Sunday – May 26, 2024 | Bentonville, AR
Before I’m even fully awake, I’m instinctively reaching towards my bedside table, fumbling for my phone. Beside me, I can hear Jesse answering a call, just waking up himself, sleep and surprise evident in his muffled “hello?” My hand finds my phone, and the screen illuminates, its glow piercing through the darkness. It’s 1:20AM. I just missed a call from my mom. Why is she calling so late?
I’m disoriented, but I realize Mom must have called Jesse when I didn’t pick up. He is pulling back the blankets and swinging himself out of bed. “Okay, we will,” he assures her, and then he hangs up, and he’s moving, heading towards the bedroom doorway. “Niki, get up. There are tornados on the ground. We need to get to cover.”
As he says this, he’s already walking out the bedroom door and into our downstairs living room, where we’ve always retreated during the rare instance of a Tornado Warning. One of our cats, James, scurries from his spot on the bed between us and trails after Jesse in a swift, low trot, his tail tucked nervously.
Tornados. The word alone has my mind spinning.
We’d been asleep for less than an hour, and I’m exhausted, but that is overtaken by adrenalin in an instant, and I suddenly become very aware that it’s raining – no, it’s pouring. I’ve only been awake for a few seconds, and while my eyes and ears are still adjusting and taking everything in, my body doesn’t require much time at all to tune in to the strangeness of this moment. We have been living here for eight years, and I’ve never heard a storm sound like this. I dare to turn and look out the window as lightning flashes and temporarily illuminates the sky. For a single second, I see the viciously swaying limbs of the massive trees growing up from the ravine behind our home through the torrential rain. Panic floods me.
Jesse is standing right outside the bedroom door, but he seems so far away. I pull back the blankets and rise to follow him, and I can already feel myself trembling as I make my way across the cool tile floor. I’m spilling out questions I know Jesse can’t possibly have the answers to. He’s calm, unworried. He’s trying to pull up the live weather feed on his phone. I’m pacing back and forth across the same two square feet right beside him, lost in my fear. He can tell I’m not okay.
“We’re going to be totally fine.” Jesse takes me by the shoulders and ushers me to a chair. I sit, but I am completely unable to be still. Immediately my legs are moving, shaking, tapping. I feel my core trembling with anxiety. Everything in me is tense. Something feels incredibly wrong.
My eyes focus on Jesse’s face as I watch him navigate to the weather feed, and I realize that I can hear tornado sirens in the background – just barely. The intensity of the sound of the rain and wind is consuming everything. I’m trying to calm myself down, but everything within me is screaming with fear, and I find myself pressing my eyes shut and holding myself as I rock back and forth. I hate feeling this way.
I realize I should be paying attention to the live weather feed, but suddenly the audio cuts out, and Jesse is calling someone. I hear his dad pick up on the third ring, and even though I can’t make out the words on the other end of the phone, it doesn’t take me long to realize what’s happening. A tornado has hit their ranch – less than 30 miles away. And now the storm is headed this way.
Jesse hangs up and starts dialing someone else, but I am completely unable to process anything outside of my immediate surroundings. The feeling of vulnerability flooding me is absolutely overwhelming. I can feel my chest tighten, and a quiet whimper escapes me. My heart is racing, and I’m trying with everything I have to stop shaking, but I absolutely cannot escape the sense that danger is upon us. Tears begin to pool in my eyes as Jesse continues to reach out to our family and friends in the area. He’s focused on his phone, but I can’t bring myself to pull out from the grip of fear to do the same. Everything is so incredibly loud.
“Jesse, I think we should get under the desk.” I have never felt compelled to take cover like this before, yet somehow I can’t move from my seat without Jesse agreeing to cross the room with me. Maybe I am overreacting, but…
“We can get under the desk if you want to.”
“I think we need to.”
We cross the room and duck beneath the thick live edge slab desk we built together years earlier. We had joked before that if we were ever in a tornado, we’d have plenty of sturdy furniture to hide under. At this moment, it didn’t feel funny.
I can feel the fear rising in my throat, and tears well up at the corners of my eyes. I’m blinking and swallowing and trying to choke back cries. I want to stay quiet, but I can’t. I begin crying out in a whisper, over and over, “Please, God – please keep us safe… Please…”
Anxiety is overwhelming me, and I know I need to find a way to ground myself and regain control of my mind. I try desperately to become tuned in to what is actually happening, to understand if the threat I feel is actually as real and present as it seems. I feel Jesse’s hand on my back, trying to calm me. I lift my eyes to look at Jesse’s face, but as I do, the sound of the world outside changes. Suddenly, everything is somehow more. The house is shaking. Fear screams in my mind: We are about to lose everything. I can’t keep myself from crying out again – I’m begging for protection, deliverance. Jesse is silent beside me, steady.
An explosion of sound is immediately followed by a consuming darkness. The world becomes a black void as we hear transformers explode one after another across our neighborhood. Rain and hail and sticks and limbs and who knows what else is hitting the roof and the windows. Then I’m hearing sounds I’ve never imagined before – cracks and snaps and pops and thuds, and something akin to giant sandbags hitting the ground. Are those trees falling?
Before my mind can process its own question, I feel the entire house shudder as a tree crashes down upon our roof. I lean hard into Jesse, and I’m crying out again. A series of crashes pulls me deep into a place of dread, and I feel my heart breaking as fear evolves into grief.
“Oh God, save us!” The words spill out from the deepest parts of me, raw and desperate. I didn’t know I could be this scared. And not just for the immediate… My thoughts wander towards the catastrophic effect this will have on an already overwhelming reality. “No! Please!” This can’t be happening.
I feel something shift in the air. Suddenly, Jesse is running upstairs, and I hear the front door open. It’s still pouring rain, and as Jesse yells back at me, I can’t make out his words, but I can tell from his tone that things are not good. For a moment I am frozen, sitting under this desk, terrified to face what’s ahead of me.
Jesse begins moving throughout the house, assessing the damage, and I hear him state that he thinks there’s multiple trees on the roof, with others down across the yard and deck. He’s talking fast, saying it’s hard to see, that he needs to go outside. He needs to check on things, and on the neighbors. My heart is pounding.
Jesse sets out to brave the outside world, but I can’t bear to venture beyond the walls of the house. It is eerily quiet and completely dark, and as the wind dies down outside I begin to hear a faint noise that fills me with dread – the alarm that sounds when our sump pumps are overwhelmed and we are moments away from water flooding into our lower level.
A new wave of adrenaline crashes over me. I’ve lived through flooding in this home before, and I know I only have a few minutes to act quickly to hopefully minimize the damage done. I race up the stairs to grab towels, bowls, pots – anything to try and keep the water from spreading throughout the entire lower level. I know we don’t have the time or the money to turn this house into a construction zone.
Suddenly, I’ve switched from afraid for my survival to desperate to minimize my losses. The time for feeling is done, and I find myself slipping into my most familiar mode of coping with stress – diving into a task with everything I have in the hopes that I might make a difference.
By the time I make it back downstairs, water has already begun to seep in through the baseboards. I throw towels down in the doorways between rooms to slow the spread of the water, but in a matter of moments, the closet and bathroom are filled with water, and it’s moving throughout the bedroom. I begin frantically scooping water into pots and dumping them in the shower in an attempt to keep it from climbing further towards the other walls. I can hear the backup battery to the sump pump activate behind the closet wall, but the few minutes it was down were critical. With our entire yard flooded and the rain unrelenting, we are defenseless. All we can do now is react.
“Jesse!” I’m calling for him, but he’s outside. “Jesse!” Please, I need help.
I hear the front door open, and Jesse’s voice is relieved. “I found Maple and BB. All the cats are okay.”
I hadn’t even thought about all the cats yet. All my pots are full, and I need help emptying them.
My voice shakes as I call out to Jesse, “Come down here!”
Jesse rushes downstairs, fully soaked, his eyes wide with concern as he takes in the scene. “I need help emptying these pots, and I need more towels.” I’m overwhelmed, but I am determined to keep going. I don’t know how many minutes pass as we work side by side in the near silence, filling and emptying pots and sopping up water, again and again. My body aches, my fingers are raw from wringing out towels, and my back is burning. But I can’t stop, not until I’ve done all I can.
Somewhere in the midst of the relentless struggle, the rain begins to let up. It’s 3AM now, and the roar of the storm outside has faded into a steady patter. I take the final towel and press it against the last small pool of water. I’ve finished the job at hand, but there’s no sense of relief. Thunder rumbles, and the hum of chainsaws in the distance tells me that my understanding of the damage from this storm is just beginning.
It’s a few hours before the sun comes up. I am utterly exhausted, but I know sleep is impossible. Our cars are buried beneath limbs and power lines, but I feel compelled to move, to see, to try and wrap my mind around this new reality. How bad is it out there?
I see Jesse standing at the bottom of the stairs, and I find myself asking, “Now what?”
