Trip Jennings
A friend who wrote searing, sometimes grisly Facebook posts as he dug out from Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic destruction around Asheville, N.C. last autumn took to the social media platform this weekend.
He wrote of the updates from Texas on the flooding that, as of this writing, has robbed the world of more than 100 lives, including 28 children. The dire news flung him back to the months of soul-crushing work after Helene decimated his community of Black Mountain, a few miles from Asheville. In the early days of the clean-up, he worried he might stumble onto the bodies of people swept away by the furious waters, he told me via text in October. He knew people who’d encountered corpses. The human carnage weighed heavily on him. Cleaning up after Helene was not merely taxing physically but also an existential crisis.
And here he was months later processing the terrible news out of Texas that grew more terrible with each update.
The Guadalupe River area has figured significantly in my friend’s life. As a teenager he frequented one of the camps in the path of last week’s rising waters. It was at Mo-Ranch that he met his future wife when he was 15 and she was 13. A year later, they were both at Mo-Ranch when an overflowing Guadalupe River killed 10 people. Vigilance and quick thinking saved Mo-Ranch from the worst of the flooding last week. There was property damage, but no deaths. Other camps weren’t so lucky.
Watching another place he loved destroyed by a natural disaster hit close to home, he wrote on Facebook.
I cannot pretend to know what my friend is feeling, or what he is working through emotionally or mentally. Pain is such an individual, subjective experience. But I can relate.
As a young journalist reporting on murders, drive-by shootings, and natural disasters, I witnessed the jarring disorientation that accompanies the loss of life. A person is alive one second, gone the next. How do you make sense of that?
But it wasn’t until the 9/11 terror attacks erased more than 3,000 lives in a single morning that I lost the sense of invincibility about myself I thought I had purged. Day after day for months, I wrote about or edited stories about people lost in the attacks from Connecticut towns and cities. Nine weeks into the marathon of trauma, a person living 10 miles from us died of anthrax, one of five Americans killed in the unrelated bioterrorism attacks.
The randomness of all the carnage — that your fate was sealed by boarding a plane or by going to work in a high-rise or by opening a letter from your mailbox — punctured any illusion I had that I was invincible, or that a life calibrated to reduce risk was enough to keep chaos at bay. It also exposed an uncomfortable truth: our day-to-day lives are suffused with faith — faith in the universe, god or gods, science, human institutions, routine, or just plain dumb luck — that we will live to see tomorrow.
As the great street poet Lou Reed sings, “you need a busload of faith to get by.”
Most of humanity probably comes to this realization much earlier than I, especially those who come from communities where resources are not clustered to reduce risk from the elements, microbes and other humans bent on our demise.
The recognition that we all are fragile, finite creatures and we don’t know when our time is up is deeply disorienting.
This is reason enough to remember to live lives in which we are sacred with one another. As Bono sings in U2’s One, “We get to carry each other, carry each other.”
May it be so one day.
Trip Jennings has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.
