Ten years.

[mrissa]

Ten years ago today, Gustavus Adolphus College and the rest of St. Peter, MN, were hit by a tornado. Like most of the students, I was away on spring break. I believe that this directly caused the zero fatality rate among the college students -- we all saw how people behaved when the sirens went off for previous events. If we'd all been around, there'd have been someone who was finishing a sociology paper, someone else who was just going to have a look.

I didn't learn so much from the tornado as from its aftermath, which seemed to stretch on forever. I guess the main thing was, there's no natural disaster so bad that the behavior of humans afterwards can't mitigate at least some of it for some people -- and there's no natural disaster so bad that the behavior of humans afterwards can't make it significantly worse. Primates are like that, I guess.

It feels like a decade. It really does. Close and yet distant, that's what decades feel like. I'm not getting out my old journals to bring the anguish and the worry closer or to feel more distant from that teenage girl. I don't want to relive, and I don't want to forget. Remembering is the right compromise between the two.

Comments

[laurel]

I can't imagine what it would've been like to live in St. Peter during or after that storm.

I know that I found it heartbreaking just driving through St. Peter (during drives between Minneapolis and Sioux Falls or Sioux City).

I once had someone riding with me on one of those many trips who hadn't been to St. Peter before and I had a hard time articulating just how bad it was. I just kept muttering about the beautiful trees.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What still breaks my heart is the trees. I see why the planted the fast little fruit trees right away. What I don't see, and never will see, is why they didn't come in and plant additional oaks that summer. It meant that three or six months after the tornado, things looked far better than people expected -- and ten years after the tornado, it still looks like 3-6 months after for me.

This is Minnesota. We need oaks and birches, poplars, stands of evergreens. Flowery fruit trees are all very well -- there's a little one in my front yard -- but we need more. And we needed more then, and we knew it.