It has been raining constantly for two
days. This is the beginning of day three and the radar shows a solid
mass of rain storm stretching from San Antonio, Texas to Huntsville,
Alabama. As it pushes northeast I'm sure that it is both helping and
hindering the efforts around Gatlinburg, Tennessee. As I look at the
radar I can't help feel sad for those folks. They need the
rain to not only extinguish the fires but to put out hot-spots. They
don't need the rain as they struggle to get to their homes and
dig through the debris to find whatever of their past lives can be
salvaged.
Over the years I have experience fires
and disasters in many different ways. For some years I was a
volunteer first responder. I have witnessed some horrendous sights I
have no desire to remember nevertheless describe to you. But I do
know that the sight of broken lives isn't greater or lesser according
to the number of people. It doesn't matter if it is one family
huddled together, hanging on each other for emotional more than
physical support or an entire town. It doesn't matter whether homo
sapiens are my least favorite animal. That has no bearing on my
compassion for their pain.
I have walked for miles through charred
forest following a fire but there I found new life and hope. Therein
lies one of the great weaknesses of developed human society. For the
humans, fires, great and small, are a disastrous terminal event. For
the rest of nature fires are a natural cyclical event which bring new
life. Some species of trees, like the giant sequoias and the
lodgepole pine, actually need fire to reproduce. If it is hundreds
years between fires that's how long they wait. This is nature and
all living things, save one, accept it without complaint and may even
turn it to their advantage. Sadly, over the centuries, humans have
worked to remove themselves from nature and such cycles. The result
isn't an improvement upon nature but a self-made chink in our natural
defenses and our natural ability to adapt.
Please don't misunderstand me. I feel
the pain of those who lost their homes and I have compassion. At the
same time the naturalist/philosopher in me says that humans are at
the root of their own demise and such events, as sad and painful as
they may be, are wake-up calls to learn to live with nature, not in
opposition to it. I feel most sorry for those who don't, won't or
can't understand this.
Some years ago a large sub-division was
built on a flat area of northern Alabama near Huntsville. There were
a great many new homes all costing well over $200,000. Northern
Alabama, especially around Huntsville, holds the record for annual
tornadoes. One year, when all of these homes were quite new, there
was a day when Huntsville had some twenty tornadoes go through. Every
home in the sub-division was destroyed. It was as disaster of
tremendous proportion. The people rebuilt their beautiful expensive
homes. The next year - almost a year to the day - their homes were
again destroyed by tornadoes. What did it take two years and
unbelievable pain and sorry to learn?
I don't hang on the news, quite the
contrary, but I haven't heard a thing about Gatlinburg since Dolly
made her marvelous offer and the people were allowed to go back.
That's the problem with disasters. It
is all we hear and, for those of you with television, see until the
dramatic photo-ops and harrowing stories are past. Then it is like
the disaster is over. After all, who wants to see heartbreaking
pictures or listen to tearful descriptions of the aftermath. There is
nothing sensational about that. The media move on to the next scenes
of flames, blood and gore. I have a strong feeling that American
children today have the idea that once the storm or the fire or the
disaster has passed everything is back to normal. In fact, I would
suspect that many adults have no comprehension because the media
doesn't deem the aftermath newsworthy.
I'm sitting here on the main channel of
the beautiful Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway - a navigable waterway
that goes from the Gulf to the Tennessee Valley - sipping my morning
coffee and watching the enormous barges and multi-million dollar
pleasure craft go by and listening to the rain. It is so peaceful
that it is tempting to think no more about what is happening a few
hundred miles away. I have two choices. I can push my thoughts of
the people in Gatlinburg from my mind like a passing vignette, or I
can write a blog highlighting an easily repairable flaw in human
society and remind people that, if we insist upon separating
ourselves from nature, we must be prepared to share the pain of those
who suffer. Gatlinburg's pain is far from over and the work to
recover has just begun. Don't forget them because the media has moved
on.
