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magazine / jf12
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January/February 2012 issue |
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IN HABITAT
Whirlwind wedding
How honeymooners deal with a tornado
By Ned Morgan
Saturday, Aug. 20, 2011. The morning is hot and sunny, though a few clouds huddle at the margins of the sky.
The weather weighs heavily on our minds. Today is our wedding, an outdoor affair on the banks of the Maitland River.
We’re not far from my wife Susan’s birthplace in Goderich, a
southern Ontario town astride Lake Huron. But we need not have worried: the ceremony is lovely, and we both feel a sense
of promise and excitement.
Not long after, as we strike poses for the photographer, purple clouds scud toward us. Susan and I cut the photo shoot
short and take refuge in the house of our hosts just as the torrential rains begin. So many
people tell me it is “lucky” to get rain on your wedding day that I grow weary of the word.
The next afternoon, at 4 p.m., our world changes. A tornado, packed with winds of 280 kilometres
per hour, touches down on Goderich. It seems to track our path: it renders the wedding
property almost unrecognizable, making short work of the empty wedding tent, shredding and
flinging it hundreds of metres away. It savages buildings in the Benmiller Inn, where we
spent our wedding night. It hits the Wellington Street house of my new in-laws, where we’ve
just opened our wedding gifts, tearing the roof off Susan’s childhood bedroom. We feel
hunted. We feel lucky.
On Monday morning, we begin to clear yards of branches, shingles and other debris. The
police drive slowly along Britannia Road, giving directions through a megaphone, the emotionless staccato voice driving
home the fact that we’re inside an emergency zone. As we work, neighbours and rubberneckers, their faces showing a mixture of
sympathy and curiosity, walk and bicycle by to view the wreckage, including a nearby house still standing but without walls,
like a cutaway dollhouse showing the contents of each room.
Susan and I hardly have time to think about anything but the tornado’s aftermath. Our lives resemble a bad romantic
comedy. During what is supposed to be our honeymoon, I am trapped like a worker bee with my in-laws, sleeping
chastely on a mattress on the floor next to the laundry room in a house with no hydro or hot water. My attitudes range
from petulant (“I’m unlucky, stuck here for a week and labouring in the hot sun!”) to grateful (“I’m lucky that the
tornado spared my loved ones”).
I notice varying shades of compassion in myself and others. I witness friends and strangers dropping by to offer food or
help. We hear about a group of men going house to house in the hard-hit zones with a gas-powered wood chipper, asking
for donations to pay for the rental of the machine before proceeding to chip the brush. Are they offering charity or are they profiteering?
For a while, I help neighbours clear debris from their yards, and for the rest of the week, I work on my in-laws’ property.
But when the fence is rebuilt and a measure of order returns to the house, I spend a day inside, writing. Deadline or no,
should I have, instead, rolled up my sleeves and marched down ravaged West Street, presenting myself at every house? Should I
have swept up broken glass or replenished generators with fuel? How do you know when you’ve helped enough?
One morning later that week, I stand with Nancy Greenwood, the neighbour across the street, and look over a sea of downed
trees choking a nearby house’s yard. “I don’t know where to start,” says Nancy, speaking to
herself as much as to me.
I have no suitable answer to offer, and a futile feeling comes over me. Then Nancy and I slowly wade into the brush, clearing
a path one armful at a time.
Ned Morgan is a writer and an editor at Mountain Life magazine.
He lives in Meaford, Ont.
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