I was born April 3rd, 1974. My birth, however, is rather less important than the other events that occurred on that day. To say that it was a dark and stormy night would not only be clichéd but specious, an understatement of epic proportions. It was a day in which people forgot, momentarily, that life would go on. The moment of a tragedy has a way of obliterating any sense of the past or future and leaving people with the stark present. As births are, decidedly, things of the future, my birth and any other births that might have occurred that day were mere afterthoughts.
Before I get to my birth, allow me to explain a few things. There are two types of thunderstorms—or four, but I prefer to simplify—ordinary thunderstorms and supercells. Ordinary thunderstorms, even when they appear as towering cumulonimbi lit with colors native to the aurora borealis, can be comforting. The flash of lightning and the echo of thunder, though startling, compose a familiar operatic opus to the staccato rhythms of rain and hail. An observer can look up at the clouds, feel the gusting wind moving with the storm, and detect the movement of the storm and know that, with time, it will pass.
There is nothing comforting about a supercell. Nothing familiar. The sky dims in the same way as it does for an ordinary thunderstorm, but when that same observer looks up at the clouds, he will see that they, all of those extravagant cliffs of condensation, are rotating. This large-scale synchronization is unreal; it is like watching gods assemble for battle, and the gods of myth care little about the realm of mortals. Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the storm, though, is that it doesn’t move with the wind. Once the storm is overhead there is no way to know how long it will stay there, where it will go, or if it will leave at all.
April 3rd was, for much of the Midwest, the date of the Super Outbreak. Nearly one hundred and fifty tornadoes touched down across thirteen states and parts of Canada. My mother went into labor just as the first tornadoes of the supercell appeared that morning. When she walked out to the car to go to the hospital and saw the clouds gathered like a dark omen, she did the only sensible thing she could do: she walked back into our house and went into our basement. She called one of our neighbors, a friend who had worked as a midwife, and asked her if she could come over and help with the birth. Then, after calling my father at the Air Force base to let him know that his first child was about to be born, she settled back onto a makeshift bed of blankets and waited for our neighbor. I have always been told that my mother was the resolute sort.
For reasons still unclear to me, we were living in Xenia, Ohio. It was relatively near the Air Force base and, I’m sure, possessed some attributes that made it a desirable location. Unfortunately, during that outbreak of tornadoes it was also the site of the deadliest tornado. Ten percent of the fatalities that occurred during that storm were the result of the F5 tornado that ripped through my birthplace. And it was under the aegis of the Xenia tornado that I came shrieking into the world.
It was a brief labor, and, according to our neighbor, an easy one. The only things worth noting during my birth were the events occurring just off stage: the constant radio updates of tornadoes tearing through the Ohio Valley and the steady stream of water leaking into the basement hinting at more violence to come. The house shuddered and gasped above my mother just as the midwife told her that I was crowning. Metal squealed against wood, and nails popped loose from planks from the picket fence outside. Disaster beckoned just beyond those walls, but when I was born, my screams seemed to chase away the terrible roar of the coming tornado. With each breath I took, the tornado moved farther away from our home, and my mother decided at that moment that I had been blessed with good luck. I was her guardian angel. I was her shining beacon of hope on a day when thirty-four people lost their lives in our city.
When my dad finally returned from the base to find his home intact and his wife jubilant with a screaming baby boy in her arms, he could not believe his good fortune. President Nixon visited our city and declared it to be a disaster area, but my father saw only the clear skies in the wake of the tragedy. He was so focused on my face in his arms that he never bothered to watch the skies. He never saw the high wisps of cirrus clouds that warned of change.
***
My father received a new posting, and my family moved. Three years and one day later, we were living in Birmingham, Alabama. The storm clouds gathered, and in response to a tornado warning, my family gathered in the basement. My father later told me that I was playing with blocks, completely absorbed in my activity, when I froze and turned toward the south, staring up toward the sky. Now, there was no reason I should have known that a tornado was approaching from that direction. In fact, the radio hadn’t even notified my family that a tornado had alit.
The wind began to howl above the sound of the rain and thunder; it was the terrifying crescendo of a fleet of trains bearing down on our house. Some of my first clear memories are from this storm. I remember the feel of the blocks in my hands as I tried to create a tower that reached higher and higher above my head. I remember my father grabbing me and covering me with his body against the concrete floor of the basement. My mom was crying nearby. Sometimes my memories become jumbled, and I remember the sound of my mother’s sobs, but it would have been impossible for me to hear them over the sound of the storm. Regardless, my last memory from that night was of my mother crying. And then nothing.
My father was never clear on what piece of debris hit my mother as the cyclone destroyed our faux Colonial home overhead. He refused to meet my eyes whenever I asked about how she had died. Sometimes he claimed it was a plank of wood from the ceiling and other times a piece of furniture and, on those occasions when his bourbon was bitter and he felt the world had forsaken him, he would say that it was the stack of blocks that had taken my mother’s life. I have never understood why my father protected me and not my mother.
***
After that, my father and I moved around more frequently, and the storms followed us. As soon as a tornado touched down anywhere near our town or the Air Force base where my father was stationed, we pulled up stakes and moved. While the storms were a source of dread for my father, they were one of the few constants in my young life. I came to look forward to the smell of ionized air that presaged a thunderstorm, and the ominous sight of a funnel cloud somehow comforted me.
***
I believe it was the summer of 1980 when my father stopped thinking of the storms as unfortunate tragedies or coincidences and began to think of them as malevolent forces stalking him. That summer, a massive heat wave struck most of the Midwest and South. Over a thousand died. We were living in Texas at the time, and for almost seventy days in a row, the high temperature was above 100° Fahrenheit. Of course, the thunderstorms still abounded, but the obsession of the hour, the topic covered in numerous television broadcasts and newspaper articles, was a peculiar sort of storm called a derecho. Essentially windstorms, derechos are a summer phenomenon. The wind is so strong inside of these storms that, even though tornadoes can form within them, it’s difficult to differentiate the damage due to a derecho’s winds from the damage due to a tornado.
The name derechos, by the way, comes from the Spanish words meaning “right” or “straight,” and it’s meant to contrast with the word tornado, which comes from the Spanish “tornar,” meaning “to turn.” The wind in a derechos comes straight on, in linear gusts, and the tornado swirls. I thought this was really fascinating when I was six, but when I told my father about it, he threw his sweat-soaked t-shirt at me and told me to go play in a pool somewhere. He was sitting in a metal chair in the kitchen with only his boxers on and a giant glass of ice water resting against his forehead. I don’t want to give the impression that my father was a slob or that he was neglectful. In heat so oppressive, every movement is staggering and every thought seems to bubble up from beneath ancient tar pits. Even as a child, with that allegedly boundless energy, I had trouble making it down my block to the neighborhood pool.
I looked forward to the windstorms as a respite, brief lulls in the monotony of an endless summer. For my father, however, that summer was a wasteland of an otherworldly hell interrupted only by the more distilled hell of maelstroms. My father never acknowledged that he was fleeing the storms, especially not to me, but discussions of storms and tornados were verboten in our household. After that summer of relentless assaults against his psyche, I believe my father began to plan his escape.
It took him another few years of transferring between Midwestern bases, chased by cyclones, but he finally got the move he wanted: Hawai’i.
***
Now, it might seem odd that my father, after being plagued by disasters, would want to move to a state that owed its entire existence to an active chain of volcanoes, but I think that he saw the problem as being linked to thunderstorms for the most part. While we did have Mauna Loa, an active volcano, nearby, it hadn’t caused a fatality since the 20s. Most rain was mild and tornados were unheard of. Even hurricanes were rare, with most storms fading slowly into tropical storms and then tropical depressions before ever hitting those Pacific shores. And that, for my father, meant that it was safe.
The first year we lived in Hawai’i, Mauna Loa erupted. That word is explosive and gives the impression of a far greater event than what we witnessed. Such a contrast from a tornado “touching down.” Naturally, there was ash in the air and the lava marched steadily toward Hilo, but we had constant updates about the eruption. Every day, news reports informed us of how close the flows were to the city. It was a disaster in slow motion, and I think that helped my father cope. It also probably helped that, if he turned his back to the volcano, his new home looked like paradise.
***
As for me, during those nomadic years, I had become an ornery little kid. With a kid who moves around so regularly and whose life is so regularly disrupted, there’s a perception that there are only two possible personalities that can emerge. He can either be the isolated, reticent child who faces mockery in every new school, or he can be a charismatic whirlwind who pulls other children into his orbit with casual ease. I guess, insofar as the binary applies, I was the latter. I can’t say that I had friends in every town we lived in, but I certainly developed a bit of a following wherever I went. A network of acquaintances, really. This was due in no small part to my ability to relate stories of tornadoes. No matter where we moved, children were always fascinated by disasters.
There is something primordial about natural disasters. They possess a deep, fundamental allure. There are a few subjects whose books are perennially checked out in an elementary school library: dinosaurs, snakes, sharks, and, naturally, natural disasters. These topics, although I doubt most children realize it, are all of a kind. They are inhuman and powerful and unpredictable. Perhaps we, as a species, feel that if we learn as much as we can about these ruthless beings, we no longer need to fear them. For children, this yearning is all the keener; fear mingles with curiosity and the thrill of discovery in the youthful imagination. Armed with knowledge of these fell creatures, raptors and asps and Makos could no longer haunt our dreams under a darkened sky. If knowledge is, indeed, power, then as a young boy, I possessed power over tempests. And so I gathered followers. Until my family finally moved to Hawai’i, that is.
I refer to the unit of my father and me as a family out some sense of nostalgia, but, by that time, my father and I led very separate lives. We rarely ate together, and I was given free reign. I fought with other military brats and, as a haole, I got in plenty of fights with the native kids too. I was angry. The moods and whims of adolescence had come early without any of the traditional physical changes, and I couldn’t figure out why I was so upset all of the time. I’m sure there are plenty of psychologically sound explanations: the constant upheaval of moving, the absence of my mother, the retreat of my father, the alienation. All cogent explanations, I suppose, but I don’t think they’re even close to the truth.
In the middle of that tropical paradise, I missed the storms.
Hurricane Estelle came and went and bored me. It didn’t inspire the fear of the storms of my youth. I mentally wrote off hurricanes as being dull and uninteresting: gathering jugs of fresh water and boarding windows all for a long, dreary rainstorm. Even my father began to lose some of his fear for the capricious skies.
It was idyllic for my father, and he was furious when he was transferred to California. I was thrilled. Four years on one island had made me eager for broad plains and towering thunderheads.
***
I was just entering high school when we moved to a small town south of Sacramento in part of the Central Valley that bore no resemblance to the California so frequently depicted in movies and television. It was like living in the Midwest again but with the weather off kilter. The California seasons were a bizarre inversion of the seasons I learned of growing up. During the winter, the land was green and lush from the rains. And it was during the arid summers that the lands withered. The entire valley, with the exception of crops that were regularly irrigated, was painted in shades of sepia, flax, and ecru. While the endless summers of Hawai’i made it seem as though time were suspended, the California seasons were a surreal enactment of time betrayed. And the rains, when they appeared, incited no more fear than the sonorous lecture of a substitute teacher.
It had been years since my family had borne witness to a disaster, and my father had grown less wary of my presence. He even began to court my favor. This might have been difficult had I been a typical adolescent, afraid of losing time with my friends, but after our Hawaiian interlude, I was more reticent. Without storms or friends, I turned to baseball. There were statistics to memorize and a history that reached back into the last century, precisely the sort of historical grounding I felt I lacked. I followed the San Francisco Giants, primarily because of their proximity. I collected their cards and watched every game that I could on television. When the Giants made it to the World Series to play their rivals across the Bay, the Oakland A’s, my dad saw it as the perfect opportunity to atone for years of neglect. I don’t know how much he paid, but he bought us tickets to Game 3. The Giants were down 0-2 in the series.
Not many earthquakes get such instant exposure. Thanks to the coverage of the World Series, it was on live television. The Loma Prieta earthquake. Though my mind has a habit of collecting facts, I have done my best to subdue the litany of figures surrounding each disaster, so I can’t be sure when I quote the magnitude. I believe it was a 6.9 on the Richter Scale. We were in the stadium when it struck, and, if you can believe it, the fans cheered afterward. We had no idea that the quake and its aftereffects would claim 62 lives and cause massive damage through much of the region. At that moment, it felt like a lark. The stadium swayed and crested as though it were taking part in the wave. I doubt many realized at first that we were experiencing an earthquake, but that isn’t terribly unusual. Creaking and undulating walls and the sudden sensation of displacement left the crowd bewildered. Inside the stadium, there was a moment of disbelief followed shortly by exultation. The atmosphere was dynamic and thrilling, and it felt as though great things were meant to happen. But people died, the Giants lost, and the world moved on.
Maybe I had grown more fearful as I matured, but while I was able to appreciate and understand tornadoes, I could only dread earthquakes after that. It was an unseen enemy that could strike at any moment without a cloud in the sky.
I stopped following baseball, and my father began to drift away again. I turned my focus to the future. I dated a few girls. I played a few sports. I distracted myself. My father was stationed in California for the long haul, and it looked like, when he retired, he was going to make it his home. I knew that I had to escape, and college would be that escape.
***
After the Loma Prieta, my father became increasingly paranoid about our family’s encounters with acts of God. He informed me, in a surprising flash of literary depth repeated to me throughout high school, that I had been an albatross around his neck, inviting calamity, since my birth.
There was a lot of talk of sin and God in those days. I would come home from school or work and find my dad sitting at the kitchen table with the gilt pages of the King James open to select passages. In his heavy-footed formulation, I was a modern day Job, and I was bringing down the wrath of God on all around me. When I would point out that Job had committed no sins and that the plagues visited upon him were God’s way of testing him—I was certainly not a devout Christian, but I learned enough to deflect criticism—my father would shake off the pretenses of religious justification and simply beat me until his anger subsided into tears. I loathed him at the time, but over the years I’ve come to adopt his point of view. Even then, I felt an omnipresent guilt that I was unable to explain.
Florida was as far away from California, with its spectral disasters, as I could get without leaving the country—I had nightmares in which I flew to Europe and the entire land mass slipped off the continental shelf before my plane could even touch down. When I was accepted to the University of Miami, I transformed myself into a devout football fan, pulled up stakes, and drove across the country in the summer of ’92.
***
It was a return to the humid summers and sudden downpours I had known as a child. Lightning storms were again a part of my life. I found a job and a small cell of an apartment off campus and set about forgetting my past lives. By the time July had ended, I felt as though I was making a credible new start for myself. I was, once again, young and invincible with the world at my feet.
I even happened into a real relationship with a beautiful girl who didn’t mind that I never talked about my past. It might have been love. When I held her at night, I whispered stories of possibilities and beginnings in her ear, and I ignored the narrative of disaster that I had constructed in my own mind.
My experiences with hurricanes were limited to brief storm surges and the occasional high tide while I was living in Hawai’i, so the approach of Andrew didn’t inspire a lot of fear in me. Even though emergency officials on the radio were compelling residents board up their windows and secure any loose goods that could become airborne debris, I actually worked at the store late that evening and essentially ignored the warnings. Or, to be more accurate, I deferred preparations for securing my own worldly possessions. Instead, I made sure the store was hurricane proof: its windows boarded, its doors barred, its stock sheltered. Rain and thunderstorms lifted my spirits, and I was looking forward to an evening in my apartment listening to the clatter of thunder and the thrum of rainfall.
I called my girlfriend, who was staying in a sorority house nearby, and we talked about our plans for the following weekend. Though she was nervous about the hurricane, I spoke brightly, without the slightest worry. I offered to help her with storm-proofing the house, but she didn’t think it would be wise for me to venture out into the streets during the opening salvo of the storm. I kept reassuring her that everything would be okay, and I never once mentioned how much experience I had with these sorts of disasters. Some part of me was actually convinced that the days of disaster were behind me, that I could not possibly be the lightening struck tower, that portent of change, in every place I lived. It wasn’t as though I had ever done anything for which I deserved divine retribution. So, I ignored the past.
By the time the storm had made landfall, I was sequestered in my room. I had boarded my windows, and I didn’t have to worry about flooding since I was on the second floor the building, which was constructed like a jailhouse with reinforced concrete. I sat in the darkened room, determined to stay awake through the night and enjoy the storm. While it never quite approached the deafening volume of the tornado tearing apart the house over my head, after Andrew hit Miami, there was no chance I was going to be able to sleep. At first, I read a book under my flickering desk lamp and then, when the power failed, under the light of a candle I had borrowed from the store. That is, I pretended to read. For the most part my mind was outside imagining the prying winds streaking down avenues and thoroughfares and shattering windows. I thought of my girlfriend, curled in her own bed without my arms around her to protect her. I could hear anonymous collisions beyond my plywood window shade. At some point, hours in, I gave up on my book and just listened to the storm. It was relentless. Until the eye. I fell asleep when the eye of the hurricane passed over and dreamt of swords held by strands of hair. I dreamt of an imminent death forestalled.
When I woke up and left my apartment, it was as though columns of tornadoes had marched down the streets in a fatal parade. Wide pools of water covered the roads, and wrecked cars were scattered about, sad islands in the morning sun. Lampposts were bent like marsh reeds. It was as silent as the eye in that moment. Later, the swell of humanity and the goodwill found in the wake of tragedies would come. But not at that moment. In that moment, I was alone in a valley of death, wreathed in shadows and cloaked in silence.
I walked all the way to my girlfriend’s house to find it in shambles. The second floor had collapsed and part of the roof had blown away to some unknown destination. A tree trunk had impaled the house through my girlfriend’s window. I realized that I was shaking uncontrollably, and I sat down next to a copse of broken trees across the street, unable to stop my mind from imagining the tragedy that had unfolded the night before. It was some time later, after staring at that wrecked building until my eyes watered, that I saw my girlfriend return in a van with her sorority sisters to assess the damage. I learned later that they had been evacuated to a high school gymnasium. I felt no sense of relief in seeing my girlfriend alive, though. I returned to my apartment without saying a word to her.
At some point, after days spent wandering and repairing and aiding, I began college. I never called my girlfriend again. I deleted every single confused, bewildered message I received from her. And I prayed every single morning and every single night that I would be able to make it out of college without bringing down another calamity onto those around me.
***
I realized then that I was a dreadnaught, a bringer of death. So, I became a hermit. Any place, even a party school like Miami, can be transformed into a hermitage if you set your mind to it. I no longer allowed myself to grow close to others, and I spent the nights dreaming of an impossible escape. I was stuck in Miami because of a scholarship, but I made plans to move away as soon as possible. I spent my summers doing research in isolated parts of Florida: swamps and keys and desolate lagoons. I learned the precise cadence of isolation and made it my own. As for the objective of my studies: meteorology. It was that old childish desire to know the enemy. Like a hero from an old fable, I felt that if I knew the djinn’s true name, I could control the beast.
Time passed with nothing more dire than a few thunderstorms threatening those shores. I hasten to point out that I never feared for my own life. I saw myself as a catalyst. I was that necessary ingredient of the world that would spark the alchemical reactions of cataclysm and remain unchanged for the effort. I remembered, during those insomnia-haunted nights, my father’s accusations and religious tirades. I chose my next step with the knowledge that where I went disaster followed. After I graduated, I took a research post in Antarctica.
***
I spent five years in that blissful solitude. While there were other researchers that came and went in that station at the edge of the world, I was the only one who could endure more than a year without a return to civilization. I suppose my colleagues thought that I was socially inept. It’s true that I scarcely spoke to them, but it was a self-imposed exile amid ice storms and blizzards.
My father, perhaps because he respected my ascetic turn, had begun corresponding with me again. The letters were, to my surprise, a comfort to me. He never asked about my life or well-being and most of what he wrote concerned financial planning for his future, but somehow seeing words from the one person that remained of my past made me feel uplifted.
Life at the outpost was already a continuous disaster, so it was impossible for my curse to assert itself. People were never meant to live in an environment so barren and cold. Temperatures were so far below freezing that they damaged communications equipment. High winds were de rigueur. I performed my tasks sheltered beneath that frozen landscape with my head bowed. It was a form of penance.
In that land where lightness conceals just as easily as darkness, there were so many places to hide, and yet I tried to confront my memories. I pored over photographs of the cities I had lived in during the days just after their obliteration. Each night I confessed my sins to those photographs. I believed that if I acknowledged to whatever powers existed above that I was culpable in these tragedies then I might be absolved. Life in the research station passed like a breath, a sigh of relief, and I began to think I was free.
***
When the towers fell, I am ashamed to admit that a small part of me was relieved. I was nowhere near New York City at the time. Nor was I near Washington D.C. In point of fact, I wasn’t in Los Angeles or Boston or Newark or San Francisco. I was still in Antarctica. By that point, I thought that when I moved from city to city, I was some dark harbinger of destruction. I was certain of it. So, when tragedy struck in my absence, I was relieved and then immediately ashamed of my relief. Of course, there was nothing natural about those explosions, but I no longer thought of tornados or earthquakes as natural at all. How could they be natural if they so relentlessly followed me?
I obsessed over those airplanes and those towers. I followed every single scrap of coverage. I kept two twenty-four-hour news channels on at all times. I wondered what sort of person could willingly bring about such destruction. Whether or not my actions were borne of base superstition, as soon as I truly suspected that I might be the cause of death, I fled from mankind, and there were men claiming credit for so many. So many.
It was my time to return. The blame for the towers couldn’t be laid at my feet. So, I left the research station and reentered civilization without any plan. I spent months working in the relief efforts. I even contemplated enlisting, but I had seen too much death already.
***
Eventually, I left the city and looked for the thread of a new life. I found a job teaching at Tulane and spent a few years there before Katrina. I will not bother describing that storm. In form, it was like so many others. It was the aftermath that was so terrible.
There is a breaking point for every man, and I had reached mine. No matter how I looked at it, the storm was my responsibility. All of my vain hopes were left in tatters. I didn’t respond to my father’s calls after the hurricane. I walked away from my ruined home, that small plot of land near the university, and continued walking. I left. I became one of the missing.
***
I do not know if I was mourned. I spent my adult life trying to create a world that would not feel my absence. I lived as a void. For a time, I wandered from town to town, without a home and without a goal, but then reason took over. As long as I was around people, I was putting them in danger. The only respite I had, or the world had from me, was when I left civilization. My path was clear.
I live now in a location that does not exist on most maps, and that suits me. I have transformed this small patch of wilderness into my home. I have not seen a thunderstorm or even a brush fire since I began to live in this manner. I grow what I need to survive. I read. I watch the sky. I write. I talk to myself so often in the voices of the lost that I am unsure if I am truly alone out here. For all I know, beyond my territory, the world is in shambles, a wreck of despair and entropy. But somehow, I think the world is a better place for my absence.
I am death to those around me. I am an ender of worlds both real and imagined. Without intention, without meaning, I bring destruction. I did not bring these disasters; I was each and every one of the disasters. Away from people, a tidal wave against a deserted shore, a hurricane without landfall, I was harmless. And once I accepted that, the rest was simple.