When the Wind Dies and We're Still Here Making…
When the Wind Dies and We're Still Here Making Things
Lead-in:
Someone left this behind after Hurricane Michael, wrapped in blue FEMA tarp to keep it dry. Could've been written by any of us who stayed—the artists, the stubborn ones, the ones who couldn't afford to leave. We all had the same things to say about what happens when a Category 5 tears through your life and you're left standing there with nothing but garbage and the strange need to make something from it.
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The first art arrives before we do—FEMA tarps spreading across our town like bandaids on a corpse. Deep sea blue. Tuna silver. Forest green. Mudslide brown. Each color has a catalog number. Someone in Washington picked these colors from a computer screen, never knowing they'd become the only colors we'd see for months.
There was this yellow house on Maple Street that—
Never mind.
We gather what the storm spit back. Yesterday—a child's beaded necklace strangling a stop sign. Today—splintered wood that still smells like Sunday pancakes. Someone's microwave, door hanging open like it's still waiting for their Hot Pocket to finish. We're tender with this garbage. We have to be. It used to be somebody's everything.
Jeremy found his grandmother's wig in a tree. Couldn't stop laughing. Then crying. Then he made it into something that looked like a nest. What else was he supposed to do? The insurance adjuster called our installations "evidence of pre-existing conditions." We agreed. The condition was capitalism. The condition was pretending the water wasn't coming.
We name pieces after storms like they're family. Katrina's tooth. Michael's fist. Maria's last fuck you.
The weather station keeps broadcasting numbers nobody needs anymore. We weave them into sculptures anyway—red thread for every degree over 95, torn fabric for wind speeds, metal twisted into pressure gradients. Some visiting curator called it "a notation system for catastrophe." Christ. It's just us trying not to go insane. We're making three-dimensional graphs of how rich countries burned the oil and now we're drowning in our beds. I can't stop stealing things from the wreckage. Little things. A button. A fork. Someone's reading glasses. The art is just an excuse to keep taking things that weren't mine anymore. That weren't anyone's.
Every Waffle House sign blown out except the 'W.' Just 'affle House' everywhere. Sounds about right.
Here's what nobody talks about: a Bentley floated past the shelter, perfect leather seats, classical music still playing from its waterproof speakers. There was a body stuck under a trailer nearby. Been there three days. The Bentley's GPS kept saying "recalculating route." I laughed until I threw up.
We photograph everything. We document everything. We stayed professional. I found my daughter's dollhouse six blocks from home. I'm not talking about that.
Linda stood in what used to be her door holding a Ziplock bag full of her son's baby teeth. Her eyes looked like they were still underwater. Still are. I took her picture because I didn't know what else to do. Up north, they'll call it "powerful." Down here, we call it Tuesday.
The rescue workers. Jesus. Watch them crawl through collapsed houses: "ANYONE HERE? ANYONE HERE?" calling out to absolutely nobody. They know nobody's answering. Marcus pulled apart an entire kitchen with his bare hands because he thought he heard something. It was a Big Mouth Billy Bass. Still singing "Take Me to the River." He laughed so hard he cried. Or cried so hard he laughed. Same thing now.
There was this yellow house on Maple Street where I learned to—
Anyway.
We make gardens now where houses were. Not metaphorical healing bullshit—actual dirt, actual seeds. Sarah planted tomatoes where her bedroom was. Waters them with bottled water that costs more than she made per hour before the storm. The vines are already climbing through her box spring. Nobody mentions that tomatoes are mostly water. Too on the nose.
But then Rodriguez found an intact disco ball in a church basement and we hung it from a dead oak and for one insane hour we had a dance party in the ruins. Everyone filthy and sobbing and laughing, covered in mud and glitter, dancing to music from someone's half-dead phone. The neighbors who evacuated will never understand. We don't need them to.
Sometimes I think we're idiots. Making wind chimes from destroyed churches while people need clean water. "Each installation is a rosary for the drowned world"—I actually wrote that in a grant application. They gave me five thousand dollars. I bought tarps and soup and one really good bottle of whiskey that we shared from paper cups at sunset, toasting nothing.
But yesterday, this kid—maybe eight—saw one of our installations. Just storm trash hanging from fishing line, spinning in the wind. Nothing special. He stood there for twenty minutes. Then: "It looks how my insides feel."
So we keep going. Obsessively. Stupidly. Tenderly. Making our garbage gardens and terror windchimes. Making questions out of broken answers. Making anything that proves we were here, in the after, unable to remember the before.
The truth? I don't know if this is art or elaborate littering. I don't know if we're artists or just the ones who couldn't afford to evacuate with our denial intact. But we're here, making things from the materials of our own undoing, because making things is what humans do when God or physics or whatever stops making sense.
The yellow house on Maple Street? That's where I was born. It's in seventeen different installations now. Scattered across the whole town. People are wearing pieces of my childhood as jewelry. They don't know. That's probably better.
Even when the wind dies—especially when the wind dies—we're left with just ourselves and all this beautiful garbage that used to be a world. So we make new worlds. Ugly ones. Holy ones. Ones that sound like thunder when the wind picks up.
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Coda:
We fasten our stories to trees because trees know how to survive things that should kill them. Most of the time.
