Fire and Rain

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.