By Patrick Beach
Austin American-Statesman
JARRELL, Texas -- Where it hit, a few trees still stand.
They're shorn of leaves and bark, bent at cockeyed angles and bowed like weeping willows, but their roots held them.
This town is still here, too. It has a post office, a bank, a store, a barbecue joint, a bar and a Baptist church. In such places people come together and a town's character is woven, and Jarrell still has them all. Even after the sky turned boiling black one afternoon last week. Even after some 50 homes were lifted up and smashed onto the countryside, leaving 27 dead. The people of Jarrell have stood their ground through a five-day march through incomprehensible violence, ghastly cleanup, a wave of grief as powerful as the tornado that delivered it and, finally, a tentative procession toward something like normal life.
This is how it happened. There is no proper explanation.
There is no why.
It came slowly, rumbling out of the north. Especially from the development on the western edge of town, you can see a vast expanse of sky. And so many of those who were home saw that sky begin to change colors, and they reflexively switched on their TV sets and radios to hear those staccato bulletins coming out of the National Weather Service.
The flare-ups -- ``tornadic cells'' in meteorological lingo -- started erupting up and down Interstate 35, starting near Waco, 60 miles north of here.
Charlie Boren was taking a nap.
Bud Taylor was behind the bar at the Speedway Inn, and he and his wife, Betty, decided they'd better go hide in the bathroom.
Larry Hausenfluke, Jarrell's superintendent of schools, was huddled under I- 35.
Rancher Byron Goode got in his pickup and headed south.
The Ruiz boys, John and Michael, knew that their mobile home was unsafe in a tornado, and so they got on their bikes and headed over to their family friends, the Moehrings.
The control of nature is beyond the realm of human possibility, but we keep from going crazy by clinging to the belief that, because our homes and families were safe yesterday and the day before, they will be so when we return tonight and tomorrow and the day after that. We negotiate a bargain with nature, settling for shelter in the absence of perfect, complete, unattainable safety. We assume everything will be fine, because we have to in order to get through the day.
And every once in a while, nature breaks its part of the deal.
The siren at the volunteer fire department, with the Christmas star affixed to its tower, started blaring. Later, around 3:15 p.m., the storm, shuffling along at a leisurely 20 mph, announced itself at the northwest edge of town.
A corpulent twister -- or twins, or six, nobody knows for sure yet -- dropped out of the clouds.
``That sky was black as night, just boiling,'' said Bud Taylor. ``Like a dad-gum big bull getting ready to charge. Seemed like it set there for 10 minutes making up its mind which way to go.''
When it passed them, Bud and Betty came out of the bathroom and started setting up beers for rattled residents.
Hausenfluke: ``That tornado moved slower and stayed over people longer than any one I'd ever seen before. That tornado sat on the ground here for a full 15 or 20 minutes. It was slow-moving but powerful.''
At 3:30, Williamson County Constables Gary Griffin and Dennis Jaroszewski blocked off northbound I-35 just south of town. There was heavy hail and multiple tornado sightings.
Joe Hoes of Joe's Country Barbecue, on the east side of the interstate, saw a funnel cloud approach his home before splitting into two separate storm clouds -- the larger one headed west.
Charlie Boren was still asleep. His girlfriend, Diane Howell, had headed off for the beauty shop a few minutes earlier, but she turned around -- toward the storm -- to get Boren out. The car was moving when his rear end hit the passenger seat.
The thing came down a gentle slope toward Double Creek Estates and the area around it and dropped, sucking the vegetation out of the ground. It ripped a long section of asphalt out of County Road 307, the road into town.
Then it brought death. To the east of County 305, people died. To the west, people merely thought they would.
Much later, when there was time for counting, these were the numbers: of 131 residents, 27 were dead. Some 50 homes destroyed. Damage between $10 and $20 million.
The twister unloaded most furiously on a stretch of land about nine-tenths of a mile long, but it moved along for miles further south. Driving rain came behind it, and then the emergency crews. Huddled survivors opened their eyes to see sky where the ceiling was supposed to be.
The area was sealed off. Griffin and Jaroszewski got there just after 4, and soon it looked like everybody in Central Texas with a uniform was there, looking for survivors. A volunteer firefighter arrived at what was once somebody's house and said, ``We know there's supposed to be a lady here with a little girl.''
Hausenfluke spent some time at the site, then went back to the office and told his secretary the school would have to stay open. Jaroszewski, who works part-time as a security guard at the Wal-Mart Superstore in Round Rock, called the night manager for help with supplies around 4:30. He got the run of the store: ``I took a whole truckload of meat and cheese to make sandwiches out there,'' Jaroszewski said.
Relief agencies and the national media were all heading for the town of what had been something more than 400 souls.
It stopped raining, it started getting dark and the grim work continued into the night. Infra-red cameras arrived, along with hundreds of dollars' worth of donated batteries to run them.
Jaroszewski: ``All we found was dead cows, dead horses and dead people. As you looked and found more and more bodies, you just said, `Isn't this enough?' ''
After death and sadness and mayhem on such a scale, can anything be the taken for granted? Can you believe that the world makes sense at all, that the sun will even come up the next day?
Coming in from the east before dawn, Jarrell looked utterly at peace. It slept to the song of truck tires up and down the interstate. But on the west side, where a rural neighborhood was supposed to be, there was yellow tape and a whole lot of men with badges, bright lights running on mobile generators. The mission was changing, from rescuing survivors to recovering the scattered remains of the dead.
At Doc's One Stop, which was flattened in the last tornado, the one in May of '89, folks started turning out after a night of unrestful sleep or no sleep at all, looking for coffee and community.
At 9, Joe Hoes and his wife Louise were cooking up barbecue -- not to sell for the lunch regulars, but to repay the community that helped them rebuild after their home was destroyed in the last one.
``It's hard to start over; I don't think I could if I had to again,'' said Hoes, 55. ``I wouldn't have a house if I didn't have friends.''
The Salvation Army was in front of the fire department, the Red Cross at the school, the Baptists next to the Baptist church. None of the suddenly homeless needed to sleep at the school Tuesday night, because they had friends or family nearby. There was a message board, a safe list, bags and boxes of clothing and supplies.
At midday, bad news was dispensed, privately, at the First Baptist Church, which lost 10 percent of its congregation.
Gov. George W. Bush came in a helicopter and landed in the schoolyard at noon after flying over the destruction zone. He greeted survivors and told them he was sorry, and he visited a flock of people at the school.
``You got you a summer haircut, don't you?'' he asked a crewcut kid.
He thanked the Boy Scouts for being there. He told the homeless he sure was sorry.
He stepped outside, made a statement to the press pack and signed a disaster proclamation for Williamson County. Then he stepped back inside for some more talk with the locals, and worked his way toward the back door to the chopper.
The National Weather Service confirmed what people here already knew: It was as bad as a tornado gets. The thing that hit Jarrell, Texas, on the afternoon of May 27, 1997, was a Force 5, the highest on the scale, with winds of more than 300 mph.
The survivors, who had to remind themselves that they were lucky, began assessing what was lost and reflecting on lives that would never be the same.
There was Juanitta Peterson, whose house caved in and who lost seven horses. She hid in an interior bathroom with her daughter, daughter-in-law and two children.
``I just thank God we're alive -- it's so bad that so any people are dead,'' Peterson said.
Lynette Tonn was at the first place the tornado hit, crying, trying to impose order on an impossible mess with a broom. Nearby, at the top of the hill, was where Lynette's mother's house was supposed to be. Nobody lived there, but it was the repository of family heirlooms and it was gone -- a pier-and-beam house, and all that was left was the piers.
Family friend Joe Sladecek, 73, stood there, looking south.
``Some people don't believe in God. I tell them to look around,'' he said, passing his hand over the horizon. ``All the cattle and sheep, all gone. Dead.''
A little girl looked for her calico kitten, maybe four weeks old, which lay dead in the dirt a few feet from where Sladecek stood. It looked as if it were asleep, except its legs were splayed in the wrong directions.
As an ironic affront to the suffering townspeople, it was a superficially gorgeous day. But specks on the ground in the distance turned out to be bloated cattle. And there was a palpably heavy odor in the air, unpleasantly sweet.
The justices of the peace were making a list of victims: the manner by which they were identified -- prints, dental records, photographs -- followed by name, sex and race, date of birth and body bag number.
Late that night, the names of the dead started coming.
Al Clawson exploded like a prophet in the Old Testament.
A tall man with a long beard, Clawson stepped in front of a group of reporters waiting for a morning briefing and vented: He was not dead. His business was not destroyed. His employees still had jobs. He was not being allowed onto his property, he had had more than he could take and he would very much appreciate the media delivering his message to the world at large.
Pressure valves, once opened, are sometimes hard to shut. And that's what happened until noon, when all the residents were allowed to return to the place that was somebody's land but nobody's home: They decried public officials for not telling them the fate of their kin. They wanted to search for family, pets, freezers full of valuable food.
But they didn't understand, because they couldn't until they actually saw.
Then they understood. Most of them needed just a few small boxes to haul away what was left.
They saw a tractor-trailer rig smashed more than 1,000 feet from where it had been parked. A stuffed toy flung into a fence. A TV sprayed with mud on an otherwise bare slab. A Dennis Eckersley baseball card. Fleetwood Mac's ``Rumours'' album. A bedsprings wrapped around a utility pole. Nintendo cartridges. Two-ton pieces of farm equipment where living rooms were supposed to be. An R.L. Stine children's book. A welded steel pole fence, anchored with concrete sunk into the ground, bent at almost a 45-degree angle by cattle that had been blown into it.
All of it was trash. They looked upon all this and they knew why it was taking so long to identify some of the victims.
But workers were already reclaiming the land, disputing the notion that nature could do whatever it wished here. Utility poles went up and, shortly after that, street signs to places that only existed on maps.
Laughter came back.
It wasn't hysterical, punchy laughter, the laughter of the exhausted and frazzled. It was the laughter of people beginning to remember they enjoyed one another's company.
Byron Goode, the rancher who outran the storm in his pickup, sat in the Speedway Inn with a cowboy hat on his head and a cold beer in his hand, trading storm stories with Bud Taylor, who was again behind the bar.
Goode, 56, had some roof damage and some fence that needed fixing, but he didn't lose a single head of cattle. A neighbor lost 109 out of 112 head, so Goode felt more than a little fortunate as he ruminated on the events of the past few days.
He told Taylor about the 1,700-pound bull he'd found covered in mud and wearing an expression that said, ``What was that?''
The men had a meeting of minds. It was an awful week, but it was certainly memorable, they decided.
``Hell, I had Tom Brokaw's crew in my driveway yesterday,'' Goode said with a laugh.
Still, Taylor had the Weather Channel on, and he didn't like what he saw.
``I hate to see that barometer dropping,'' he said.
Around 2:30 p.m. they reopened the disaster zone and the gawkers arrived with a swiftness that suggested some kind of telepathic notification. This led to something even rarer than tornados in Jarrell: traffic gridlock. People came off the highway, rolled down their windows and hollered, ``Where'd that thing hit?'' A few people even appeared to be tourists, posing for pictures in front of piles of rubble.
At a house just outside the disaster area, the washing was done and hung out in the sunshine to dry.
Standing in front of the fire department over which he's presided for some 23 years, Johnny Martinka was surprised to find he had a little time to talk.
``It's a transition now, I guess,'' he said. ``From this to the funerals.''
The firehouse flag flew at half-staff. The visitations and memorials were beginning.
And then the weather intruded again. A fat belt of thunderstorms rolled down out of Waco. Shortly before 6 p.m. somebody reported another twister headed for town. The firemen set off the siren again, and people fled.
Nobody died this time. There was no damage other than to residents' jangled nerves.
They are burying their dead now, honoring them, remembering they were people before they were victims. The area will be cleaned up and the psychic aftershocks will manifest themselves in a myriad of ways. Once the task of getting through each day becomes a little easier, they'll mark the weeks, then months, then years.
``When school starts, those chairs will be empty,'' school superintendent Hausenfluke said. ``The kids will have to deal with that again. We know the first time it clouds up and we have a thunderstorm we'll have to deal with a lot of scared children, a lot of scared parents.''
Some are scared even when the weather is clear. A handful of survivors don't care to be around this luckless tornadic hot zone any longer, and they're leaving. But most everybody will stick around because bigger towns are too busy and crowded and expensive. When things like this happen in towns like this, your neighbors make sure you have hot food and a place to stay. Before their head hits the pillow at night, they're apt to say a prayer for you, too.
If this town is your town, there is no place in the world like it.
Look at those trees out where it hit. They're pretty beat up, but they didn't pick up and leave. Their roots keep them here.
Still.