My Hometown

It just doesn’t feel right to post about books on a day when my dad woke up with no roof. He and the rest of my immediate family live in Joplin, Missouri, which was devastated by a tornado on Sunday evening. At the time that the tornado twisted its way through the town, I was at Sushi Yu on 181^st Street, trying to explain to the woman behind the counter that I had only ordered one shrimp-tempura roll, not two. Jonah put his hand in the goldfish bowl. “Come on, buddy. You know better than that," I said.

At that moment, my dad was huddled in a closet as the wind scattered his belongings across the rapidly disappearing neighborhood. “It was amazing, Kirb,” he said in a spotty cell-phone conversation much later that night. “One minute it was just raining, and the next thing I know, all of my windows are shattering. It sounded like lightning. I tried to open the garage door, but the wind was holding it shut, so I got into the closet.” Five minute later, he re-emerged and found that he was now a part of the sometimes-not-so-great outdoors. “That beautiful picture of my mom and dad,” he said. A gold chain on the kitchen counter remained exactly where he had left it. The hummingbird feeder in the backyard swayed in the wind.

I had heard the news from my mom, who happened to be in West Virginia at the time and who had received a call from her brother, who lives in one of the Carolinas. “Looks like a tornado hit Joplin pretty good,” he said. “Everyone OK?”  Their mother, my grandmother, is in a nursing home there. “I don’t know,” she said.

In New York, you live your whole life hoping to avoid the cover of the Post. In the Midwest, you don’t ever want to be the lead story on the Weather Channel. They were live, cars stacked on top of one another in the background, pyramid-style, like it was a piece of modern art. They were in front of St. John’s hospital, where we used to get chased by the security guards for skateboarding in their parking garage and where a patient was rumored to have been sucked right out of a window during the storm. As was true with most of the images I scrutinized online that night, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at. Reference points had blown away. At St. John’s, the windows all looked to be broken, giving some credence to the story about the patient being vacuumed out, and there seemed to be some smoke billowing from somewhere. In general, though, the pictures just failed to capture it. From one angle, Joplin High, where I went to school, didn’t seem so bad; from another, it was rubble.

That the Weather Channel had descended spoke to the size of the story, but the real information was being disseminated on Facebook. With cell-phone reception knocked out in the immediate aftermath, Facebook was the most effective way to check on friends and family. I followed the unfolding narrative by feverishly refreshing my screen. “I’m OK but Joplin is destroyed,” read one early post from a good friend. “Just visited South Joplin,” read another. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Ex-pats like myself urged family to check in when they could. I stayed up to date through a series of exchanges with my 14-year-old niece. “Dad is OK, but not sure about PaPa,” she said before we tracked him down and learned about his house. “Attention Joplin,” announced one popular post, “Walking wounded go to Memorial Hall. Critically injured go to Freeman. Repost.” One friend admirably managed some humor from Lawrence. “Glad your cutie patootie is still, um…alrigty-rooty,” read his message to another friend. Yet another friend in nearby Carthage offered her house to people who needed a place to stay.

A kind of roll call developed where people logged on if only long enough to let others know that they were OK. I kept a mental checklist and ticked off names when they called out their virtual number. As the night wore on, I noticed that an ex-girlfriend had remained silent. I had stayed in touch with her pretty well over the years but had no idea where she lived. She had recently moved to a new house and talked a lot about her garden. I checked her profile. There were a host of messages wishing her well. Her profile picture was of her and her son. For a split second, I imagined the worst. “Please don’t be dead in a tornado,” I said to no one in particular. Minutes later, a note appeared: “We are OK.” I went to bed.

As anyone who knows me even a little bit can attest, I have a love/hate relationship with Joplin, which is to say that I love to hate it. My dad had moved us there from San Diego right before I started my freshman year of high school, so I resented it from the start and never really warmed up to it. Growing up, I had always thought of it as small, narrow-minded, and constricting, and, let’s be honest here, my feelings really haven’t changed all that much as I’ve gotten older. We all need something in our lives to push against—whether that something be a political party, a sports team, or a religion—and Joplin has served that role well for me throughout the years.

But I do know a whole lot of people who have stayed in town most of their lives and who have flourished. They are lawyers and musicians and city employees who stayed and fought to build the community rather than tearing it down from afar. For all of the times that I have wished Joplin ill—and, believe me, there have been plenty—it’s something else entirely when it actually happens. That’s where I crashed the junior prom with Tommy Walkinshaw and that’s where we met for drinks every single Friday night after work and that’s where I took my grandmother for a drive that one time. God damnit, like it or not, that’s my hometown.

When I went to bed on Sunday night, the death toll was at 34. By Monday morning, it was 89. Jonah was setting the timer so I could play with him “for just five minutes, Daddy” before going to work. He wanted me to assemble his train tracks. Leu was awake but not yet out of bed. I poked my head in. “Death count is at 89,” I said. “Jesus,” she said. “I would not want to wake up in Joplin this morning.”

I knew what she meant, yet somehow, for the first time in my adult life, Joplin was the one place that I wanted to be.