One very small way to take note of a disaster

The closest I've ever come to being involved in a natural disaster was as a young girl - maybe age 8 or 9 - visiting an aunt and uncle in Emporia, Kan.

One particularly dark evening, full of storm clouds, howling winds, lightning and eerie sounds, tornadoes were in the forecast somewhere else in Kansas.

When you're young, the fact that Kansas is a fairly good-sized state, with hundreds of miles between cities, is hardly consoling. Vivid memories of the Wicked Witch of the West riding her bicycle through the air in the tornado scene in "The Wizard of Oz" were enough to send me into an unnecessary panic and assure that I wasn't leaving the basement that night.

I can't begin to fathom the anxieties of the people living along the Gulf Coast this week, whose fears were not fueled by movie images and geographical ignorance, but the reality of Hurricane Katrina.

So when it came time to write today's column, usually not exactly an exercise in gravity or sharing of world-changing political insight, it just didn't seem right to carry on as normal. Throwing out inconsequential observations about everyday life just didn't seem right.

I was told once by a woman that she read my column because it was a welcome break from all the bad news in the paper. Even so, sometimes frivolousness and exaggeration and stabs at comedy seem in bad taste.

It would be a poor contrast to the dramatic photos I saw on Friday on The Associated Press wire - hungry, filthy and homeless people, wading through a few feet of water to board a bus that will take them to destinations unknown; a family trying to entertain a small child while waiting in the car for at least 15 hours to fill up their tank so they can get out of Mississippi; a man surveying a field full of bricks that used to be an old theater. He had lived there with his family members, all but one of whom made it out alive. For unexplained reasons, his mother-in-law didn't leave when the hurricane approached; she died in the ruins.

(There are also four fairly nauseating photos of Celine Dion scattered among the Associated Press images of the disaster, announcing during a self-congratulatory press conference that she has pledged $1 million to the relief efforts. Fine, but wouldn't it be more admirable if she kept her charitable giving to herself?)

Of course, if you were to fixate on human disaster, one could never write anything light or make a joke or laugh at the inanities of life. Every day, every minute more likely, something terrible is happening in some corner of the world.

Too much dwelling on the harsh realities of the human condition, though, would cause a person to lose sanity, or at the least become so grim and pessimistic, the rest of humanity could no longer bear your company.

But sometimes the magnitude of something as disastrous as Hurricane Katrina - even if it has no real effect on a person's life, or at least none that can be legitimately complained about - requires at least a small response.

And though there could be nothing as essentially meaningless as changing the tone of a column, it's the best that can be done in this space. Nothing written here can fix anything, or add to the drama of the event - the tragedy speaks for itself.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com.