Solid Ground
I visited our friend this week with a trunk full of food. I felt that this was one of the best gestures of my love, as homecooked meals have the dual-action power to soothe a soul while satiating the body. Our friend's farm, forty minutes down the road fell victim to an F3 tornado. I didn't fully understand the Fujita scale for tornadoes until I heard his story and wondered what kind of a beast could turn someone's life upside down. Turns out F3's qualify. What the scale doesn't describe is the unforgettably malevolent roar a severe tornado unleashes when it rips through the land, feet from your foundation. It doesn't warn you that the hellish bellow of destruction will haunt you.
It also fails to express that life will never be as it was before. I suppose I can read between the lines...158-206 mph winds: things will never be the same. Typical damage=severe: the 100-year old barn will be a pile of extra large splinters; the house you raised your family in and which has survived 110 years of storms...a structural engineer will tell you to demolish it and "start over"; your busy spring calving season and the high time for your compost operation will have to take the backseat to insurance calls, unbelievably physical clean-up efforts, and most difficult of all, planning sessions for how to move forward. It'll be a while before you aren't immediately transported back to the basement in your mind every time you survey the landscape. Old growth trees which welcomed you to the property in your youth are gone, others are mangled, the scene is rather like a battlefield.
When our friend ascended from the safety of his basement, in the wake of the monster, he started his new life– a life in a house with an impartial roof and blown out windows. A new life in restoration and metamorphosis. In this new life, one foot goes in front of the other. First comes mending the ceiling, boarding up the windows, and cleaning the muck and broken glass and strewn paperwork and household items in time for the impending rain/hail and the upcoming freezing temperatures and wind storms. The next foot follows with endless phone calling that will continue for days as you coordinate insurance, volunteers, contractors, customers, family, etc. And don't forget the calf whose mother rejected her and who is waiting for her milk, still warming on your stove.
In this unreal, real new life, this guy has an impressively tight grip on his bootstraps and a head held high. His resilient nature beamed when I saw him, days after the storm, navigating the fall out with grace. I can tell that he has accepted reality, a feat of his strength of characer. As he puts it, it's due to his resolute belief in a greater picture. It seems to me that with such a strong conviction, you could manuever whatever may come. Of course what I missed in the initial aftermath of the storm was Dan's mourning of the life before the tornado blew through. Like any goodbye, to achieve closure it's best to emancipate your woes and to pay your respects to what was.
I was drawn to tears myself as I pulled up his driveway, my eyes registering the devastation. We warmed our hands over the stove in his kicthen, while waiting for the calf's milk to come to temperature next to us. A card table overflowing with muffins, sweet breads, fruit and other provisions crowded the room and Dan struggled to fit my boxes of quiche in his fridge as other gifts of food preoccupied the shelves. The full breadth of the benevolence shown by Dan's community far and wide was astounding. A fleet of farmers from Michigan is scheduled to come down next week to help run machinery to dislodge a huge grain bin from the edge of the woods and to clean up more cumbersome debris. A group of 70 people pulled together the day after the storm to help make Dan's property livable and navigable. Someone has offered a camper as a temporary home for as long as it takes to rebuild.
Dan and I made it to his other barn which, providentially, was spared by the storm and which sheltered 130 cattle from the elements. A sweet calf, rejected by her mother, slept soundly in the middle of the herd with a belly still full from the last evening's feeding. As I this little one, imprinted on "mother" Dan, it struck me how stabilizing it is to be needed. If Dan didn't have the calf to check on, and her kin to turn out to the field, compost waiting to be turned, two dogs who call him their best friend, he could succumb to total despair. Instead he rises to the occasion of his routine, relying on it as it relies on him: symbiosis on this broken farm.
The alarm sounded from my phone, reminding me it was time to retreat to Brookville to pick Jack up from preschool. Retracing my tracks down the long farm lane, a part of me felt I was leaving Dan with the weight of the world on his plate. Another part of me had learned that everything was going to be okay. What will be will be, a truth that our friend seems to understand well. The best way to move is upwards with our bootstraps and onwards with our helds held high.
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