Way back when Sandy had first touched down and we were all novices in the natural disaster area, I had conversations with many National Guard troops along Cross Bay Boulevard and eventually at my own door.
Right after they first arrived I was standing and talking with a guard originally from California.
Sgt. Wendell Jackson was informative, witty and compassionate and of all the things we spoke about, I remember this one best. “You will never understand what this has done to you and your community, until you see it happen again somewhere else. Then you will first know what has happened to you. And you’ll know for sure how you managed to get out of it.”
I pretty much dismissed the statement—I was too busy and had too much else on my mind.
But on Monday, immediately after news of the storm broke, all TV’s were tuned to CNN and other news outlets. It took about one minute of footage to realize the implications of what the guardsman had told me and then, all at once, I knew exactly what he meant.
In one flashing moment I was hurtled back to October 29, to those feelings of panic, confusion, fright, desperation—the adjective list could grow longer, more desperate, for pages. Suffice it to say, I remembered everything that happened since then, all at once. I felt sick to my stomach. Every inch of what I had tried to bury was right there in front of me. I understood Oklahoma as I never could have before.
Shattered glass, photos strewn all over—the wind comes and you drop everything to chase after the picture of your grandmother in a bathing suit on a pier in 1935 at the Jersey Shore— What could be more important than that?
The memories that came alive in the faces and the landscape in the town of Moore were so vivid. This was really hi-def TV. The real thing. People had been forced underground in the hopes that their emergency plans would work. Two schools were leveled, one had no basement. When the death toll was officially revised it totaled 24 lost lives, 10 of them children.
One woman talking to reporters outside a pile of rubble that was once her home, had taken refuge in a small bathroom; that had been her game plan for the last 30 years. When it was all over she wrangled from under the pile of debris resting on her. “It was there and it was gone.” She called out for her dog but he didn’t answer. “I know he’s in there somewhere,” she said, pointing at the mound of rubble around her. In that instant, she had lost her best friend.
But then another voice spoke, “Uh, there’s a dog. A dog.” A cameraman screamed the news. The attention around her had shifted to the ground where there was movement. She turned and bent down. “Oh my God,” she called. “Babsy. Oh my God!”
Barbara Garcia crouched down to lift an anxious ball of fur, scrambling to free himself from what ensnared him. “Help me,” Garcia called, “get him out.”
And as she bent down beside the beloved pooch you could hear her whisper, “thank you God, thank you so much.”
She turned back to the reporters “I thought God just answered one prayer and let me be ok. But he answered all because this was my second prayer, that he’d be ok,” she said pointing toward her miracle dog. “Well,” Garcia said, “God answered both.”
Still, other people made the decision to get out of their homes. Rebecca Vitsmun, mother of 19-month-old Anders, is originally from Louisiana and had been told by her husband and other Oklahomans that you don’t leave your house. You put on a helmet and you get in the bathtub. But you don’t leave.”
So as the tornado neared their home, Rebecca obediently got her son’s mattress and helmet and loaded him into the bathtub where she had been told to go. Her husband, Brian, was travelling on the interstate, trying to get home.
She had brought water, some blankets and her lap top into the bathroom.
Then while huddled under a blanket in the bathtub, tracking the storm, she made a split second decision to leave the house. The tornado was about 5 miles away.
“I looked at the screen, and I knew I wasn’t staying. I panicked. I just got him into the car on my lap. I didn’t put him in his car seat and I thought, nobody is going to pull you over for that. Not today.” The tornado was ripping through the county in a northeasterly direction and so she drove south.
“I pulled over to try and put him in the car seat but the wind was too strong.” She drove in traffic, where she felt safe, trying to get back to the house. She thought about her husband—the couple had staved off technology, they did not have cell phones—she hoped he was safe on the road. “If he is back at the house, he’ll think we’re inside.”
She arrived to find Brian on top of the heap of lumber and twisted metal that was their house. “He was up there searching,” she choked up. “Searching for us.” She started screaming “Brian. Brian.”
Her husband came running, they hugged and they cried. “One of our favorite things is whenever we have a group hug, Anders always says “yay.” This time, was no exception. “He was just screaming yay and we were holding each other and crying. It was awesome.”
As the interview came to a conclusion, reporter Wolf Blitzer asked the obvious. “You, your husband, your child—you’re all blessed. I mean,” he continued, “you gotta’ thank the Lord. Is that what you’re doing right now? Are you thanking the Lord for that split second decision?”
Rebecca smiled and stammered , “I…I am… I’m actually an atheist.” And then “But I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.”
And then I realized what Sgt. Jackson didn’t tell me, some people just don’t get it…right away.
God bless Oklahoma.
