Snakes in the Trash: Adding Insult to the Injury
My mom, sister, and I drove around New Bern yesterday, taking turns naming people we know who lost everything– family friends, personal friends, the children and parents of friends. My sister occasionally interjected with the name of someone who had to be water-rescued.
Riding through various parts of town, I was struck by the layers of destruction. The water has receded, and if it weren’t for the mountains of debris and people wearing masks as they came and went through doorways, much of the scene would look fairly typical. It wouldn’t be until you stepped across those thresholds yourself that you would witness the internal scarring of home after home.
Hurricanes evoke mental images of the flattened houses in south Miami-Dade County, Florida after Andrew. We picture the terror of Category 5 winds with roofs flying through the air and the metal tumbleweeds of gas station awnings. These are what make for dramatic video.
The flooding of a city is stop motion. The storm surge. Water rescues. The rain. The rivers cresting. The mold. One calamity after another, while residents hurry up and wait for the next shoe to drop.
I tried to take in the reality of what I was seeing. Even my mother, who lives in New Bern, was shocked to see the condition of neighborhoods that had not been featured on the news. The flooding was too extensive to be universally newsworthy. We drove past the houses of my childhood, which appeared to have fared ok, though the first house has felt the passing of time more than any hurricane.
Many parts of the city really do look normal, other than mobile response units, supply distribution sites, and the roadside advertisements for contractors that overshadow campaign signs. But then you look down a side road or turn a corner where the land is a little lower, a little closer to the river, and you see it — people’s houses turned inside out, their belongings and the internal guts of houses standing sentry at the edge of the street.
Here are some photos my mom and I took from the car. They include downtown New Bern, the neighborhood where I grew up, a childhood friend’s house, Trent Woods, and River Bend.
Residents are searching for long-term housing in a city that has little available. My sister came across a request for family DVDs at the West New Bern Recreation Center, which is currently housing around 80 families. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a useless disaster-rubbernecking tourist in my hometown, so, we went shopping for DVDs, toys, journals, games, and activities for kids.
Downtown, which served as the on-location site for many news reports, appears back to normal as you drive through. But when you get out of your car and browse the sidewalk sales, you realize for some stores, the sidewalk is all they have. Sales of “hurricane touched” goods are a bargain hunter’s dream if you don’t mind wiping dirt off of discounted sunglasses.
My mom’s office, which was expected to take on several feet of water somehow remained dry. The working theory is that the docks that washed up against the building acted as a dam, blocking the worst of the onslaught.
The annual Chrysanthemum Festival is still happening next weekend — trucks carrying disassembled rides are already parked in riverfront grassy fields that were inaccessible and unrecognizable two weeks ago.
Even BEARon Von Graffenried is back at his post, standing in silent judgment of us all.
This normalcy intersecting devastation is jarring, but the only way to a new normal is through.
I was going to segue beautifully into political and social commentary but decided to give readers an off-ramp, if you were just here for the hurricane discussion.
Many of the women I know are living their own internal stop-motion emotional flooding right now. If you aren’t paying attention, maybe you wouldn’t notice. But if you look, you’ll see piles of debris as women turn themselves inside out to assess and clean out memories that have grown moldy over time. We are putting it all out on the curb, in hopes that those in charge will give a flying fuck. So far, they don’t seem to. We aren’t surprised, but it still hurts to be told we are not as important as the rich white dude’s career.
In the landscape of 2018, I’ve managed to compartmentalize the outside world through my own privilege and a shit ton of other things to worry about. Last week, the compartment was breached. Again. Cracks formed in my walls and the swamp water got into my brain. I think we all keep reaching various tipping points and then trying to stabilize. But the GOP just keeps kicking our feet out from under us.
Women have been grabbing at threads of confidence woven with vulnerability to share their stories, only to be told that they did not remember the chosen details of their personal storms well enough to be believed. We’ve been dodging straw men and red herrings all week. I challenged my readers to think of their own most traumatic experiences, sexual or not, and consider the details of memory. Any past event could be called into question if you go that route, yet it’s only when women finally lay bare the memories they’ve been carrying in patriarchal shame that it suddenly becomes relevant to measures of honesty.
Quit looking for the dramatic storm video and just listen. Believe people when they tell you what they’ve been through. Understand that just because you can’t see the internal damage, it doesn’t mean the storm never happened. The debris is being stacked along the metaphorical roadside for all to see.
For once, climate change is a good thing, so help or get out of the fucking way. And don’t forget to check your voter registration.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch the first female Doctor take on some aliens with force and compassion, like the badass she is. Like we’re all going to have to be.
