“Many of the people who died were in basements, doing exactly what they should have done,” the man at City Hall told me. He paused, then added, “My aunt died that day.”
An EF5 tornado had ripped through the small, rural town of Parkersburg, Iowa four-and-a-half years earlier; all the homes, businesses, and trees had been obliterated into tiny pieces of debris. Grass and soil had been scoured from the ground. Fully-anchored basement walls had been shaken and cracked, and cars had been mangled into unrecognizable frame-balls. The sheer violence of the winds has made it frequently placed near the tops of lists of the most powerful tornadoes, and therefore most powerful winds, in recorded history.
A young police officer took me to the town high school to take photos from the school’s roof. From there, you could see an eerie line that divided the new, post-tornado construction from the original, mid-19th century midwestern homes and towering oak trees. The tornado had erased the visual history of half of the town. The brutal line was one you could almost step across, walking between past and present.
Having recently returned to the States from a year in southern China, I was struck by a strange form of reverse-culture shock walking through the midwestern high school, which was quite similar to the one I had graduated from a decade earlier. Sudden pictures from somewhere in my unconscious flashed back through my brain: the girl I sat behind in Spanish class that I wasn’t brave enough to ask out, buying doughnuts and Gatorade at the Eagle supermarket before soccer practice, a recurring dream of forgotten locker combinations, a friend Jenny driving while smoking out her window as we listened to a mixed cassette tape of punk music I had made.
The policeman, sporting a short, blonde crew cut, had been a high school football player, and had only graduated six or seven years prior. He was married with a young daughter, a fact I could not imagine for myself at the time, despite the fact that I was a few years older than he was. However, there was something in him that only many years later I recognized as a contented, sage form of attainment – a place in life that back then I thought I was beyond, but was in fact behind. His patience was soothing, and with curiosity he helped me set up my large format camera, although he answered questions in one-word answers with little elaboration. The officer had been there during the tornado. And he had been there as the town and community incrementally rebuilt itself, over the hours, days, and years since. I was reminded of the rare kind of friend who rarely speaks and seldom is the center of attention, but who you know immediately comes to offer help without the slightest hesitation or question when you urgently need it.
Two days and 1,200 kilometers after I was in Parkersburg, I would meet up with a beautiful friend of mine, a truly sweet soul that everyone had had a crush on in high school. We caught up, watched a soccer match, and I took photos of her talking on the phone on the balcony of her apartment. It would be the last time I ever saw her; nine years later she would drink herself to death, alone and nearly unrecognizable. I would be on the other side of the world, offering no help at all.
By the time I had packed up my cameras in Parkersburg, it was late afternoon. I left the town on a rural county road, surrounded by vast, beckoning cornfields, on my way to California. Just before dark, the vast Nebraska border emerged, with windmills and sparse traffic on the highway lit by a brilliant, breath-taking sunset over the openness of the great plains. I tried to take a photo while flying down Interstate 80, but managed only to capture the edge of the horizon through the dashboard of my van.
That night I stayed in a forgotten motel on a random exit of the highway. Being on the road was the only place I ever thought I could find myself, but I only felt lost listening to the rising and falling hum of cars going past on the interstate.