Disaster at a distance

As Nicolas Tamborrel peered out of his brother’s windshield, the caravan of cars strapped with mismatched belongings, U-Haul trailers full of knick knacks and memories and trucks brimming with furniture had come to a standstill after hours of driving at 20 mph. Just outside of Tallahassee, Florida, all that met the eye, straight to the horizon, were red brake lights, flooding the road. In two days, Hurricane Irma was set to level South Florida.

Nicolas, who moved to Miami when he was three years old, is a Northwestern junior with a dark brown shock of hair and the kind of nonchalant aura only a South Floridian can possess. He set out on the trek from his home to Atlanta, Georgia on a Friday in September just two days before the storm, along with the 5.6 million others fleeing the state: they were heeding the largest evacuation orders since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. The hurricane would make landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 that Sunday. So while his mom and younger brother, a Northwestern first-year student, flew to O’Hare for Wildcat Welcome, Nicolas and his older brother hopped into the black Tiguan with their black lab cowering and bichon frise sunbathing in the back seat. They trailed their dad who drove a silver Tahoe, with a mini U-Haul trailer latched on to the back. The U-Haul was half empty, carrying only irreplaceable momentos; all Nicolas had packed for school was a suitcase.

“Guess we’re not gonna have a house later,” he thought as they shuttered up their home and drove away. Yet the U-Haul was cluttered only with yearbook pictures, pieces of art and his grandmother’s silver tea set. His elementary school trophies still lay in his room. His turtle and bird had a 50/50 chance of making it. He watched as his Waze traffic app slowly ticked up their arrival time: a trip that would normally take 11 hours stretched out to 23 on the never ending road.

With an increase in global temperatures, the warm waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have increasingly become breeding grounds for catastrophic hurricanes. Hurricanes Michael, Florence, Maria, Irma and Harvey have all ravaged coasts and islands in the past three years. While Nicolas’ home barely curbed destruction this time around, scientists say these storms will only get worse. Forest fires in California break out with more fury and breadth as environmental pollution increases global warming. And the warming of the oceans will increase the moisture in the atmosphere, which will likely lead to stronger blizzards in the winter.

For students who live in these disaster- prone regions, sometimes life has to be packed into a suitcase and shipped off to school. Their homes become carry-ons, and in finding solace in Evanston, they leave everything – family, community, the tangible and intangible tokens of home – behind.

Before the storm

Two days before the hurricane and just over 100 miles away from Nicolas, junior Hannah Brown was lying on her bed in her home in the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys: Key West. She was jolted awake by her distressed mother telling her, “we have to evacuate.” Not a morning person, Hannah begrudgingly got out of bed and started to take in the growing anxiety surrounding the incoming storm, as it played out on television sets across the island. Her family piled into two cars and raced against Irma to Orlando, Florida. Hannah prefaced this story by matter of factly stating she isn’t a sentimental or material person. She instead looks to the landscape and vegetation of the island as tokens of her memories. And these hurricanes usually blow over. Her friends typically opted for watching the storm unfold from her front porch or the occasional “hurricane party.” During Hurricane Katrina, she casually stood with a towel up to the crack of her front door where water was dripping through. But as the fear settled in, Hannah reached for her great-grandmother’s hand-me-down pearls, the ones she never took to school because she was too afraid of losing them, and packed her childhood chapter books into her suitcase. This time it was different.

As they drove past the “100 miles until Miami” sign down the lone road out of the island, all she could think was, “this is the last time I’ll see this sign again.”

Two days later, Irma would ravage the Florida Keys, leaving families homeless, without power and scrambling to get back on even footing. Fortunately, Hannah’s home was spared, but she wouldn’t return to see it until December. She flew directly from Orlando to Chicago with her dad as her family waited out the three weeks that would pass before they could return to Key West.

“A lot of my friends in the Upper Keys are ... still living in hotels or in temporary housing,” she says. “I had several friends that were going to school in Florida that had to come home for a semester because their parents couldn’t afford the tuition with the expenses of fixing their houses ... or even just to support their family.”

Hannah was essentially “lucky.” The storm short-circuited her fridge, and her grandparents’ home needed some plumbing repairs, but her life seemed to be back to normal. Yet only a few days prior, she was sitting in a powerless living room in Orlando.

“I’m sitting on my aunt’s couch, my aunt’s dog is losing its shit. It’s actually shaking in fear, and I’m looking at this dog and I’m like, ‘that’s how I feel right now,’” she says. Would her parents have a place to stay? Would they be able to afford tuition at Northwestern? Would she have to come home from school to give them time to get the money together to repair the house? She couldn’t shake these questions from her mind.

While Northwestern students were going about their daily responsibilities, students like Hannah were throwing themselves into work and routine to try to shroud the guilt they were feeling from seeing their communities work to rebuild, while they remained a plane ride away, holding on to a home they no longer recognized.

Rebuilding from away

Lillian Aff, a sophomore with clunky glasses and a tendency to laugh before she says something dismal, had to watch as her county in California burned to ashes during her first month at Northwestern. The Tubbs fire was the second most destructive fire in California history, and 23 days passed before the flames were contained. The fire’s toll was the largest in Sonoma, where Lillian is from, with 24 people killed and 5,300 homes lost. Across Northern California, insured losses from the fires reached $15 billion. At the start of October, classes were just picking up. While she sat in courses like Introduction to Reporting and Writing, her friends’ homes were ablaze over 2,000 miles away.

“After one month at college, my hometown is burning,” she says, laughing uncomfortably before she continues. “It was pretty sad for me. And I tried to help, but since I was so far away I couldn’t really do anything for anybody.”

Her family was safe out of the fire zone, but her friends texted her daily updates about which part of Sonoma County was burning down next. She didn’t know how to cope, and kept falling into a depressive state thinking, “I’m going to come back and there’s going to be nothing.” So she sought out CAPS for the first time. Lillian went up to her reporting and writing professor in the middle of class and told her, “I have to leave, I can’t be here today.” She couldn’t bring herself to attend classes for over a week.

“It was just a really intense, painful experience for me because I felt guilty, even though there was nothing I could’ve done,” she says.

Hannah felt culpable too. When she pulled up to her dorm after her flight from Orlando and carried her overstuffed suitcase up the stairs, she felt like she could breathe for the first time since leaving the Keys. She settled down and thought: “Okay. I know what to expect here. I know what I can do here. I can put this out of my mind. And I know that the routines here and the day to day pace is something that will distract me.”

She found comfort in knowing she had class on Monday, and could come home to homework and problem sets due on Friday. It was something she could break down. There was no uncertainty in a rhythm like that. All the unpredictability was left on the island.

All it took was reading an article or hearing a comment from someone about the storm and she would pause.

“There was always that undercurrent: I should be texting someone making sure that they’re okay, that they got back, that they come home, that they were doing alright, could I do anything for them?” Hannah says. “I don’t think I realized until I got home that I had really been avoiding thinking about it on my own.”

Home revisited

Neither Lillian nor Hannah would return back to their towns until winter break in December that year.

Lillian drove down Mendocino Avenue her first time back in Sonoma, a road lined with an assortment of shops and age-old establishments. Everything was “burned to a crisp.” There was nothing. Everywhere she turned for familiarity she only found ashes. Right when she got back, she tried to head to Kohls, but there was a sign that said “closed for renovations.” There was no physical store to renovate. “I guess I’ll turn around and go home,” was all she could think.

Hannah flew straight into the Key West airport, missing the drive down the island to see the destruction of the Upper Keys. Across from her house, there’s a park where a colossal tree once stood, with long dangling leaves that would rustle on cool nights. She remembers climbing its trunk and branches as a child. Once she returned, it was ripped up by its roots. All that stood in its place was a stump.

“They planted new trees around it, which I think is a great metaphor for how people are trying to rebuild, but it’s not the same,” she says.

Even now, it’s the little moments that serve as painful reminders that Hannah wasn’t in the Keys to experience the collective horror those in her community had to live through. The main movie theater’s roof is still caved in. One of the grocery stores still hasn’t opened its doors. When she walks around Sears, the one department store, the lights randomly shut off, a result of electrical damage. Her friends in the Upper Keys are still living in hotels and temporary housing.

She says returning home was like watching your best friend undergo a dramatic makeover, changing their facial features and all. The looming palm trees in her backyard that used to slant one way all her life, where she propped her water skis, were suddenly dragged in the opposite direction. Everything she knew about her home was distorted.

For Hannah, returning home on breaks and driving her family’s boat around the coral reefs of her island was a way to reconnect with the place she only visits once or twice a year. She used to know the bends and ins of the water and the landscape like one knows how the drive back home after a long night. But now, the complete makeup of the island is dramatically restructured.

“In college, you get really distant from your hometown because you’re probably going somewhere else, you’re learning new things,” she says. “I really miss being so comfortable at home in the water, when now I don’t even recognize it at all.”

As the impact of these disasters continues to grow, Hannah’s family is looking to move from the Keys. The uncertainty of the storms has made the only lifestyle they’ve ever known too volatile. Now, every time she returns to the greenland that vaguely looks like an old friend who’s name she can’t quite remember, it could be the last moment she shares with the place she grew up. Meanwhile, the local TV stations in Evanston play the images of destruction in places like California, the Keys and South Florida. Students are forced to watch their homes flood, burn and crumble from miles away.

“I don’t know if I’ve really accepted that it happened to me,” Hannah says. “I don’t think I’ve fully accepted that the island’s been replaced.”