"Wind and Water" (June 2011)

The energy of a restless planet commands our attention this spring.

"April showers bring May flowers", so the old adage goes. No additional parameters regarding the volume or intensity of those showers on the quantity of said flowers exists, to the best of my knowledge.

Just a few hours drive north or south this time of year is like moving into a different season. It's been a very wet and cool spring here, so our drive down to make music at the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance conference near Asheville NC last month brought us three or four weeks ahead into early summer. Everything there was crazy green, from the honeysuckle and takeover kudzu to the tall tree canopies in the Blue Ridge foothills.

Nature has many ways to remind us of its seemingly infinite powers. One oft-cited bit of science is that 98 percent of the world's tornadoes happen in the United States. I've never had an actual face-to-face encounter yet, but we've had several close calls in the last 20 years. You don't live in the southeast and mid-Atlantic states without disaster plans for tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards and of course, terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

While folks turn to the weather to make small talk, it sure seems this spring has brought us epic meteorological energy. The tornadoes hitting major population centers like Joplin, Tuscaloosa and Raleigh are from small talk, and tore our attention from the record floods moving down the Mississippi River. We hardly had time to focus on the massive wildfires sprawling across wide-open west Texas.

It seems the planet has a lot of excess energy to shed these days. Maybe we're more aware than ever because of our ever-deepening ability to track and measure atmospheric and geological spasms. What is clear is that this spring Mother Nature dropped bombs on cities rather than small towns and rural areas. Hundreds of people killed, tens of thousands deeply affected.

What it doesn't mean is that these events aren't also affecting small towns and rural areas. Communities of dozens of people have never made it onto the radar of national consciousness. We were driving home from the conference up I-81, and just north of Abingdon VA we went through the wasteland that a few weeks earlier had been Glade Springs.

The Tuscaloosa cluster of tornadoes devastated big chunks of the south. One of them landed at Glade Spring and in less than a minute made a truck stop look like a young boy's floor littered with Hot Wheels cars. Every large tree snapped, most roofs gone or damaged, and perhaps most eerie of all, no leaves on any trees. Anywhere.

The sign over the highway just passed Glade Spring is what hit home - an indictment of FEMA for forgetting the victims in southwest Virginia. Memories of Katrina. But one has to wonder too - just how many people can be mobilized to help so many people in so many places all at once?

The people of Missouri and Louisiana who lost homes and farms to the Mississippi, the neighborhoods of Joplin and Tuscaloosa whisked away on the wind - it's no small wonder that the need outweighs the helping hands.

It has been one wild spring. Wind and water win. Locks and levees, storm cellars, and firebreaks all have their vulnerabilities. So do human beings. We may be strong of spirit, but frail of body in the face of the storm. It is how we respond and adapt that defines our humanity.

The city of Greensburg, Kansas was essentially destroyed in a 2007 tornado. Four years later, the rebuilding of the city as an energy-efficient, green and tornado-prone community has drawn a lot of attention for creativity and innovation (check out the May 2011 Reader's Digest).

Clearly over the short term our landscape is changing and being changed. So too, will we. It is that strength of spirit and adaptive nature that are being tested. Over millennia, wind and water sculpt rock. Over moments, they sculpt us. What will we become of all this?