Day 23… Has it only been 23 days since I started this journey? I haven’t gone anywhere yet, really. I thought when I left my stuff in storage and planned to hit the road that I would feel like I was getting somewhere. Not that I don’t love being out here with Team Rubicon. I guess I am just itching to see what the adventure looks like for me on the road. My plans changed when I didn’t get the position I applied for, so now I am even freer than originally planned.

Today I find myself looking back. My team changed a little bit, but they are still going strong! We finished out the debris management from yesterday. I had a moment today where I stood, looking at the debris pile, with the river flowing behind it. I felt a heavy weight on my heart, one that I only feel when I take a moment to survey the task at hand and remember.

My first flood response was when I was 18 years old.

I was a freshman in college and I sat in my dorm room and watched the news as my beautiful New Orleans was almost swept off the map. I spent half of my childhood there, if you didn’t know. I always thought I would return. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, and the levees didn’t hold. Why are the sad or painful memories the ones that stick with you the most? I sat in my dorm room, sobbing, wishing I could do something, anything, for a town I loved so much. Later, I went to church and I told the Vicar about how sad I was. How I wished we could do something. My dad immediately went to New Orleans and worked alongside a couple of pastors to help the community. I wished I could do the same, but I was in my first semester at college, life didn’t allow me to go. I don’t really recall the details of the plan, but my Vicar came back to me at some point and offered a mission trip over the following spring break for our members. I was overjoyed to know we would be helping. It was, and still is, devastating to think that 6 months after that disaster they still needed crews to perform interior demolition on homes. We were given pre-deployment counseling on the devastation we would see, and how to cope with it. As always I took all of it very seriously.

We went down for a week with a team of 10 or so, we gutted 2.5 homes. We stood in the midst of properties that had been left abandoned due to the flooding and removed possessions that were waterlogged. None of us had done this kind of work before. It was very REAL, that feeling of seeing the devastation. People deal with it differently. Some run from it, some run to it, and others are spectators. We charged head long in to it, tackling the task at hand, because we were going to help these homeowners. Being there was close to my heart, but the others didn’t have a personal connection to it. Often it is easier to not have a personal connection. The work we did blurs together with the work I have done since joining Team Rubicon. Interior Demolition and Debris Management… though I didn’t know those fancy terms back then.

There are vivid images I recall…

They took the sledgehammer away from me because I put it through a wall almost in to a person’s head. I warn against just such an occurrence now with Team Rubicon.

The tall people worked high and I worked low (because I’m not tall…). This led to me being under the wrong section of dried out moldy dry wall that came down on my shoulder, leaving a fist sized bruise that colored almost immediately. I sported that “battle scar” for 5 weeks before it completely went away.

There was the refrigerator that though strapped closed, still opened and everyone ran from the house due to the smell. Thank goodness for Tiger Balm under our nose.

Or how about when Joseph opted to read the N-95 box which warned that those masks were not graded for mold protection? Or we wiped our hands on dirty pants before sticking them inside the chip bags at lunch?

Then there was the home where the debris was piled two feet high and I started to wonder what my stuff would look like if there was a flood. The debris was at the point that we couldn’t make out carpet from books. There had been children in that house, and they had had many toys. Fish tanks that once housed fish now housed remaining flood water and debris. I am trying how best to describe to you the exact feeling of looking at this for the first time…

It’s like when you forget to take the clothes out of the washer for several days. That smell that makes you just want to throw it all away, but you like those clothes, so you do what you need to in order to save them. Even if it means washing them again several times. Except in this case, you can’t wash it out, they are just ruined. Now imagine that it is not just your clothes, but your favorite books, the photo albums of your children and loved ones, the good china from your great grandmother… the feeling that occurs when your heart goes from being in your throat when the storm hit to being stepped on with every step you take. Your skin tingles as you view the wreckage before you, like the hairs are going to stand on end, but not quite, because they cannot quite believe what they are seeing. It is a deafening silence in my head to recall that moment. Though I am sure it was loud all around me. It struck me as heart wrenching.

This particular family opted to not come see us clean out their house. We were told that they had expressed gratitude but it was too hard for them to see. I am glad they were not there; I still recall how high the pile of debris got as we removed the interior debris. In my mind I still see the white siding of the house, stark in contrast to the debris pile which filled the yard and flowed in to the street. About 7 months later I returned to the neighborhood, to see the rebuild work, and to feel that the city was coming back around. No one had rebuilt in the houses we touched, it didn’t appear that many were rebuilding anywhere. I knew that we had done good, even if the homeowners didn’t return. We had taken a load off their shoulders. I didn’t understand it as well back in 2006, but now with TR the process makes more sense, for how the homeowners, communities, and organizations involved in disaster handle things.

So back to the modern day, standing in that pile of debris, I felt sorrow, because someone was regretting having lost that house, where memories were made, and summers were spent. It was a vacation house, which originally made me think differently about it. I realize in that moment today that it was still a place someone cherished, someplace that reminded them of the good ole days and summers on the river.

How often I worry that my sensitivities are being hardened to the sight of pain and disaster. It is good to have moments such as this, to take a moment of silence and share in the sorrow of the tragic event that has occurred. Wanderers, remember that pain and sadness are also parts of life, don’t run from it, accept it, feel it, and then let yourself move on to the task at hand. This is what I did today.

 

Signing off Wimberley, TX