More thoughts on the Greensburg tornado

Some good information on this page from the Wichita Eagle. I thought this by Phyllis Jacobs Greikspoor was especially moving.

I almost made it through the first 24 hours after a storm without sobbing.

Almost.

Greensburg
is one of my favorite small Kansas towns. And now a tornado has
practically smashed it out of existence. Joining a media tour through
the devastation, I walked past the decimated Dillons store, the gas
stations, the Kansan Inn and the bludgeoned courthouse. I gasped at the
remains of the high school, city hall and the churches. There were a
few hastily stifled tears at the site of the elderly people in
shelters, holding tight to a beloved dog or cat.

But when I saw what happened to the Big Well, I cried.

OK, I know the “World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well” is one of those cheesy, hokey Kansas things that everybody always laughs about.

But I love that well.

I
discovered it on one of my first “getting acquainted” weekend jaunts
the first year I moved to Kansas. Half fascinated, half terrified, my
daughters and I climbed to the bottom and back to the top. When their
friends came to visit from Minnesota and North Carolina, I could count
on a visit to the well to create a great memory of Kansas.

On
annual Wheat Quality Tours, somebody always stopped at Greensburg and
everybody piled out of the cars and into the gift shop, past the
meteorite collection. They bought a ticket and climbed down the stairs
to the chilly depths of the well. On my last such trip in 2006, I did
too. I thought I’d never make it back to the top. But I did.

I’ve
always thought of the well as kind of a monument to the persistence,
maybe even the downright stubborn streak, that runs down the backbone
of Kansas. The railroad needed water and by golly, Greensburg built
them a well they had to respect. With shovels and pickaxes and ropes
and buckets, they built it.

Without electricity or gasoline
engines or powered anything they dug a circular hole 109 feet deep and
32 feet in diameter and cased it in native stone hewn from the banks of
the Medicine River 12 miles away.

With the same stubborn
persistence that allowed them to move back to the old dugout when a
prairie fire took the house or survive on root vegetables and beans
when the drought took most everything else, they built it. You couldn’t
stand at the bottom of that well and not be impressed by the
accomplishment.

I‘ve always felt proud to be a descendant
of that kind of folks, even if I am a transplant from the land east of
the state line.

On Saturday, the gift shop that covered
the well was rubble. The meteorites are missing. The BIG WELL sign you
could see from the highway lay crumpled on its side. The guard rail
around the top of the well was bent and twisted. Since the storm,
nobody has tried to take a look down the well yet. There’s too much
really important, life-saving stuff to be done.

I believe
that some big sheet of something, maybe a wall of the building covered
it snugly and everything else fell on top. And when all the debris is
cleared away the well will be fine. I refuse to think it’s been
bludgeoned and beaten, so damaged it can’t go on.

Maybe I
need to believe the well survived because then I can believe that
Greensburg will survive, too. After all, the folks who lived there are
the progeny of the farmers and cowboys and shopowners who dug and dug
and sawed and hauled rock until the job was done. They’re made of
pretty sturdy stuff, those kids of the pioneers.

Tornadoes,
like wildfires and drought and hordes of grasshoppers, are part of life
in Kansas. When you get hit, you begin by picking up the pieces. Your
family and friends and neighbors come and help. In these more
sophisticated times, your state and federal government comes too. You
recover and rebuild.

It’ll take time. And persistence.
And stubborness. But I think we’ll see Greensburg rise from the rubble.
Just like I think that one of these years, I’ll be able to take my
grandkids to climb down the well.

I hope that she is right. I would love to see a town rebuild itself like this. And they can be sure that if they do, I’ll bring my kids to see the well, just like my parents took me. I love my native state. Not in the typically Texas way of “my state is better than your state”, but an appreciation for what it gave me, and what it stands for. Kansas is a stubborn, hard-working, stiff upper lip state. This isn’t the first time this has happened in Kansas. Udall, KS was practically destroyed in 1955. Hesston was hit hard in 1990, and Andover was battered in 1991. They rebuilt, every time. I hope it happens in Greensburg.