What Stands in a Storm (39 page)

On hearing Chelsea's story, the doctors and nurses in the audience rose to their feet for a standing ovation. In the back of the room, James Spann listened and clapped. They had asked him to speak, too, but he had politely declined. It was still too fresh, too raw.

As Chelsea turned to leave the stage, the emcee announced that they had a little surprise for her. She turned around to face Adam Watley, the paramedic who rescued her on April 27. She hugged his neck and burst into tears.

Watley had not known, until someone called to invite him here, that Chelsea Thrash had survived. He had thought that of all the critical patients they rescued that day, none of them had made it. Those three babies he would never forget. When he heard that the girl with the broken back lived, and had even learned to walk again, it meant more than any award. Paramedics are in the business of saving lives, but they often never hear about the fates of the people they save, much less get to meet them. Now, face-to-face with his healed patient, who beat the odds by standing here, he felt the unfamiliar wetness of salty water streaming down his face.

APRIL 27, 2012—CORDOVA, ALABAMA

The members of Cordova Fire & Rescue rose before dawn and gathered in their empty downtown. It still looked much as it had a year ago. Buildings crumbled at the edges. Storefront windows, blown out, had been boarded up. A chain-link fence surrounded the downtown eyesore to keep kids from poking around inside condemned buildings and getting themselves hurt. The trees that had survived were shorn of their branches and looked like telephone poles wearing kudzu sweaters. Places where beautiful homes once stood now had double-wide mobile homes parked upon the foundations of what used to be.

Brett Dawkins, now twenty-two and assistant fire chief, unfurled a giant piece of cloth, attached it to the ladder truck, and raised it as high as it would go. By first light, when Cordova's early birds began stirring, the first thing they saw when they came downtown was a giant American flag rippling in the morning air.

The fire department had lost five trucks to the storm. They had three now and parked them in the high school gymnasium, which they converted into the fire station. They would move later to the former Veterans of Foreign War building.

It was the one-year anniversary of the superstorm, and the town had not been forgotten. Bo Jackson—the Auburn football hero, the Heisman Trophy winner, the first athlete to go pro in both football and baseball, star of the “Bo Knows” Nike commercials—was coming to Cordova. Recently pronounced “the Greatest Athlete of All Time” by ESPN, Bo
hailed from Bessemer, a poor black suburb of Birmingham. And when he saw the state of his state on TV, he wept. He lived in Chicago now with his wife and grown kids, but he still thought of Alabama as home and he wanted to help the state that raised him, that made him who he is.

So he came up with a somewhat crazy plan: ride a bike three hundred miles across tornado-torn Alabama to raise money and awareness. He would lead a philanthropic peloton across the state like some pied piper in skintight Lycra, drawing attention to places forgotten when the media circus moved on. He christened the endeavor Bo Bikes Bama, and decided the route—fifty miles a day for six straight days—should start in the northeast corner of the state and snake through the areas damaged by the storm. Magnanimously, he chose to end it with a party in Tuscaloosa, the home of the Crimson Tide, the bitterest rival of his own alma mater, the Auburn Tigers.

In Alabama, college football is a few prayers shy of religion, and a family containing fans of both the Tigers and the Tide is a house divided. In Alabama, “Roll Tide!” and “War Eagle” can mean anything from “Congratulations on the birth of your first child” to “A curse upon your children's children!” In Alabama, loving thy enemy as thyself is one thing, but loving the other side of the Iron Bowl is the business of Mother Teresa.

Today's ride started with a pep rally at Cordova Middle School, where Bo, who overcame a stutter as an adult, gave a touching pep talk to a sea of elementary school kids waving hand-drawn signs that read
GO BO GO!

It was day five, and Bo was 200 miles into his ride. Having pedaled up hills that don't look all that steep from a car, he was tired and sore and suffering cramps that, by his own admission, “made me scream like a little girl.”

He was not alone in the pain cave. He had recruited a number of celebrity athlete friends to join him: Ken Griffey Jr., Picabo Street, Al Joyner, and Scottie Pippen. None was an avid cyclist, but all made up for their lack of training with their ability to dig deep.

In rural Alabama, folks waved from their porches and from the side of the country road. And for once, the schism between War Eagle and Roll Tide disappeared, and they were all on the same team. Bo nearly fell off his bike when one fan hollered from a pickup truck, “Roll, Bo, Roll!”

Along the way, Bo stopped to talk with survivors, including children orphaned by the storm. Bryce Ferguson, who was ten, lost his parents and sister and sustained permanent brain damage from a blunt force hit to the head. He was now being raised by his grandmother. Ari Hallmark, six years old at the time of the storm, lost both parents, two grandparents, and a seventeen-month-old baby cousin in Ruth, Alabama. To help her cope with the loss of her family, a therapist encouraged Ari to write a book about her story, and at seven years old, Ari published
To Heaven after the Storm
, describing the moment that she looked up into the yawning mouth of the tornado and saw not death but a staircase leading up into the sky. She told of a tall, blonde woman who led her up those stairs, where, behind two doors with diamond handles, she saw her family one last time.

Bo Jackson could not recount Ari's story without tears streaming down his face. “I was so amazed at how resilient people can be after a tragedy,” he said after meeting them. “To be six or seven years old and have it all taken away, that's enough to sink anybody. I explained to them that God has a plan for them; he has a plan for everybody. And when God calls you, no matter what, you've gotta go. I said, ‘Whenever you want to talk to me, you call me. There are people who know how to get you in touch.' ”

At the end of the ride, through donations from individuals and corporations, through auctions and entry fees and five-dollar text donations, Jackson raised six hundred thousand dollars in that first year for the Alabama Governor's Relief Fund, which pays for tornado relief and the construction of new community shelters. He promised to come back every year.

APRIL 27, 2012—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

Four families and their friends gathered around a new house at 31 Beverly Heights. Refreshments were served on the old front door, which rested across two sawhorses. It was the first time since the posthumous graduation ceremony that the families had been together. Newly planted trees were sending their roots into the soil.

Loryn Brown's family had picked a magnolia tree. Will's planted a dogwood. Danielle's chose a weeping cherry. Kelli had engraved their names on stone markers that the families could visit when they wished.

The house had been rebuilt in the fall with a new floor plan, in a different shape. Dianne Rumanek told the builders how it had fallen, and that they were building on sacred ground. On December 7, Danielle's birthday, Kelli placed a bouquet of purple zinnias in the new mailbox and tied on a balloon that said
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
.

Sean Rivers, a musician and a good friend of Loryn's, strummed a guitar and sang a song he wrote for her, “Mind on Tuscaloosa.” Ed unscrewed a plastic bottle of water, took a sip, let Terri drink, then poured the rest on Danielle's tree. It would become their tradition. Loryn's Maw Maw and Will's Paw Paw met and traded memories. Their mothers spoke about how perfect a couple they would have made.

Kelli had prepared a short speech about her friends. But when she
stood in front of the group, she opened her mouth and nothing came out. She stepped back and let the others speak.

Since the storm, Kelli had suffered from anxiety and panic attacks so debilitating that they threatened her ability to live a normal life. Any mention of tornadoes, in news or conversation, would trigger a memory and send her running out of the room to cry and to call her mother or Eric.

Her turnaround began in the parking lot of Bruno's grocery store. She had run out of class after someone uttered the word, “tornado,” feeling a suffocating anxiety. She got in her car and started to drive home, but had to pull over and cry. And there, in the parking lot of Bruno's, she had an epiphany:

Nobody's dying today. There's no tornado coming.

She grasped for the first time that the threat was inside her, not in the sky. Her thoughts were creating the danger.

She began seeing a counselor and learned how to talk herself through the panic, how to catch herself before she spun out of control. It did not stop her mind from racing, and even though she could logically observe herself spiraling into a meltdown, it did not stop the emotions. But at least now she could calm herself down.

What she had learned she paid forward to her patients every day in her new job. She had gained a new level of empathy, and although she still struggled with irrational fears of losing someone close to her, she had learned to manage those feelings. After finishing her master's in social work she was hired by a psychiatric hospital to work with people in crisis. She still panicked every time the weather turned, but now she had a weather app on her phone, and an emergency plan with friends and family.

She and Eric had gotten married two months after the storm, realizing that tomorrow may never come. Eric had had an epiphany while holding Kelli beside the fallen house. When he saw that playing
card facedown in the dirt and flipped it over to reveal the queen of hearts, that was the moment he realized he was ready to spend his life with this girl in his arms. He had felt that the universe was giving him its blessing. Not long after, he proposed with a ring of stones set in the shape of a flower—perfect for his modern hippie. On a sweltering day in July, they got married, barefoot, beside Lake Nicol. They got a small house and a big, happy dog. On the wall of the dining room they hung the old front door of 31 Beverly Heights, a door to the past, a daily reminder to live mindfully today, because tomorrow may never come.

Will's mother still cried every day at 1:15 p.m., because that was the time when Will should be calling. His father cried, too. He had towed Will's truck back home and let it sit out in the field. Will never knew that Darrell had been fixing him up a dualie like his as a graduation gift. He didn't have the heart to do much with either truck now.

They buried Will near his Nana. The family Jack Russell Terrier, Bubbles, fell into a depression. She ran straight to his grave and lay down beside it the first time she ever saw it. They had kept his room more or less as he left it. Jean could not bring herself to clean it up, though she did pick a few of his clothes off the floor. She used his laptop until the screen went out, and his sister wore his clothes.