Various donations of food, clothing, linens and more were collected at a hub in Mayfield with some stand-up tents and shipping containers for shelter serving brisket and cabbage, organizing the donations. Workers were holding hands in a park in Dawson Springs as night fell and arranging piles of items with a pastor of a local church along the cinder-block wall of a Dollar Store, under immense blue tarps that would preserve everything for the night, ready for uncovering again the next day when the gleaners would arrive, as they had the day before. Looking into their eyes, the ones who had come to help, even just for a moment, reminded me of why we had come.
These were the best of people, not aware of anything about one another except the energy of their hearts, what each in effort and humor and hope was there to contribute and share: the safety net they were assembling together spontaneously an expression of their larger, cultivated and deeply measured faith. Each one of them who was there — to make sure no child went without understanding, that no one went hungry, and that everyone stayed warm — knew that it very easily could be them one day on the flip side, needing someone’s help and care. In doing this we were holding the line on what we are all here to promise to each other, whether we stop very often to realize it or not.
Our last looks at everything with just one last bundle left to deliver were long ones before we began our way, with a relieved, much lighter truck, into the night toward the perfect Christmas we had waiting for us in New York. Perhaps it was like something that could have been witnessed in Japan after the bombs, August of ’45, or as if a demonic lawn mower 1,500 feet across had descended from nowhere and pushed horror, ruin and reasonless punishment across only a very specific, unlucky cut of territory — leaving neighborhoods surreally normal and almost untouched on each side of the surgical — which now was laid out beyond all imagining. What we were looking at was a visual representation of the very deepest kind of emotional depression humanly fathomable. Even that does not say it. The salvage, restoration and rebuilding effort that it will take weeks for these people in Kentucky and elsewhere just to figure out how to begin to take a stance against and face, had scarcely even begun to take shape.
The very last item we had in our possession left to donate to someone in Dawson Springs at the end of the night was a single bag of extraordinarily wonderful-smelling coffee, freshly ground, into which I had placed the $399 in cash donations that we had collected in the quick five days that the word had gone out to Pagosa that we were trying to help Kentucky. It was wrapped in an envelope that was then folded inside the coffee bag, with a copy of our Cub Pack picture and a custom bit of art drawn by one of the scouts sending a Christmas wish. Jonah and I had figured that it would be better to give this amount all to one person, or one family, who could really use the sum, rather than to pass it out in smaller and less-meaningful doses, which we didn’t have time that night to do anyhow.
After searching around the edges and in the direct-hit ruin of the tornado’s path through Dawson Springs, not sure what to do, the door presented itself to us. It belonged to a very modest brick, single-story apartment with a bed sheet printed with race cars tacked up in one of the windows. Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater were telling us that this was a house where kids live.
The lights were on. The woman who appeared at the door didn’t strike me at first as exactly the person to whom I wanted to hand this highly caffeinated bag of coffee. She seemed relatively alright, and that wasn’t what I was looking for. Trying not to appear as if I was interviewing her to see if she was a worthy recipient of this mysterious “last gift” that we had to give to someone, I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing with us what the night of the 10th was like.
Jonah and I, standing there in our Scout uniforms, me in my Stetson looking like the Man with the Yellow Hat from Curious George, I’m sure, to the 3-year-old kid who howled and wailed behind the storm door, closed so that his mother could talk to us, listened as this woman kindly told us of a night where “the five of them” pressed each other into a bath tub, listening to a sound that had no earthly equivalent with anything else she had ever experienced. Trauma beyond reckoning and fear that leaves a canyon inside of you that you might never be able to find the bottom of if you spent your whole life probing and your whole life daring to look, or trying not to. I realized that this is where we needed to leave our imprint.
A few minutes after pulling away from the shadowy, disheveled apartment complex, I said to Jonah, who was also smiling, “I bet they opened that bag of coffee and are feeling pretty good right now.” Jonah agreed. We talked about it, driving toward eastern Kentucky where we would stay the night in a motel that had clean sheets and all the television stations, the hot shower and usual perfect towels and bathroom amenities, semi-friendly motel clerk and all the expected things.
It hit me, then, as we drove and talked: giving them that money was of small importance. It’ll help with Christmas, sure, and maybe they needed it more than the woman who we met was letting on, guarding her pride… but what really happened in that moment, what really matters and amounts to something out of what we handed them there in that coffee bag is the story we gave to them, and that they, in turn, gave back to us. The one that we make for each other.
That’s what defines us as we go on, no matter what the circumstances: what we choose to create for each other as we face difficulties together, as well as celebrate the good things. That kid behind the storm door will be Jonah’s age one day and he’ll have maybe a vague memory to go along with the story his mother will tell him of a Webelo and a proud dad who showed up at the door from Colorado twelve days after the tornado and said with action — far more than anything expressed in words — that this is what we do for each other. This is who and what we are. This is how we make it count.
It’s not just the darkness. It’s also the light. If we are brave enough to be it for one another.
Jonathan Dobson
Pagosa Springs Cub Scout Pack 807
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