Disaster Tourism: Aching for That Lingering Look

A mighty weather front brought the clatter and roar of Summer tornadoes, with rushes of flooding rains riding on their swishing tails, into sweaty humid metro Louisville -- and thus to our vulnerable neighborhood -- in the mystic duskiness of last evening. It launched massive, silvery, madly-spinning harpoons, glinting and slanting savagely, this way then that way, right past our Cherry Springs. Too close, way too close, for any restfulness --

In the awful wreckage of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, for the rest of 2005, we often sadly referred to a daily sight with the odd name: 'disaster tourism.'

It looks like: SUVs full of people arrived from elsewhere. Snail's-pace drive by's. Necks craned at very odd angles -- little black and red smartphones shooting brilliant white flashes. Aching hunger to see -- for a little while -- what the charging weather bombs hath wrought. Staring blankly, jaws slack and distended slightly, at the ruins that once constituted some poor souls' homefront and livelihood. Curious. Hopeful the pictures will be good. And: Predatory. Words spoken in hushed tones, as if at a funeral. Japanese motorcar engines purring softly along the debris-laden, breezeless streets. Lacking, all ways, in human care and compassion.

Yes, the touchdowns, then stark and shattered aftermaths, of power storms -- Mother Nature in vivid, 3-D stop action -- seem to (predictably) spur a horrific thing inside otherwise 'normal' people . . .  Truth: I have beheld it again today . . . . Edgar Derby plaintively said:  And so it goes.