In this deeply personal essay, Tessa Fontaine contrasts her mothers health crisis, a personal disaster lived in isolation, with a devastating tornado in Tuscaloosa, where she lives, a communal disaster with a shared suffering in its aftermath. She ultimately returns to the neighbourhood ravaged by the tornado a year later, maybe looking for connecting and healing.
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.
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.