remains of the destruction. The Icelandic poppies are mostly open, their petals papery and thin, a bright red-orange against their green stems and the darker purple bulb of their interior. They are carefully spaced along the walkway, a stem arising every three or four inches. 

The poppies are a marvel to me because they still bloom in such a meticulously straight row. Like the dirt here never got the message that everything above was different now. I slow down while I run past this brightness, wipe the sweat that is always blossoming from the humidity. The poppies’ walkway is concrete and leads to a step that leads to a front door, except there is no front door because there is no house at all. There’s a large, cracked, concrete foundation. Above that, where a house once stood, there is only air. 

There are many beautiful places in Tuscaloosa I could run instead. There’s a path that runs alongside the Black Warrior River, for example, a wide calm waterway with low-hanging willows and brass bridges so pretty that in the spring, they’re clogged with high schoolers posing for prom photos. There’s also wide-open space a few miles away where, the story goes, a golf course had been donated to the city and left to grow wild, tall grasses and little yellow wildflowers springing up where there once had been so much order. It runs alongside an arboretum, and in there, tall, thin trees lose orange and red leaves in the fall that make the ground look aflame.

But I don’t run in those places. I run here, where I’d put my arms around a stranger and told her I was sure her son was ok, wherever he was. I run here, past the family of feral cats, and the glint of something buried deep in the dirt that, on closer inspection, is a button eye. I run past the one perfectly intact house with columns and a gazebo and no neighbors. Beside it, a real estate sign posted on an empty lot full of debris reads: “Gorgeous Waterfront Property!”

There were other factors in my decision to move to the neighborhood, though in retrospect, they were small. My old apartment’s rent was increasing by $25, and Jess, whose own apartment had been destroyed in the tornado while she’d been curled on my lap, needed a new place to live. There was no obligation for me to step in. I was perfectly happy living alone. But she was looking for a new place, and some string that was trying to tether me to something good, to another anchor point in the world, maybe some internal guide pointing me toward what I kept missing in the solitude of my grief said me, I want to live with you, and let’s move to Forest Lake.

A group of geese live in the small lake alongside tornado debris—a dumpster, a crane, unconfirmed dead bodies—a block from our house. The debris stands tall out of the water like it is meant to be there, a statue in a botanical garden. 

Like most of the other houses for miles, the house Jess and I share still has the spray-painted X on the outside that signals disaster. X-codes, they’re called, or search codes by FEMA, and drawn on by first responders. The four quadrants around the X indicate emergency information: to the left of the X, who was in the crew, on top, the date and time, to the right, the hazards found inside, and on the bottom, the number of people inside, alive or dead. 

X-codes still mark nearly every house. Even the houses that have been repaired, moved back into, maintain their X-codes. They’re a sort of remembrance, I think. I saw them in New Orleans, after Katrina. And I will see them once more: near my home in Asheville after Hurricane Helene, during the writing of this essay. 

Back in Tuscaloosa, back to 2012. I run past a house on the corner whose yard is overflowing with flowers: pansies, roses, lilac. The lot looks almost normal, except for the black plastic still nailed over a section of the roof, and its spray-painted X-code. No bodies inside that one. The black plastic flutters in rhythm with the tall blooms as wind passes down the street in strong gusts, common now since there are no tall trees or buildings to block it. In the house next door, the young man who lives with three dogs emerges from his door each morning, shirtless, and practices some form of martial arts on his weedy lawn. I say hello to him when I run, to the construction workers repairing a roof, to the tractor driver clearing debris, to the dozens of lots with no humans but cicadas grinding their legs, and then I run home. Jess will be there, wrapped in the calf-length purple down coat she wore as a robe, pouring coffee. Why did I move to the disaster? Maybe a deeper part of me understood there was more work to be done connecting the threads, that the coming together I’d missed by leaving didn’t mean I’d lost it all. 

It feels too easy, that idea. But I like what it suggests about humans, about me. Instead of the story I usually tell myself about how I was lost in grief and emergency, maybe this story is about unconscious choices acting in service of what I needed to be ok.  That’s a generous idea. The world’s mysteries being answered by some inner music, singing you toward what you need. 

There was nothing I could do to help my mom after her stroke. I stood against the hospital walls, sat on the edge of hospital beds. I held her hands, talked to doctors and social workers and nurses and hospice, but nothing was actually helping. I tried to teach my mom basic sign language and how to hold a pen to write yes or no or thumbs up thumbs down or to nod, anything to communicate—and failed. Time stomped forward. A month of that, a year. Six years. I have written about this before, but doing so has not enabled me to escape this central truth of my life. The almost unbearable weight of witnessing so much suffering. Living inside your own impotence right alongside it. Being there, alone.

A major loss in our own lives often isolates us from community, Rebecca Solnit writes. Nobody else is suffering in this way we are suffering; we are alone in our grief, in our loss. 

Public disasters on the other hand, Solnit posits, usually have the effect of bringing a community closer together. For me, maybe I was still so deeply inside my private disaster when the tornado happened that I did not find the feeling of togetherness that so many did afterward. Or maybe I did for a few days, and then I left. Why did you move to this part of town? When I came back, I was outside the cohesion. Maybe by running to bear witness, I was trying to find my way back in. 

Now, writing this, it is 2024, and Hurricane Helene has just taken out every road in and out of my city, Asheville. All of them are closed, gone. The water is out and power is out and cell service is out and internet is out. I have just completed this essay I’ve been thinking about for years, about public and private disasters, when another disaster arrives. 

This time, I do not have a mother I am traveling back to see. She is long dead. This time, I have a child. She is two and a half, loves to sing, and has just gotten into poop jokes. 

When a single road opens a few days after the storm, we pack our camper van and leave. I have a small child. There is no other choice. 

We leave, and I get my daughter and husband settled at his mom’s house in Tennessee. I take a shower, I drink some water. And then I come back to Asheville, alone. 

My camper van is filled all the way up with drinking water, shelf-stable food, diapers, wipes, pet food, flashlights, hygiene products, anything on any list I could find that people might need. I drive supplies deep into parts of the county with nothing left. I deliver them to the doorsteps of mothers I connect with on Facebook who need size 2 diapers, Similac formula, toddler snacks. I deliver latex gloves, Ziploc bags, cat food. And water, for everyone. I cook food, I knock on doorsteps to search for the missing, I comfort a man whose son-in-law was washed away in the river. 

There’s no heroic conclusion to reach here about the right way to move through a disaster during the emergency or the long tail of its aftermath. This likely won’t be my last disaster, with the way things seem to be going. But I will tell you that for the five days I was back in Asheville alone after the hurricane, from sun-up to long after sun-down, I did not stop moving, driving, stacking, clearing, and each day, many times per day, I thought about the last disaster. I remembered not so much how the land had looked from the departing airplane window, but the feeling of getting further and further away from it. I remembered that as this time, I said yes to anything, feeling my hand graze a stranger’s as I helped peel away waterlogged drywall, as I passed along a box of pull-ups.  So far, the feeling has been simpler. Gratitude, again, for not having lost much myself.  And for getting to be here this time, in the middle of it. With all the other people in the middle of it.