You Are Here: Recovering From Twisters in Rural North Carolina

Across the road at Askewville Baptist, the Rev. David Crumpler asked if I’d seen the field. When I said I had, he told me, “Well, that field used to be a trailer park.” A silver-haired, trim-mustached man from Alabama, he’d spent all day supervising the handing-out of relief supplies. He marveled that of a dozen or so single-wides, almost all of them were empty when the tornado struck the park. Only two were occupied. Those two were spared. The rest were gone.

“That’s lucky,” I said.

“That’s God,” he said.

He had other stories of people who’d narrowly escaped, who should’ve been home but weren’t. He saw meaning in it. The people who worried him most were the ones he couldn’t locate, those at the very bottom, the trailer renters, families with no insurance and no phone number. Those people tend not to sign up for aid, he said. They just disappear. “We’re trying to find them.”

The tornadoes of April 16, 2011, killed 24 people in North Carolina, fully half of them in a tiny strip of rural Bertie County. Two weeks later, it was the banality of recovery, that thing our species has that makes it possible for us to go on, the way we can undergo horrors then wake up and get on Facebook. All the obliterated houses had been backhoed up into neat piles that looked not unlike the brush piles in some of the fields, except that these stank of rotten refrigerators and had bent metal sticking out of them. They creaked in the wind.

Fifteen miles northeast, in Colerain, Carolyn Rankins stood staring at the forest across from her godmother’s house. To call it a forest anymore seemed obscene. It was acres of matchsticks. This was on Morris Ford Road, where four people died, three of them down the lane at a group home for mentally handicapped people. There it depended where your room was, if you lived or died.

Carolyn was short and young, with dark skin and multicolored braids that she wore tied up into a loose knot behind her head. She talked about Peggy Leary. “Miss Peggy’s trailer was right there,” she said, indicating the next-door lot, where only a small concrete slab, like a grill patio, suggested the presence of some vanished structure. “This was a whole neighborhood,” Carolyn said in disbelief, “50, 60 years old!”

Miss Peggy was sleeping when the tornado came roaring up across farmland from Rosemead. It picked up her trailer and dashed it into the woods at some unthinkable speed, with the same wind that snapped the trees in half and sheered off the bark. Even so, her neighbors believed that she had survived the initial event. They thought they heard her crying in the night, but no one could find her. I was taken aback, thinking surely they hadn’t tried hard enough. If they could hear her voice, they might have reached her. Not until we went farther along the edge of the damage and saw how much of the forest had been lain waste did I understand how impossible it must have been, a nightmarish game of pickup sticks, with thousands of spiky trunks and limbs, and you’re trying to clamber through there in the pitch-black, after the storm, with the wind carrying the sound around. And after a while they couldn’t hear her anymore, she stopped crying. In the morning the fire department cut their way through to her, with chain saws. It was too late. Indeed, her body was hurt so badly, it was unlikely she’d ever made a sound. They were hearing things.

“That’s where Squirrel stayed,” Carolyn said, pointing across a small pond. Squirrel wasn’t his real name, she assured me, but she didn’t know his real one. He had survived, but his trailer was gone, lost in the blast thicket. Worse, he’d been unable to find his dog.

It came trotting back a week after the storm, while they were out picking through the wreckage. They found some rope and tied it to something heavy. Somebody called Squirrel. He left his job and raced over in his truck. “My dog, my dog,” he said over and over, embracing the animal. Carolyn grinned widely, telling about it. “He was so happy,” she remembered. “He kept saying: ‘I don’t care about my house. I don’t need a house. I got my dog, man. I got my dog.’ ”