GRIEGO: Kids need to hear story of rebuilding in Windsor

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 9, 2008 at midnight
Updated June 9, 2008 at 9:28 a.m.

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Matt McClain © The Rocky

Maggie Barnhill tries to coax her son, Riley Barnhill, 6, to look at his tornado- damaged room Saturday for the first time since a tornado that hit Windsor on May 22 destroyed much of the second story of the Barnhill home.

Maggie Barnhill of 707 Cornerstone Drive called her mother to tell her a newspaper reporter would be writing about her family and three others as they recovered from the May 22 tornado.

Now, why, her mother asked, would you want to discuss intimate details of your life in the newspaper?

The question stumped Maggie for a second. Her first thought turned to the practical value for readers - do they have an inventory of their belongings, sufficient homeowner's insurance? It's not just our story, she told her mom. It's about the community, what people are going through. If the story gives insight on that, it might offer people a whole new perspective on other, more immense catastrophes like Katrina or the earthquakes in China.

It's a good question. It's one all people I write about in detail must ask themselves. It means having a reporter underfoot for months. It means a barrage of questions, many impertinent. The fact is all explanations of what the experience might be like are insufficient.

Still, I try. I tell the families of Cornerstone Drive I will ask questions about their finances, emotions and relationships. I tell them I will respect the boundaries they set, though I may test them from time to time.

A tornado tore through their neighborhood, and now they must rebuild. In that experience lies a story beyond drywall and trusses and insurance forms. It is the oldest story - the struggle and resilience of the human spirit.

It's that which draws me to most of what I write, and I struggled for a long time to express this sentiment until I found someone already had.

The only thing worth writing about is a heart in conflict with itself, William Faulkner said, and so no room exists in writer's workshop for anything but "the truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

These truths, in the aftermath of disaster, are not only present, they are magnified.

The day after the tornado, Maggie and Jim Barnhill sent their two children on vacation with Jim's parents. It was hard for Maggie to do. She was home with Riley, their youngest, when the storm descended. Ceci, just days from her 9th birthday, was at school. Maggie had picked up Riley from kindergarten and made soup and sandwiches. They decided to picnic in the living room, setting plates on an old wood crate, lighting a candle.

The hail was pounding and the two of them went to watch it through a kitchen window. Baseball-sized ice chunks slammed into the deck and the wind grew stronger when, whoosh, two resin deck chairs flew skyward.

"We gotta go," she said to Riley, swinging her body between him and window, arm around his shoulders, moving toward the basement stairs, backtracking to grab the candle. A couple steps down, the windows blew.

After the tornado, she told Jim she didn't want to send the kids on vacation; she wanted them near her. Think about it, he said. She did. And pictured them stepping on glass or plunging off the mangled second floor. In their bedroom upstairs, the two outer walls, roof, ceiling; everything in it had been stripped away. A neighbor two doors down would find Maggie's pajamas in his basement. If he weren't 90 years old, I might have some questions about that, Jim would joke later.

The storm heaved the giant cottonwood tree in the backyard toward the house, sending it smashing into Riley's bedroom.

Jim was at work in Johnstown, about 20 minutes south. He's an assistant principal at Roosevelt High School. The power had gone out, and he hadn't heard anything about a tornado when he picked up Maggie's voicemail: We're OK. In case you heard about the tornado. House . . . not so good. Come home as soon as you can.

I was at their house on Cornerstone when Ceci and Riley returned a week later. After the hugs and kisses, the kids took their first good look at what had become of their house.

Riley didn't want to go inside. "I'm afraid," he said. It's OK, Maggie told him; you can stay here. But he didn't want to do that, either, so he followed his mom through the front door, stepping gingerly over the glass and clumps of insulations and chunks of drywall.

"Oh, gosh," he said. "What happened here?"

A plastic tarp covers the enormous hole left in the roof and ceiling, casting the upstairs rooms in dim, blue light. Riley took one look at the collapsed walls of his bedroom and tarp in his parents' room and turned around. "I'm going outside 'cause this is scary in here."

Both kids drew pictures describing the tornado. Riley scribbled a giant, chaotic spiral looming over the broken house. Ceci drew two houses, hers and her friends' Jenny and Katie Zrubek next door. She wrote: "The best place in the world runed by a tornado."

Last week, Maggie showed the drawings to a friend of hers, Susan Rymer, a former colleague from her days as a special education teacher.

Don't let the story end there, Susan said.

What do you mean?

You need to tell your own story.

How do I do that?

You start out by saying there was once a little boy and a little girl, and one day a tornado came. You tell about how they rebuilt their lives, and you make it better; you make it all turn out all right.

The kids couldn't sleep that night. Tell us a story, they said.

Once there was a little boy and a little girl, Maggie began, and one day a tornado came, and they were so brave. After the tornado, all their friends came and helped them clean, and they found the little boy's tool box, and he got to hammer nails with his dad, and the little girl helped her mom put up siding, and they built their house back, and their friends built their houses back, too, and everyone played together again.

Ceci started crying. She looked at her mom, and if Maggie had to describe her daughter's expression, she'd say it said: I know what you are doing, thank you; everything is going to be OK.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

Cornerstone Chronicles

is an occasional series following four Windsor families as they rebuild their lives after the May 22 tornado that killed one person, destroyed 80 homes and damaged nearly 800 others.

• June 9, 2008

  7:02 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  nonayerbsns writes:

  "Still, I try. I tell the families of Cornerstone Drive I will ask questions about their finances, emotions and relationships. I tell them I will respect the boundaries they set, though I may test them from time to time."

  You 'test' them? Either you respect them or you don't. I guess, in your search for pithy, emotional crappola, you will 'test' them. Icky, is pretty much the only (acceptable) adjective that comes to mind.

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