The Crucible of Catastrophe

Our capacity for kindness in mutual misery

I remember it clearly—it was a Tuesday morning in August—when the food ran out.

I don’t usually remember little details like the day of the week, but then again, this was unlike anything that ever happened to me. I remember it was a Tuesday because I don’t usually go to the grocery store on Tuesdays, but that morning, I had a doctor’s appointment, so I decided to swing by on my way home. It was just convenient. 

It’s funny now for me to consider that conception of getting food—that I could just “swing by” and pick it up, without even really stopping, en route to something else, something more important. But very soon, food became the most important thing; actually, the only thing. That and trying to stay cool. Because although most places in the northern hemisphere are hot in August, Texas is nearly infernal. 

I should have noticed how odd it was to see such a long line of cars in the parking lot of the grocery store. But at the time, I thought maybe there was just some summer sale of super sweet watermelon, or maybe a girl scout troupe was hawking their narcotic confections. I remember actually being a little pissed off, because I expected the store would be empty on a Tuesday morning. Like many times that week, my expectations were not only exceeded by reality, but roundly thrashed by it.

It wasn’t until I got inside the store that it became apparent to me that something was actually wrong. But I couldn’t put my finger on it… You know that feeling when you reunite with a friend after a few months absence, and they’ve gotten a haircut, or lost weight (or gained weight), and you know they look different, but you’re not sure exactly why? The store was like that. Gradually, a sensation arose in my consciousness: it felt like I was touring a construction site. But this store wasn’t new– it had been there for as long as I could remember. And yet, there was nothing on the shelves.

Inexplicably, people were wandering the aisles pushing their carts, even though there was obviously nothing to be found. Everything was picked clean, probably had been long since last night. Foolishly, I too grabbed a basket and walked a few laps before I realized it was futile. I didn’t have time to visit another store, so I just drove home. I assumed maybe this one shop had a supply chain issue; maybe they just lost one of their trucks over the night; maybe the went bankrupt. It didn’t really bother me. I just shrugged it off and kept going about my business. That was a mistake.

By the time I got home, I had already forgotten about the store, at least until I flipped on the TV about an hour later. In hindsight, I’m amazed at how aimless and thoughtless I was in the beginning of it all. But I guess we all were. The reporters were explaining that my snafu at the store was not an isolated incident; this was happening all over the southern coast. It’s hard to tell whether you can actually trust a reporter when they make bold claims like, “This is the largest hurricane ever recorded.” But at least it indicated to me the gravity of the situation. So I knew I had to do something. 

What do you do when you realize you are already way behind the curve? I stood there, stunned, for what must have been three full minutes, an agonizingly long time in such a dire scenario. But I didn’t know what to do. I was dumbfounded. Should I pack? What should I pack? Where will I go? How long will I be there? More questions arose than answers. Eventually, I just decided to move. Just get going. Somewhere, anywhere. I guess that was better than nothing, but again, I really should have thought about food. But it had never been an issue before. There was no conception in my mind of a world without food. It was unimaginable.

It’s funny what you remember and what you forget. I remember most of the beginning of the crisis in vivid detail, and the rest is just bits and pieces. I guess I was just under so much stress at the time that my brain didn’t have the capacity to use anything but RAM.  And even that was laggy. It probably would have gone much smoother if I had thought through these kinds of scenarios beforehand, but I just never expected any of them to actually occur in my lifetime. I’d read many stories, watched many fictional retellings of such events, but they were always just that—fictions. Until suddenly, they weren’t. Perhaps that explains why most of us were so dazed and confused. It felt more like a dream, or rather, a waking nightmare. We kept pinching ourselves. But to no avail.

The next thing I remember was driving down the interstate for hours. Well, “driving” is probably not the proper word. It was more like sitting in a very hot parking lot, with the occasional idling every few minutes. I don’t think I touched the accelerator pedal once. And Texas in summer is like the big flat grill at an old fashioned diner—the pavement seems to be heated from beneath by propane jets. I think the ground was hotter than the sun itself, somehow. And we had the air conditioning turned off, in order to save gas, and I remember the beads of sweat that rested on my upper lip. I also remember the distinct pattern of perspiration where my shirt had totally soaked through: one pond in the center of my chest, two puddles under my armpits, and then my entire backside was an active, flowing stream of sweat. I don’t, however, remember what the sky looked like. I just remember trying to avert my gaze from the blazing ball of fire that was apparently cooking us all alive.

Instead, I remember the sounds. Oddly enough, I didn’t hear horns honking. I didn’t hear people shouting, music blaring, or babies crying. It was very peculiar. The only thing I heard was the sound of cicadas buzzing like mad. I never hear them anymore these days. But anytime I come back to Texas in the summer months, I am instantly transported back to that time. As a teenager, their buzzing used to remind me of days at the local pool as a little kid, but now they remind me of that interminable stretch of time on that hellacious highway.

Finally, after what must have been about 8 hours (it should have taken 50 minutes), we arrived at the stadium. Fortunately, because of the sweltering weather in that region, the stadium had a roof. But sometimes this felt less like a blessing than a curse when the heat from the collective metabolic combustion of nearly 100,000 bodies was trapped within that dome. It was literally a pressure cooker. We were all of us stressed, anxious, sweaty, hungry, tired, frustrated. Whose fault was this? Certainly not ours. 

And then, the lines began. On top of the snail’s pace exodus from the city proper, once we actually got near the stadium, there were more lines. There were lines in order to exit the freeway and to park in the lot. Once out of our cars, there were lines to get into the stadium. Once inside, there were lines to get a bed (or rather, some space on the floor to make a bed, if we had had the foresight to bring anything to that purpose). Then lines to use the bathroom. Then lines to get food. There was certainly not enough of that to go around. But at this point, even some meager rations were sufficient; anything was better than the hydrochloric cauldron bubbling within our bellies. 

And then, the next day, the unthinkable happened—once again, the food ran out. I remember that mouths literally stood agape. It was almost comical. We had never once been truly hungry in all of our lives. Maybe we had skipped a meal or two, but when it came down to it, if we were really desperate, we could always go to a restaurant, or the corner store, or at least a food bank. But this was different. It started out as a mere annoyance. Then it became very irritating. Then miserable. And then, eventually, it felt like near-prehistoric levels of hunger pains. Only refugees and the homeless feel this kind of hunger these days. And, us, in that stadium.

Sometimes, even to this day, I jolt up in my bed in the middle of the night, my mind trying to interrupt a terrible dream which resembles that period—endless lines, endless sweat, endless anxiety, endless hunger. In those semi-conscious midnight stupors, I’ll remember a snippet of the disaster which I thought I had completely forgotten. It’s funny how scraps of memory like that seem to disappear, only to reappear in the most unlikely of times. And I imagine that there are probably whole swaths of time that were just never encoded into my mental hard drive, things that happened to me that I’ll never recall, even if someone were to recount the story to me, or show me a video with me in it. Human memory is fragile.

But there’s one thing I’ll never forget about that week, and in particular that second day, when the food ran out. It might just be me trying to justify the intense amount of suffering I had to go through. But I don’t truly believe that. I honestly believe that it was a blessing to have gone through that hurricane. Like many things in life, we don’t realize their significance until long after they have passed. They may be absolutely miserable in the moment, but yet in the long run so immeasurably priceless, so incalculably valuable, that we could never recreate the events under any circumstances, no matter how we might try.

As I stood bewildered amongst the crowd, I felt a certain sense of detachment, and there was this quote from George Carlin that kept looping in my mind: “I love individuals, but I hate groups of people.” And I remember thinking that this hellhole was going to be the perfect demonstration of that principle. Humanity is easy to love in the abstract, but once you get an actual group of living, breathing, stinking, pissed off people together, you can imagine how things can quickly become ugly. I remember thinking that we were going to witness something like Black Friday, but this time with real stakes—we would be fighting over MREs instead of LCDs. If we could tear each other down for something so completely inessential as a wide-screen television, how much more awful would we get if our lives were on the line? I kept imagining something like Lord of the Flies: “Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.”

But what was so shocking to me, what’s still so shocking to me after all these years, what shocks me even now as I try to piece together the scraps of what it felt like during that whole dreadful nightmare—there was no violence. People were not barbaric with one another as I had expected; no, they were uncharacteristically kind. I saw a group of, shall we say, rough-looking, young men who yesterday would have laughingly taken the seat of an elderly person on a public bus, just for the spite of it. Those same men were today calm, demur, even polite. They were making themselves useful, carrying other people’s bags, helping others up or down the stairs, literally lending a helping hand. Another group of old ladies who yesterday wouldn’t have wasted a second at a fancy dinner to coarsely complain to their waiter that their food was not exactly to their satisfaction—even now dressed in their pearls and lace dresses and handbags—today those same women were sweating it out just like the rest of us, their faces set with a calm determination and mild acceptance of the state of things. Not a single indication that they were irritated, uncomfortable.

I saw humanity transformed before my eyes in that cavern of collective calamity. Somehow in the midst of all that shared misery, we came together as human beings. We did not descend into imitations of apes, but transcended into emulations of angels. It was so far out of the norm from our daily lives— rife with the arguing and bickering of politicians on TV, their adherents following suit in bars and on the streets, every man and woman out for herself, a dog-eat-dog world, the default attitude of distrust of strangers, the ceaseless shielding of our children from the so-called evils and hazards of the immoral outside world, the selfish infighting among families, infidelity between lovers, self-serving and shameless actions in our careers, our habits, our hobbies, our homes— all of that was eradicated in a moment. Finally, like the old times, we had something to fight for, together, and we all needed each other, and no one was going to be trod upon, no matter how unsavory or unfortunate.

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” —Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor

The conditions of the stadium did not improve with the passing of each day. We never got used to the cramped quarters, the sweltering heat, the gnawing hunger that seemed to forever linger, the worries about whether our homes would be livable— or still standing at all—when we returned to the city. But instead of getting worse, our attitudes and relationships only got better. We were in this together. No amount of complaining was going to serve any of us. It wasn’t going to ease our pain, or improve our situation. Thus, no one complained. No one even frowned. We just got through it. Hour by sweaty, starving hour.

There is something about shared misery that changes us into who we were truly meant to be. We begin to love one another, unconditionally. In normal life, when one party is suffering disproportionately, they will clamor and complain, and often rightfully so. But just as often, this is really due to some silly entitlement, or lack of appreciation for how much worse things could and should be, were we not so fortunate. But during a catastrophe, when we are all suffering, when we are all fighting the same specter—whether war or heat or hunger—we come together. We lean on each other. We soothe and reassure and smile (even if grimly). We suppress our sorrows. We shoulder on. 

I don’t miss that period, but I do miss the feeling of camaraderie we had during it. I wish we could retain that love, without having to endure such intense misery and despondency. I try to keep the feeling with me, but I often forget. I guess we all do that. We adjust our expectations to the status quo, and then, we want more.

But sometimes, when I’m trapped in the airport for hours, or stuck in line at the store for an unreasonably long time, or placed on hold for what seems like an eternity with some faceless corporation that has somehow wronged me, I try to cast my mind back to that August. I try to remember how much worse things could be, and therefore how good I have it.

But more than that, I try to remember how amazing we can be as a group of humans, when the going really gets tough. I know we all have that capability, regardless of our age, our personality, our financial situation, our strength or intelligence. We can forbear.

I hear an oft-repeated complaint that our country is going to hell in a handbasket, that the youth no longer embody traditional values, that we don’t know how to be polite to each other, or how to work hard, or how to serve our communities, or revere God. Perhaps those things are true, but perhaps we just don’t have anything to fight for right now. We don’t have a world war, or a holocaust, or a genocide, or an unprecedentedly massive hurricane. 

I imagine the worst thing that could happen to us would be some kind of disaster which keeps us apart, alone and in our homes, separated from one another. Perhaps that’s when the distrust and selfishness and self-pity rear their ugly heads Perhaps that’s when we are at our worst, as a species. But when we are together, when we can see the suffering that each of us is going through, when we can touch and hold one another, lend a hand, or a shoulder, we are amazing. I hope I don’t have to go through that kind of disaster again, but if I do, I know we’ll be alright. There’s one thing from that experience that I’ll never forget:

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In the crucible of catastrophe, we are uncharacteristically kind.

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