The Endless Search

Ever have one of those authors that you simply never give up on? I have an author that I discovered many years ago and fell in love with. Unfortunately she has given up on my favorite series of hers but I never give up on her. I started reading The Ruins of Ambrai by Melanie Rawn when the second book The Mageborn Traitor was released. I had to look on Wikipedia to remember when exactly that was. March 1, 1997. Almost 13 years ago now. The funny thing is, now that I look that date up it's no wonder I remember the book so well. I seriously don't think I picked up the first book on the very day the second was released because I remember that day all too well. But I know it was close to this time and I know now why I continue to obsess about this series.
March 1, 1997 is the day that Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where I was living in at the time for college, was completely destroyed by an F4 tornado. It also happens to be my birthday; I was turning 20. At the time I was dating someone that I thought I was going to marry. Thank goodness for both of us it never happened, but we were very happy at that time. We had gone to visit my mom and my best friend from high school for the day (they only lived an hour away), to have dinner with them and celebrate my birthday. We stopped at a pawn shop about 15 minutes away from our destination so he could look at amps or guitars or some such. (I didn't play guitar then, though I wanted to learn). While there we learned from the guy working that a tornado was headed right for us. He had the news on and we watched the weather. We decided to stay there for a little while just in case. I stepped just outside the door and was shocked by the change in the weather. Just a few minutes before the sun had been shining. Not brightly but it had been there. Now the sky was a greenish-grey and the wind was blowing something fierce. Just as I called to my boyfriend to come see, I saw insulation flying through the air.
"I think maybe we should go back inside," I said.
"Ummm, yeah, good idea," he muttered.
So we rode the little tornado out, it wasn't much there and we thought we had a cute story to tell friends later.
When we went to dinner, the restaurant had the news on. It was one of those places like Chili's or Applebees or somesuch that always has the tvs on over the bar playing some game or news. On the all the channels was the news of the terrible tornados that whipped across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisanna. So many tornados that day all over the region that I doubt they ever knew exactly how many. I was shocked.

"I guess we weren't the only ones to see a tornado today!" I joked. But my mood quickly turned sour when I realized what they were showing. The pictures of devastation were just way too familiar.

"It's Arkadelphia," I breathlessly said to everyone at the table. "And that's the pharmacy that Kelli works at." It was leveled. There was truly nothing left of the building and I could not remember if Kelli (my roommate) was working that day. I tried immediately to call her, yet she didn't answer. I didn't know it at the time, but there were just not enough phone lines left in Arkadelphia to handle to normal amount of calls it gets, much less the massive amounts of people calling for help or people calling to see if loved ones were all right. I was simply frantic. I listened though when everyone said there was nothing I could do. I stayed, had dinner, and we left right after to go home and assess what we had left to go back to.

I will say right away, we were all very lucky. According to old reports (cause I couldn't remember this part) only 5 people died. It was shocking. You should have seen the devastation. The entire downtown was destroyed. I'm not exaggerating. There was was no building left standing downtown. This is where Kelli's work was. Kelli was not at work that day. She was not one of the few who died. In fact, she just had a baby two months ago. Everyone say congrats to Kelli!

Unfortunately for the town, most of the damage was done in the parts that were solely town. What I mean by this is, there are two universities in Arkadelphia. I highly doubt if they were not there that the town would survive. However, the most destruction was done in places that had nothing to do with either college. That turned out to be lucky for me and my friends though, in more ways than one. Our apartment and all the dorms being used were untouched. The universities had very little damage. As I recall the most damage was actually done to a dorm that was not used anymore. Just as the semester was ending, Kelli and I wanted to find a place off campus to live. Our campus apartment had some serious flaws and we needed a cheaper place to live.
An interesting side note. The pipes in that apartment popped constantly. It was loud so that you couldn't help but notice and be bothered by it. Unless you lived there. I remember going to the apartment with Kelli before I moved in and asking her what that noise was. She said, "What noise?" And cocked her head to listen. "Oh yeah, that's the pipes." She was serious. She had gotten so used to it that she didn't hear it anymore. I had almost the exact same conversation with a friend just a few months later, only I was the one saying "What noise?"

We found a couple new trailers for rent right where some houses had been destroyed and torn down. Another plus for us. I hate to list all the good things we got out of this tragedy, but they are there. My boyfriend and his friends rented the other trailer and we were suddenly party central. I'm sure the neighbor were overjoyed with us for the year we lived there but they had their moments too. We moved in during finals. I was deperately trying to study while listening to the constant pounding of hammers all around me as the town tried to recover. I tried to find some pictures, I figured there would be several but I guess the internet just was not as popular then as it is now so I couldn't find too many. Here's a good one to illustrate what I'm talking about.

It took me some digging but I found this one too:

So now, after all these years, is it any wonder that I still remember Melanie Rawn's books so well? The other day on Walking in the Mountains, JhanaJian brought up the subject of awareness. Mainly the post discussed how the two opposing forces of war and mediation can both bring us to a heightened sense of awareness. I believe this tornado did that for me at the time. I have read several of Melanie Rawn's other books, yet I remain spellbound (pun intended) by this incomplete series. I so aware of myself and my surroundings at this time of my life that I can sometimes remember whole conversations. I have a hard time some days remembering conversations from yesterday.

Many promises have been made that this series will be completed one day, yet Rawn continues to put it off, writing about other places and other characters. It is very possible The Captal's Tower (the third book) will never be written. But I never give up hope. Every so often I go on a search to see if there is any information about it. Everytime I find out about another story she did for a collection or a new book in different series she is writing. I am happy she got passed what ever difficulty she had. I'm not sure what it is but she has alluded to it in the notes of other books. This makes me not so anxious, knowing she has had some writer's block or personal problems or something that keeps her away from this series. But I loved this series and continue to hope that one day she will find her way back to it. And I never give up the search.

Repost: Road trip to Seatle

I am reposting a couple of stories that I wrote for my myspace blog that I don't want to lose. I don't ever use myspace anymore and want to be able to find these easily. This one is from January 31, 2008. I am using the same pictures from the original post along with some I posted a few days later to remain true to the original story.

So, Tammi and I took a trip right after Christmas from Ft Worth, TX to Lacy, Washington (near Seatle). What were two Southern girls doing driving over mountains and through snow and ice in the middle of December, you may ask? The answer is: we were stupid!

Seriously, for those that don't know, Tammi left her Pathfinder (which has REAR-wheel drive, btw) at her parent's house in east Texas while she was in Iraq. She didn't want to drive it all the way back to Washington by herself so she asked me to come along. We decided to make an adventure of it. The plan was to stop the second day in Denver to visit a friend of hers and then drive two more days and go snowboarding. We figured we'd have one more day to shop and then go the Symphony to hear Beethoven's 9th and Mendolssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream on New Year's. As the saying goes, the best laid plans...

Here's what really happened. The first night we got as far as the Texas-New Mexico border and at just about 8:30 or so while going through some rinky-dink town (that the hotel clerk claimed was the "hub" for skiing) we spun out in the middle of the road and ALMOST hit a street sign. We were sufficiently freaked and tired enough to stop for the night. The next day, after driving for only an hour, we discovered that to cross the border from New Mexico into Colorado we had to go through a mountain pass (the Raton Pass) that sometimes is closed in bad weather. We were lucky, kind of, that the pass was open. So we zipped on through at 40 mph (on the interstate now). We were feeling very proud of ourselves for surviving the pass and even felt confident enough to take some pictures.

(She looks so happy)

About an hour from Denver, again doing 40 because the roads were getting bad again, the trip went horribly wrong. We hit an icy patch and spun first to the west, then back to the east and smacked head first into a light pole (totalling Tammi's Pathfinder, damn rear-wheel drive). We then turned back to the west and slid with the pole (yes, it was on the car) about 100 feet or so. This all took place in the span of a few seconds. I saw that pole coming toward us and knew without a doubt it was going to be bad. Thankfully, we were not hurt. Three more cars slid behind us and one stopped, after getting control, to call 911 for us. The fire station is apparently so close to the interstate that they were there before we even had a chance to find out how bad the damage was. Tammi has those pictures, I'll put them up when she sends them to me. After the firemen came and checked the car, a police officer came and let us stay in his car until the tow truck came. Just to pass the time, he gives Tammi a speeding ticket because "Do you see all these other cars out here? None of them are sliding off the road." SERIOUSLY??!!!! Where were you when 3 of them did right behind us? He was nice enough to drive us around until we found a place that would allows us to wait for Tammi's friend, Russ, though. We had her dog Rhapsodi with us so that was a little challenging. A very nice truck stop manager allowed her to come inside.

Once in there I noticed a couple sitting at a booth next to us with all their stuff. Turns out, they were one of the cars that spun out right after us. The girl freaked when she saw us hit the lightpole and slammed on her breaks, then spun into the wall. They got all their stuff out when the tow truck came and took it in to wait for the rental car agency to pick them up. While we were waiting, Tammi called the tow truck people to find out where they were so we could get our stuff out when Russ got there. As she's talking to him, he drives to get gas. We run out, drag ALL our stuff inside, taking over two booths. The nice couple we caused the accident of watched Rhapsodi while we did this and she fell in love with them.

Finally Russ came and we went back to his house. These are from his backdoor.

Russ was so awesome. He told us to stay as long as we wanted until we figured out what we were going to do. The whole next day we tried to figure out if we should drive, fly, take a train. Train was a no go because they don't take dogs. Flying was Tammi's first choice. She wanted to fly home, leave Rhapsodi with Russ and come back to get her a couple weeks later on her three day weekend. That sounded like a really bad idea to me. She wouldn't know what kind of conditions the roads would be in and it could be worse, then she'd be driving by herself. I argued that if we rented a car, she'd have me along and wouldn't have to this all again so very soon. She finally agreed. That night we rented a SAFE car (i.e. front wheel drive) to make the way back to Washington. Tammi was still very upset by the crash so I drove all the way into Portland.

After leaving Colorado and entering Wyoming, I realized why my ancestors did not settle up north. Wyoming is the most deserted, forsaken land on earth. The sky was completely clear but since there so much snow on the fields and the people of Wyoming do not believe in trees, the wind was blowing snow all over the road. So much so, that at some points, I could not see 10 feet in front of me. It was 8 degrees as we traveled this miserable place. When we stopped to use the bathroom at the dirtiest gas station on earth, the clerk mentioned, "Oh, yeah, it was minus 10 yesterday." Great, so today it's down right balmy.

(This shows the desolation of Wyoming but I wish you could see better the blowing snow. It was miserable)

We stopped in Utah for the night and I got the best surprise when I woke up the next morning. There was a mountain right outside our hotel.

I've never seen mountains like this before, and even though the mountains in Colorado were impressive, this was so close I could almost touch it. Beautiful.

The next day, we traveled through the Blue Mountains and stopped just before the Cascades. And yes, I was STILL driving.

On the drive I noticed something in the rental car (a Hyundai sonata) called ESC and asked Tammi to look up what it was in the book. Apparently it's for exactly the kind of thing that caused our accident. It's called electronic stability control and helps get you under control in bad conditions. As we were getting ready the following morning we had the Weather channel on and they did a story about this very thing. I have to say I was sold that this was the best rental car we could have gotten. (There's my advertisement, think I'll get paid?) After making it over the Cascades the following morning, I was very happy to give the driver's seat over to Tammi. I hope never to drive in those conditions again. She brought us in nice and safe. We had just a few hours before the Symphony (because, yes, it is already New Year's Eve by this time).

The Symphony was amazing. We were so close to the stage, the baritone was practically spitting on us. He was a very impressive man, actually. Commanding presence and gorgeous voice. The only hitch was the flute player during the Mendolssohn. We had been so excited and were very disappointed by his sloppy interpretation (we were both flute majors in college).

And the next day......I went snowboarding for the first time. Here's the scene on the way up Crystal Mountain:

I'm pretty much terrible at it and hated it completely the first time down the run. I was so frustrated that I took the damn board off and walked the last half. I almost cried. I forced myself back up with the class and did amazingly better the second time, until I fell wrong on my arm and over extended my elbow. Not fun. Needless to say, that was the end of my snowboarding experience for the day.





So, I made it home safe and already miss Tammi. Everyone needs to write her and tell her to move back to Texas when she gets out of the military. For those that haven't heard, she gets out at the end of March. She decided to buy a Hyundai Santa Fe with the money she got from totaling her car!

Here are some of the pics I posted a few days later. It's Tammi's truck after the accident. Oh yeah, the air bag never deployed. Think about that while you look at them.




Real Time Update: Tammi now lives in Virginia. She lives in a part of the state that sees very little snow but she got dumped on last week when the blizzard went through! Poor girl!