The risk of a breakout of strong tornados was no secret on Thursday, April 16th. The previous night’s weather had predicted severe weather and warnings had us on edge when we awoke early that morning. I drove to Murfreesboro to teach while my wife, Joyce, went to work at the nursing home located at the junction of Eastland and Porter Road. During the day, severe storms caused a 45 minute power outage during my class and I joked to the class that I would tell them when the tornado hit. The power returned and when my classes were over, I debated whether to return home early or stay later. As it was I decided to return early and arrived home about 3:20.

After settling in, I monitored the weather on the radio and reports spoke of a tornado headed towards Rivergate Mall about 3:40. I relaxed believing that East Nashville would be spared. Then the lights began the flicker and the power finally went off. I went out the front door onto the porch and looked down 12th Street and scanned Calvin Ave looking westward but saw nothing beyond a darkening sky. I went to the back of the house and looked westward out of my kitchen window across Gallatin and beyond the Third Tennessee Bank (now SunTrust). And there it was; a dark blackish cloud a block beyond the bank. I stared amused that the expected storm was ready to arrive as predicted. Then I saw it was moving, both rotating and moving in my direction!

I knew I did not have a finished basement in our 1903 house and that the only room without outside walls was the central hall. I decided to take an old blanket, dive in our claw foot bathtub, and cover myself with an old blanket. After waiting just a minute, I heard not the freight train I was expecting but just a gust. Then the summer fireplace covers rattled slightly and there was a thud against the back of the house. More waiting and then silence.

I went out the front door and saw the devastation. The largest hackberry tree in Lockeland--bigger than two people could stretch their arms around—lay blocking the street. I marveled that the maple tree in front of our house still stood but every house on the north side of Calvin Avenue as one looked down the street toward 14th had lost a tree; most had a tree resting against them. I went to check on my next-door neighbor and after knocking on her door, she opened it unscathed.

Then I went to the back alley and saw the maple tree on the back of our house—with nothing more than cracked drywall inside. Our backyard looked like some exotic jungle with horizontal trees, including a huge hackberry tree which crushed our garden shed. One upper trunk of the same tree lay crushing the top of my car while another lay on top of my neighbor’s car.

The telephone was dead and I had no way to check on the safety of my wife. I did not need to unlock the shed because the door was the only part standing. I reached inside, brought out and found its tires to be flat, After frantically pumping air into them as the rain still fell, I rode the bike in my old rain coat along Stratton Avenue in the direction of the nursing home. A police officer had already closed Stratton at 12th and said she knew nothing about any further damage. I maneuvered my bicycle around a street littered with downed trees and electrical lines, carrying it more than I riding. Turning onto 16th Street and then down Eastland, the extent of the damage became even more clear. A woman stood in the street near 17th weeping, with one house totally destroyed while another—one of the oldest in the area—was seriously damaged. A school bus sat on the grade at Eastland empty but with its emergency buzzer still sounding. Trees on either side of the street were mangled and stripped of their branches. As I continued on, Joe’s Place--now the site of Rosepepper Cantina--was just four walls and open sky. A dazed Joe just stood there. The adjoining buildings, which had housed a drycleaners and take-out pizza store were all destroyed. As I peddled towards the nursing home, I saw my standing in the parking lot picking debris off her damaged car. The tornado had blown out the rear window and creased the hood as it tried to suck the car up. A wood splinter punctured the sidewall of one tire, attesting to the wind’s fury. Otherwise she was unscathed and I replaced the flat tire. She too had seen the debris cloud approaching ahead of the tornado and warned people to brace for the storm.

The nursing home was chaotic, the layers of roofing pealed of the slabs of concrete which seemed to form the roof. Rain pouring into the ceiling making the acoustical tiles on ceilings soggy until they collapsed. Many windows were broken. More storms soon arrived dousing the building with rain and we moved inside. Now we began helping the regular staff move patients downstairs and then fretted about gas leaks and, ultimately, the failure of the backup electrical power. The Fire Department finally arrived having struggled to get around downed trees. As darkness fell, they brought in generators and we waited until the emergency rescue responders could cut a clear path through the downed trees to bring in a fleet of ambulance to evacuate the patients. [We actually found a working phone line to contact family to tell family that we were all right, but since they did not know that there had been a tornado, it took some persuasion.] At 9:30 or so, we were able to leave the evacuation to the regular staff, maneuver our beaten car between departing ambulances, and drove through undamaged section of (now) Eastwood to Gallatin Road, and to our house on Calvin. By now, police were guarding every street headed into the devastated blocks.

Exhausted, we had our late dinner by flashlight. Knowing that our freezer food were soon to be lost, we heated a pot of water on our gas stove and boiled some hot dogs. Those turned out to be our breakfast the next day.

The rest of the week of recovery became something of a blur. The nights were cold and the days cool. We camped in the living room shivering through the nights because our gas fireplace generating too little heat to make the room comfortable. Organizing the armies of volunteers to help clean up took a couple of days. They had to content with the debris from insulation clinging to chain-link fences, foam roof insulation panel from Main Street and even downtown, the trees blocking streets, and the downed power poles, many of which were broken in half like matchsticks. Walking about the immediate neighborhood revealed the devastation of lost trees. One house had slate tiles from the house across the street lodged in its siding. A photo processor on Woodland at 12th street was too damaged to be salvaged and had to be demolished. Adding to the sense of misery were the vultures who followed disaster: the sham contractors and fly-by-night operators offering to help with the cleanup for inflated prices. While they seem to have few takers, many a resident would struggle with insurance company and contractors over the next year. The blue tarps covering damaged roofs added an uncharacteristic color.

As for our own cleanup, we were able to use the service of a tree surgeon from up our street to remove the tree off the back of our house. Unlike one house at the corner of 12th and Calvin that was destroyed as a tree was lifted from it, we had little further damage. The father of our next-door neighbor arrived from Alabama with chain saws that freed up his daughter’s car trapped in the alley as well as my crushed car. We were able to drive both through a neighbors property to Stratton. Moving the segments of the downed tree was not always easy, since the volunteers and supporting Bobcats had so much work to do. In between the exhausting clean up work, my wife and I have the fondest memory of a Red Cross truck that cruised the street offering plastic plates with hot dogs, canned sauerkraut, baked beans, and cake—never did such otherwise forgettable food taste so good! Until the power finally was restored over a week later, we developed a routine of going to the “Y” to shower (until my wife learned that our next door neighbor on the other side still had power, so she had another place to shower).

Recovery for us was much easier than many of our neighbors, particularly those on Ordway, Gartland, towards the Eastland dip, and beyond Porter Road towards Riverside Drive. I called my insurance company from the pay phone that used to be located next to the post office. Within ten days we had a check. We had a solid contractor with experience with historical houses offering to work for us before we could even use him. The reconstruction of the back of our house and rebuilding our shed—grander than before—was finished in only a few weeks, although telephone service took a couple of weeks to restore, and cable (which also involved internet) took nearly a month. In between this, we found time to fly to South Florida, stay with family, and buy two used cars to replace our Nashville automobiles, with insurance adjusters declared total losses after the tornado. We had figured that with so many automobiles destroyed by the storm, replacements would be hard to find.

A week after the tornado, as utility workers came from far and wide to replace poles, restring wires, and swap out transformers, neighbor flocked to the Lockeland School, where under the glare of generator-power klieg lights, Mayor Bredesen tried to offer reassurance. Realtors—perpetual optimists—insisted that the neighborhood would come back bigger and better than before. For those of us who attended as television crews broadcast their stories from outside the school, connecting with others was something we needed to do because we still were in shock. Time had largely stopped because the lack of power cut us off from the accustomed information we used to regulate our lives. The blur of cleanup left us numb. At that moment, I for one found it hard to believe the predictions of realtors and politicians. Of course, they were correct. Insurance money gave homeowners and slum lords alike the motivation to fix up things that had been neglected for so long. Many would make the changes, sell, and move out. But for those of us who continued to live in East Nashville, we have been heartened to see the run-down houses on our streets repaired, the new faces, and even the arrival of baby carriages that would have been a rarity before the tornado struck. But our minds mix and mingle the neighborhood we see today with they way we knew it before. Certainly all the improvements make us no longer defensive about living in East Nashville—indeed the changes make us prouder than ever to live here. Still, we see those thousands of phantom trees, the ghosts which ReLeaf Nashville tried to mask by planting thousands of new trees. As those of us from before the tornado walk or jog the streets, we still see that not everything since the tornado is for the better. We miss the green leafy canopy that was also East Nashville before April 16th.