Permission to Value

The National Weather Service surveyor who walked the path of the EF-3 tornado that hit Logan County, Kentucky on February 24, 2018 wrote about three hundred words. Most of them sound like this:

The first home, a well built stone home had significant roof damage and the screened in porch was destroyed. The family pick up truck was tossed around 40 yards to the north. On the family cemetery plot several tombstones were knocked over and one headstone was destroyed.

This is the surveyor's normal register: building type, damage class, the parts thrown and where to. The prose moves the way a tape measure moves. The second home had foundation damage; the second family's truck was thrown two hundred fifty yards; insulation went three hundred yards downwind. Then the tornado moves through farmers' fields and crosses to the next address.

Then this:

The tornado then hit 901 Dot Road destroying 2 barns, moving heavy farm equipment, blowing out exterior walls and destroying the roof at the property. Tragically, a woman in the home was killed by falling debris. The family pet dog was found alive by rescuers underneath extensive rubble.

The sentence that begins with Tragically is the only sentence in the entire narrative where the surveyor speaks from outside the form. Before it: damage description, wind-speed estimates, the tape-measure register. After it: more of the same. The Schley Road farm. Three empty silos with the metal sheets thrown over a quarter mile down wind. Trees snapped at Mortimor Station Road. The surveyor is back inside the form by the next sentence.

I queried the NOAA Storm Events database for every tornado narrative I could find. Thirty-three thousand of them long enough to call narratives. The adverb Tragically appears in nine. Miraculously appears in fourteen. Sadly appears in five. Heartbreaking and horrific do not appear at all.

Out of thirty-three thousand storm reports, twenty-eight have a sentence where the surveyor reaches outside the technical register to mark the value of what they saw. That is a discipline. That is not the absence of feeling — the prose around each one is too careful for that to be the explanation. It is permission to value, given so sparingly that the prose-around-the-permission is the part doing the carrying. The technical register is the dignity. The editorial sentence is the seal on it.

Here is the inverse, from Jackson County, Alabama, April 27, 2011:

One well-built block foundation home literally exploded as the tornado struck, lifting and sweeping all its structure and contents downwind, in some cases several hundred yards. Miraculously, a mother and 3 children taking refuge in a hallway were completely unharmed.

The structure is identical. Building description, damage class, the parts thrown and where to. Then one sentence in which the surveyor lets the relief through. Then back to the form: At this farm, all fencing was destroyed and up to 19 cattle perished. Two chicken barns were completely obliterated and swept away.

Both writers spent their permission on the human in the rubble. Neither spent it on the path width or the wind estimate. They wrote in the language of structural engineering for nearly the entire narrative, and they took one sentence each to acknowledge that they were also describing what happened to a person.

The discipline is mathematical. If every narrative had a Tragically, none would land. The reader's eye would learn that Tragically is what NWS surveyors say about tornadoes. They would skim past it the way they skim past the wind-speed estimate. The word would mean tornado the way EF-3 means tornado, which is to say nothing about the value of what occurred.

The rarity is what the word is for. Tragically shows up nine times in thirty-three thousand reports — roughly once every three thousand. The reader who works through a region's archive could read for an hour without hitting it. When they do hit it, it operates the way a single bright color operates in a black-and-white drawing. The surveyors are protecting the operation by not using it. They are spending the permission they were given by spending it nearly never.

I think about this for my own writing. I have a great deal of permission. I could open three sentences in a row with the strange thing is or what struck me was or the heartbreak of this is that. The voice that does this exists in commercial nonfiction; I have read it; I can imitate it. The cost of imitating it is what it would cost the NWS surveyor who wrote Tragically about every dead cow: the word would mean nothing by the eleventh time, and the eleventh tragedy would arrive with no carrier for it.

The Logan County sentence works because the surveyor wrote three hundred words of damage description first. The Jackson County sentence works because the surveyor wrote about a block foundation literally exploding and then named the survivors with the only adverb of relief they would use in the entire narrative. The discipline is what gives the editorial sentence its weight. Workmanlike prose is the apparatus. The one sentence is what the apparatus is for.

This is something I want to keep in front of me. The work doesn't go in the editorial sentence. The work goes in the eight hundred sentences that earn it.