What Stands in a Storm (38 page)

The tiny downtown of two-story brick storefronts was damaged beyond repair and condemned. The whole history of the town seemed tied up in those buildings, which would be reduced to a flat place in the heart of town, as if they had never existed. But the town could not afford to demolish them for three years, so the vacant buildings stood, a ghost town within a depressed town, an unavoidable reminder that haunted residents and children peering through the windows of school buses every single day.

On the outskirts of Cordova, Spann and the baseball-dad convoy pulled into the first driveway that looked hopeless. There, a double-wide trailer was eviscerated, insulation spilling out like guts. Nine children between twelve months and fourteen years old rambled about in the dust. Their parents, Tom and Heather Adams, had herded the kids into an underground storm shelter and ridden the EF4 out in safety, only to emerge into the daylight with the blinding disbelief that their home had been torn to shreds.

The Adams family—all eleven of them—were living in a tiny silver Airstream trailer parked in front of the uninhabitable double-wide. Heather had a one-year-old baby on her hip and a two-year-old at her knee, but she smiled at the men who pulled into her driveway. She had no idea why they were here.

James gravitated to twelve-year-old Patrick, a boy who dreamed of playing drums in a band. He was of the age James affectionately referred to as “knucklehead,” and he introduced the boy to his own thirteen-year-old son, Ryan.

Patrick's ten-year-old sister, Adrianna, smiled and squinted up at James.

“Are you gonna forget about me in an hour?”

“No,” James said.

“A year?”

“No.”

“Two years from now?”

“No!”

“Knock-knock!”

“Who's there?”

“You said you wouldn't forget me!”

James laughed. How could he forget?

Spann and the baseball dads adopted the Adams family. Over the following months, they would make trip after trip to deliver food, clothing, cleaning supplies, toys. They got in touch with Habitat for Humanity and started building a home. A big one. It looked a bit like a stable, but that's not a bad thing for a couple with nine kids. They tried to get them on
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
, but it didn't work with the TV show's schedule. They did, however, get the family moved into their brand-new home by December. Just in time to play Santa.

After twenty-four nonstop hours on the weather desk, Jason Simpson had fallen with relief into the arms of his pregnant wife. Lacey and the dogs had ridden out the storm in a neighbor's basement, where a tornado had barely missed them. Simpson's family in Holly Pond finally got through to tell him that the family farm had been hit. The barn was gone and the land would never look the same. But none of that mattered, because despite the many close calls, none of his family had been hurt or killed.

The next morning, he woke up to the dreadful news: a death toll of one hundred and rising. He broke down. His wife, like Spann's, had
never seen her husband weep like this and it worried her deeply. But Simpson did not want to talk about it. Not yet.

“I just want to go to work,” he said.

The station sent him to Cullman with a camera crew to report on the mess downtown. On the drive, he saw power trucks coming in from other states, and his chest surged with relief and gratitude. They were not alone. Others were already there to help. In Cullman, he surveyed the roofless courthouse and the blasted buildings downtown, amazed that no one had died. Cullman had been warned with sixteen minutes of lead time, and people had gotten to safety.

The Sunday after the storm, Jason's and Spann's Facebook pages turned into living message boards for tornado relief. Jason noticed there was little traffic for many rural small towns, so he and his wife loaded their pickup with food and supplies. They did not know where to go at first, but decided just to drive until they ran across a place that needed help. They would not have to drive far.

They found Eoline Baptist Church, the only structure still standing in the little community of Eoline. People were clustered there under a tent, doling out food and stories. Some of them had lost every object they owned. But they were in good spirits, because they knew they could have lost much more. Their biggest need at the moment was paper plates to hold all the food. Jason smiled when he met the pastor overseeing this flock, because it was a pastor from another church in another town, giving Eoline's preacher a break to rest. Jason Simpson's healing began on the steps of that church.

The tornado that hit Eoline had been the same one aimed at his house and his pregnant wife. It was not the biggest funnel of the day, but its impact was profound. Even a small tornado can level a house. Whenever anyone asked him, as they would for years, “Will this storm be like April 27?” he would answer:

“If a tornado wipes out your house, that's your April 27. That's your day in hell.”

Brian Peters was crushed when he learned “his” tornado had killed four people in Cordova. The excitement he had felt quickly curdled into sadness and remorse. But the experience renewed the passion he poured into teaching storm-spotter classes, which left crop after crop of spotters reeling with awe at the majestic danger of the sky.

A few months after the storm, he was attending a weather conference when a young lady approached him with an unexpected question.

“Can I give you a hug?” she said.

He looked at her, puzzled. She could have been thirteen or sixteen, it was hard to tell. A group of smiling family members stood behind her.

“Um, okay,” he said nervously. “Why?”

“You saved my life,” she said.

“I what?”

“You saved my family's life.”

In his forty-five years of meteorology, no one had ever told him that. Suddenly the noise of the conference vanished. It felt as if they were the only two people in the world. He let her hug him, and then he stepped back, wide-eyed.

“Okay, now you've got to explain what you mean by that!”

She and her family had lived in a mobile home near Cordova. When they heard his voice on the radio, they ran into their underground shelter. They crawled out to find their double-wide trailer twisted beyond recognition. She showed him a photograph he would never forget.

Retelling the story would choke him up for years.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2011—BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Chelsea Thrash leaned on a pink cane as she limped across the stage before the sea of expectant faces. She had to walk slowly now, but every step she took was a tiny victory lap, because the doctors had initially told her she would never walk again. Now entering the fall of her junior year at the University of Alabama, she was a highlight speaker of the Trauma Symposium, a gathering of trauma nurses, doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists, paramedics, and emergency responders. She was there to tell her story of waking up on April 27 in the courtyard of the Charleston Square apartments in Tuscaloosa, unable to move her legs.

“My sorority's motto is ‘Founded upon a rock,' ” she joked. “And I was found upon a rock.”

Chelsea had been thrown about 150 feet when the tornado blasted Charleston Square and landed like a rag doll upon a rock at the base of a tree that was now a stump.

Chelsea was taken to Tuscaloosa's Druid City Hospital and assigned the code name “November November.” The doctors there assessed the gravity of her spinal injury—her L1 vertebra had been crushed like a soda can—and called for an ambulance to transport her to the hospital at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. As they examined her in this emergency room, flooded with people injured by the same tornado, the man on the gurney next to her flatlined.

“Mom, what if I don't make it?” Chelsea had asked her mother, Kelle Thrash, as they wheeled her into surgery. Her mother, who also happened to be a trauma nurse with thirty years' experience, looked into her daughter's frightened face, still caked with mud, framed by a mosaic of broken bathroom tiles tangled in her hair.

“You're going to make it,” Kelle told her daughter.

The surgeons cut off the tip of Chelsea's rib and used it to rebuild the crushed vertebra. They treated a punctured diaphragm and picked shrapnel out of her flesh. They stabilized her spine. The operation took thirteen hours.

Chelsea regained consciousness hours later in the Intensive Care Unit with a tube threaded down her throat and a ventilator breathing for her. High doses of antibiotics were burning through her veins, combating the fourteen different types of bacteria detected in her system. A chunk of flesh around her ankle was missing, and a skin graft was taken from her leg to patch it. She was immobilized in a chest brace. She still could not move her legs. Lying there, she wondered whether she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Could she finish school? Would she ever walk again?

She was not able to sit up until days later, in the step-down unit, where she would transition into rehab. It took several people working together to haul her up into a seated position in bed. Her feet touched the ground for the first time since the storm, and she would never forget it. Her left foot felt nothing. But her right foot tingled.

That was the moment she inked the goal into her mind, the promise to herself that would drive her through many excruciating months of daily rehab and physical therapy:
I'm going back to school. In a wheelchair, on crutches, with a walker—whatever. No matter what it takes, I'm going back to school this fall.

The first time she stood, with the help of a team of therapists and a machine that lifted her to her feet, the effort of standing for five long seconds left her drenched in sweat. Then she would stand for ten seconds, work up to fifteen. Learning to walk all over again was the
hardest thing she had ever done. But the tingling in her right leg had grown into movement, and her left leg was waking up, too. She revised her goal:
I'm going to walk into class on August 20.

Her mother filmed her first step, an exhilarating moment of triumph over suffering that was like scoring an Iron Bowl–winning touchdown. Chelsea muttered unladylike things through clenched teeth, but she worked with the fire of an athlete training for the Olympics. Her therapists were like coaches, pushing her through two-a-days to the limits of what they knew she could endure. They saw she was tough, and determined, and rarely inclined to the emotional trap of self-pity. On the days when they saw her struggling deep in the pain cave, they bribed her with whispered promises.

“Chelsea, if you can make it to the end of the hall, I'll bring you a Starbucks from the cafeteria.”

On the bad days, her leg would buckle and she would fall to the floor, embarrassed, annoyed, and sometimes crying tears of angry frustration. Her therapist would give her a moment and say without pity:

“August 20. Here's a tissue. I'll come back in a minute and we'll do this again.”

Between PT sessions, Chelsea watched movies or entertained the friends who came to visit her in the hospital. Her boyfriend had a two-hour daily commute to his internship in Montgomery, but he came to see her every day. Her little brothers and sisters brought her Coke slushees and Disney movies, which took her away from the TV news, a minefield of storm-related images so upsetting that she asked to have the TV disconnected. In the void, her days ran together, the weeks marked by the discharge of fellow storm patients she had come to know through rehab. One day, she was the last one left.

Chelsea got to go home in June, and her parents re-created her upstairs bedroom in a room on the bottom floor. Stairs were still Mount Everest. Her parents drove her to outpatient rehab every day, and she began filling out applications for financial aid, because the fall semester was now in sight. She bought herself a cute pink cane.

On the first day of class, a camera crew followed Chelsea as she limped on her cane into the lecture hall, and students craned their necks to see what all the fuss was about. Chelsea smiled and took things as she always had: one step at a time.