Lori Kim’s Blog 9/22/2012
I’m in a large building in Virginia Beach. Used to be a community college, but now no one occupies it. There’s the remnants of an Atlantic Hurricane trailing off to the north of us. My phone became waterlogged and inoperable about a week ago in the rain, and I’ve been unable to communicate.
With no national weather service, no disaster relief agencies, there’s no way to predict what the weather will do. I just rolls in over you, levels towns and moves back out to sea. I don’t know if there’s anybody to name storms anymore, so I named this one Professor Lanegan. He was my martial arts instructor, and this storm hit almost as hard as he did.
First time I saw Hurricane Lanegan, it was a gray mist on the horizon. Obviously a storm, but who knew how bad it would be? I tried to gauge my estimated time to my destination, and thought I could make it. I didn’t know it was just the leading front of something much larger. The sky turned darker and darker, and the wind kicked up tremendously. It was practically impossible to make forward progress, and I was in the middle of nowhere. I was 30 miles from any semblance of a town, and then I couldn’t tell how far because I had to dodge the signs as they ripped from the ground.
I found shelter in the grammar school in a small town. Grammar schools are almost always brick buildings with cinder block insides, and so they are safe as you can get. They were designed as community shelters for storms and nuclear attacks, and that kind of thinking definitely saved my life. Drove the bike right up the steps and into the main entry. There were two families in the building. They saw me pulling up, and opened the door, just as a large tree blew down over the steps.
Times like this, you don’t really think about some of the standard survival instincts. The strangers are never aggressive towards the outsider, you don’t worry about resources. You’re all just happy to be alive.
I moved the bike into a hallway, shut it down and took stock of my situation. I was soaked through, and likely so was everything in the bike. I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, and it dripped. I opened it up, pulled out the battery and shook it out. Not much else I could do.
The two families stared at me in wonder. One was a mother, maybe 35, two kids, a boy and girl probably seven and nine, and a grandfather, I guessed. The other was a young couple, could have still been teenagers, and an infant.
“Thanks for opening the doors,” I said. They looked almost as afraid of me as they were of the storm, at least until
I shared some of the canned goods I had, and we weathered the storm for two days. The roof of the gymnasium caved in, or partly tore off. Could have been a tornado. Some debris broke windows in several of the classrooms. We kept to the inner halls and the offices, the most protected areas. Seemed like there was hardly any time for conversation as something was happening around us almost always. Windows breaking, trees being uprooted.
And then the storm lifted.
The outside was brown, all the trees had been stripped of their leaves, the streets and lawns were mud. My phone still didn’t work, and hasn’t since.
After the ordeal, We simply parted ways, having shared another disaster.
From that point, I chased the coattails of the storm, and I mean chased. I wanted to get to safety fast, especially with no phone to provide backup. In a disaster like this, with no communication, you could just disappear and I wasn’t going to let a little rain slow me down on that. Finally pulled into Tidewater Community College at dusk and in the rain. Headed straight for the only light in the place. Got my bike into the building, and finally got some rest.
--Lori Kim is written by Bryan Lee Peterson.
Tags: hurricane, Tidewater Community College, Virginia, Virginia Beach