Little was salvaged, but everything was saved.
On May 22, less than a month after our experience, Joplin, Missouri, endured its own disaster. An EF5 tornado decimated the town, and as I watched the news footage over breakfast, I was overcome by a sickening déjà vu. Hadn’t we seen this one before? Hadn’t it already played out?
Feeling mostly helpless, I thought about all that I still had.
I have a pen, so I will write a letter to Joplin.
My letter ran in a few St. Louis newspapers, warning Joplin residents that as a tornado survivor myself, I knew for certain that “this will get worse before it gets better.” The letter was well received, and for a week I received phone calls from radio stations and journalists throughout Missouri, asking me for interviews about my experiences in Tuscaloosa. I obliged, always willing to open my mouth, though I hardly knew anything. My own house had been spared, after all, and at the storm’s conclusion, when I walked outside to assess the damage, all I found was that there was nothing to assess. We remained wholly intact, right down to the potted plant on the porch.
Yet the people of Joplin had hardly been so lucky, and my letter to its citizens—gloomy content aside—went momentarily viral, enticing Missourians I’d never met to Facebook me, Follow me, and call upon me for answers. Columnists quoted the letter; pastors, too.
“People really love it,” one interviewer informed me. “We’ve gotten all kinds of calls from churches who can’t wait to read it at Sunday service.”
I was the wrong spokesman, and yet I just kept speaking.
I told them that the death counts would continue to rise, and that when the cell phone reception returned, it would only bring bad news. I was no prophet—just a guy who couldn’t shut up—and in an attempt at solidarity, I went so far as to assure the people of Joplin that our towns would be “forever wedded by our shared season of misfortune.” But what did I know of misfortune?
Days later, when the letter reached a producer affiliated with Diane Sawyer’s World News, I was asked for an interview yet again. And yet again, I was happy to comply.
I have a voice, so I must share our story with the world.
The film crew situated me in front of a few leveled houses half a mile from my own upright house. For five excruciating minutes as the camera rolled, I rambled on about “town pride” and “camaraderie” and “communities coming together.” I sprinkled in a few uplifting catchphrases as well, working in “but there will be brighter days ahead” more times than I’m comfortable admitting.
In retrospect, my intentions seem obvious. I was a cheerleader for the living—proof that some of us were still okay. Yet I could fulfill this role only when I refrained from looking at the destruction behind me. Eyes forward, chin up, I stared into the camera and assured the nation that Joplin, like Tuscaloosa, would undoubtedly endure.
Diane Sawyer’s World News never aired the footage. Once again, I had been spared. I had nothing of value to add, and as I turned on the news the following evening, I was relieved to watch B-roll from other people’s stories, instead. I received my message loud and clear: People had heard enough from B. J. Hollars.
If the interview had gone longer, I might’ve described to Diane Sawyer’s crew how my wife and I rode out the storm in a bathtub, our only inconvenience a dripping showerhead. I might also have admitted that we watched a romantic comedy that night, burning the battery from her laptop, while just out of earshot, people cried for help.
“Maybe your town will recover,” I should have explained to the camera. “I guess I really don’t know.”
Marc Halevi was likely equally uncertain of the outcome from his photos of the woman in the surf. Could hardly have predicted the debate he’d spur from what developed on the beach and in the darkroom. Perhaps writers and photojournalists are alike in that we can only seem to find answers in the aftermath. Yet as reporters of truth, perhaps our first responsibility is simply to tell it, to scribble and to click. When we start down the path of parsing what portion of truth we feel obligated to tell—abridged or unabridged—perhaps we do a disservice to our readers and viewers. Simply put, reporters of truth (be it through words or pictures) are bound to a different set of rules than fiction writers and illustrators. We work at a disadvantage because we don’t create the stories, nor are we capable of divining their endings. In nonfiction, “happily ever after” is always a possibility but never a guarantee, though this in no way diminishes our need to recount these stories regardless. “The truth is in the telling” (or so the adage goes) and as a writer, it is my job simply to tell it.
At least that’s what I thought in the moments before all my self-righteous rules went out the window.
You see, less than forty-eight hours after I completed a draft of this essay, a young man drowned in the river behind my house. As I began my first early morning jog in my new town I noticed a bevy of police officers and rescue personnel peering into the river. To my right, a boy in a still-wet swimsuit leaned over a car’s driver’s-side window to share news with the girl inside. I overheard what I could while jogging past, though in truth, I didn’t hear much.
The story revealed itself later: How the young man and an acquaintance attempted to swim from the nearby island back to shore. How the pair became separated in the dark water. How one made it back but one didn’t.
No telephoto lens captured anything.
No lifeguards were called in to assist.
The next morning, my wife, dog, and I walked the riverbank directly across from that island. We were not looking for a body, but we found one—a middle-aged man tromping his way through the brush. I asked him if there had been any updates on the search, to which the man replied that no, they had yet to find his nephew.
“Nephew?” I asked.
For the next ten minutes we spoke with the victim’s uncle, and he told us many things that I will not repeat here.
Perhaps a better writer would repeat them, would take my earlier advice and simply “tell it” via scribble and click. But for me, the story—still ongoing—isn’t yet ready to be told. Or at least I’m not ready to tell it. There is nothing to save, only something to salvage, and what good can words possibly do?
Let the body first be pulled from the river, I think. Maybe I’ll tell it then.
Dispatches from
the Drownings
1.
It is our first night in a new town and we sleep soundly. Brush teeth, crawl beneath sheets, and listen to the crickets just beyond the bedroom window. There is a river beyond the window, and in that river, a boy. A boy who—we will learn the next day—has the river inside of him, too.
2.
Our lives begin in the water. In utero, a fetus relies solely on its mother’s water-based womb. Oxygen is not yet introduced through the fetal lungs, but through the umbilical cord—a more direct route. Nevertheless, with the snip of the scissors, this route closes for good. Dear Child, if you wish to live, you must try to trust your lungs . . .
3.
On the third day, God divided water from earth and two days later he filled them. “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures,” he cried, “and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Despite his miracle, God’s work remained incomplete. On the sixth day God created humans, endowing us with lungs and free will. Sixteen hundred years later, he drowned us like dogs in the Flood.
4.
As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, thirty-eight dogs were drowned in the name of science. Professor E. A. Schafer of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society held them beneath the water to gain insight into how life leaves a body.
5.
Holocaust (n.): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, esp. caused by fire . . .
6.
Since God chose water, do we call it a mass execution instead?
7.
French royalists were no strangers to mass executions. In 1793–1794, those loyal to the cro
wn were often condemned to death by drowning. By year’s end, revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier had water on his hands. In the city of Nantes, he ordered the drowning of an estimated four thousand royalists in the Loire River. Carrier dubbed the Loire the “National Bathtub”—a nod to the guillotine, which was dubbed the “National Razor.”
8.
Others, too, had water on their minds. When man could not decide if a witch was a witch, the witch was hurled into the river. The tests were always conclusive: the innocent sank while the guilty stayed afloat.
9.
In Archimedes’s book, On Floating Bodies (250 BCE), the founder of hydrostatics notes, “Any body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid experiences an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.” Translation: Anybody smaller than the body of water in which the body is placed is capable of floating. Translation: Adherence to the principles of science may be an admission of witchcraft.
10.
By the eighteenth century, drowning victims were not treated with hands clasped in prayer, but hands clasped to a chest. Though resuscitation seemed like witchcraft, God himself had given us the clues. In Genesis, he breathed life into Adam’s nostrils, and humans took careful note.
11.
On December 14, 1650, Anne Greene—sentenced for murdering her stillborn child—was hanged in Oxford, England. She refused to die. Greene’s friends tugged on her dangling legs to hasten Death, but Death refused to be hurried. When at last it was believed that Death had taken mercy on her, Greene’s body was placed in a coffin. But even there she retained a spark of life. In an attempt to extinguish it, a merciful man struck her hard on the chest, but the blow only served to further restore her. Let the record show that they could not kill Anne Greene, despite their best efforts. However, this incident was not viewed as the world’s first successful resuscitation attempt, but as a miracle. It was God’s hand—not the merciful man’s—that was credited with saving her life.
12.
Yet men wanted credit as well. In 1767, citizens and physicians in Amsterdam created the Dutch Society to Rescue People from Drowning. Their mission: to promote resuscitation in drowning victims. Their primary promotion involved awarding medals to those who saved a life. The medals depicted a cloaked woman with a hand clutching a drowned man. Yet it is the cloaked woman’s other hand that matters, the one that halted the scythe-wielding Death like a stubborn crossing guard.
13.
On November 16, 1793, the crossing guard was nowhere. And so Jean-Baptiste Carrier shoved ninety priests into the National Bathtub. Death gorged on eighty-seven of them, but nowhere in his expanding waistline could he find room for the remaining three. Miraculously, the three priests floated downriver and were rescued by a warship. The ship’s captain provided the priests with drink and blankets; they had been brought back to life. The following day, the priests were returned to Jean-Baptiste Carrier; they had been brought back to Death.
14.
A year old now, my son knows that when the conditions are right, bath time can be fun. These conditions include warm water, “No Tears” shampoo, and his trusty rubber duck. Other conditions: It is not November 1793. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is nowhere to be found.
15.
On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley and a pair of Englishmen set sail from Leghorn to Lerici in the schooner Don Juan. Prior to boarding, Shelley supposedly spotted his doppelgänger warning him against the trip. Shelley ignored him and drowned. How are we to interpret such an act? As a premonition? As prophecy? Or as some mythmaker’s attempt to allow Shelley to perish poetically?
16.
Josef Mengele—also known as the Angel of Death—allowed no one to perish poetically. The Nazi doctor who’d busied himself tearing hearts from Jewish bodies found one day that he could not control his own. It beat for the last time while he was out for a swim off the coast of Brazil in February of 1979.
17.
Who are the victims of drownings? They are not all Nazi war criminals. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are mostly males and minorities. “The fatal drowning rate of African American children ages 5–14 is almost three times that of white children in the same age range,” the CDC notes.
18.
These statistics prove particularly true if you are a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till in 1955. He was drowned in the Tallahatchie River—though only after he was beaten and shot and weighed down in the water by a cotton gin fan barbwired around his neck.
19.
I’m elbow-deep in my soapy sink when my wife says, “Thanks for doing the dishes.” When I don’t respond, she reminds me that she prepared dinner, that this is our arrangement. “I know,” I say. “I’m not complaining.” She says I look grumpy, and I tell her I’m not even thinking about the dishes. “Are you thinking about drowning?” she asks. “Of course not,” I say, but what I’m thinking is I’m always thinking about drowning.
20.
When we speak of the river, we often speak of it in human terms. The river is rough. Dangerous. Unforgiving. The river is brutal and cruel. Emmett Till’s murderers were also all of these things, as well as innocent—at least according to the all-white, all-male jury in that Mississippi courtroom in 1955.
21.
You know this story by now. How I was out for a jog in July when I spotted the police car pulled to the side of the road alongside the river. How I observed the people gesticulating toward the water, and since I was curious—not to mention breathless—I used the distraction as an excuse to momentarily rest. I paused just long enough to overhear an officer say that the boy was believed to have drowned. That was the moment I picked up my pace. The moment I learned I knew nothing of breathlessness.
22.
Shelley’s body was burned beachside in August of 1822. Overseeing his departure were his friends: Lord Byron, Edward Trelawny, and Leigh Hunt. But Shelley’s boatman, Edward Williams, was the first to burn. As he did, a grief-stricken Byron turned his attention to the sea. “Let us try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends,” Byron challenged as he charged into the water. After a few strokes he was driven back by cramps.
23.
We can only speculate what masterworks Shelley might have written had he heeded the advice of his doppelgänger. Or at least the advice offered in a 2012 article from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Learn to swim.”
24.
In 1892, I. D. Johnson’s A Guide to Homeopathic Practice provided information on how best to save a drowning victim. “Now, with one hand upon the back and the other upon the abdomen, press gently for about two seconds,” Johnson explained; “then turn the body well upon the face, and repeat the pressing as before; in this way strive to induce artificial respiration by the alternate pressure upon the abdomen and rotation of the body.”
25.
When I think of putting pressure on a body, I think of Josef Mengele.
26.
But let us not overlook the Romans. How in Rome, if a man was found guilty of murdering a family member, he could be sewn into a sack with any number of live animals—cock, viper, ape—and hurled into the unforgiving water.
27.
Which begs the question: How many apes were available for drowning in ancient Rome?
28.
Which begs the question: What is the Lungmotor? “The LUNGMOTOR,” explained the 1920 pamphlet, “is a simple and an easily understood device—always available—It is worked by hand—It can always give air, the kind you use everyday . . .”
29.
But what is it really? It is a pair of air pumps connected to a tube that is snaked down the victim’s throat. It is a siphon of sorts, sucking the unwanted water up and out. “One of the great features of the LUNGMOTOR is the ease of operation,” the pamphlet explained. “Anyone can operate the device . . . All the operator does is set the pin to the approximate size of the victim, cleanse mo
uth, pull out tongue, apply mask, and operate the device. Simple, isn’t it? Nothing to watch but the patient.”
30.
Simple, isn’t it? Mengele thought as he conjoined the twins. Nothing to watch but the patient.
31.
Simple, isn’t it? Schafer thought as he drowned the dogs. Nothing to watch but the patient.
32.
Simple, isn’t it? Carrier thought as he drowned the priests. Nothing to watch but the patient.
33.
It is a misconception that when water enters the lungs of a drowning victim the lungs themselves drown. In fact, when the lungs are removed from a drowning victim and placed in water, the lungs remain buoyant. They float. What can this be but witchcraft?
34.
Water, sometimes, is a source of relief. If you are thirsty, for instance, or uncomfortably warm. It was a relief, also, for the boy at the summer camp whose body refused to bend. Brain damage kept him rigid, so I propped him against my chest in the lake—held him as close as I’d ever held anyone—and we rocked there, allowing the water to turn us weightless.
35.
The water burned from Shelley’s body in the pyre. Bones cracked in the heat, brains boiled, and as Shelley’s boatman burned, Lord Byron retreated once more to the sea. Took his walrus frame and just swam and to hell with the cramps. While Byron floundered, Trelawny claimed to have kept the vigil himself, later providing the primary account of the remains of Shelley’s remains. “The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull,” Trelawny wrote, “but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire.”
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