Op-Ed: Homesick after Hurricane Matthew

I’ve never been one to be homesick. I’m at a loss for words whenever relatives and family friends pose the question, to which they assume every college freshman 15 hours from home will answer positively. I know people that go to college 15 minutes from home — they attend high school football games on Friday nights and drop in to surprise their favorite teachers — but I never feel as if I am missing out. Technology has made it so easy to communicate with other people across the globe. Every day I am talking to my family and friends, so it doesn’t feel like I have been completely cut out of their lives. This has been the case for the month and a half that I have been at Tufts, until last weekend, when Hurricane Matthew unexpectedly turned inland.

North Carolina isn’t known for getting struck by hurricanes. The last majorly devastating one was Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and that was considered to be an anomaly. I live three hours inland, but the winds and floods of Floyd, so the story goes, caused the lake a mile down the road from my house to overflow, and for fish to litter the streets. Whenever the news projects that a hurricane will make it to the shores of North Carolina, it is often compared to Floyd. They say that it’ll be fine, that we’ve been through worse, and that the roads aren’t even that bad. My mother actually said those exact words to me when I called her last Saturday to ask if they were alright. In fact, she was in the middle of driving on the roads that “weren’t that bad” to get my brother lunch after they realized they couldn’t make frozen pizza.

Last weekend, thousands of people lost power. Some, including my friend’s family, didn’t get power back until this past Friday afternoon, while others are still without. Five of the huge Leyland cypress trees in my backyard, trees that I loved so much as a child for their similarities to the enormous Christmas tree I always wanted, fell. Another tree fell on my friend’s little brother's car minutes after his father and sister had been standing next to it. Even now, some schools on the coast are still devoid of students after evacuations and flooding continue to cause problems. Things are not nearly as bad as they could have been, and North Carolina most definitely did not get the brunt of the storm, but the idea that so many things could have gone wrong is terrifying.

I found myself constantly checking the news and texting my mom for updates. I couldn’t understand how people were so nonchalant about the fact that rivers were being created out of roads, dams were overflowing and winds were pushing down 30-foot trees. Being 15 hours away made the storm seem very different than if I were at home and knew everything was alright. The strangest thing is that one of my friends that goes to school close to home was able to go to my house and help my brother with chemistry after the worst had hit. Someone outside of my family was able to see that they were alright but I wasn’t. That was when I first realized that I actually did want to go home. I wanted to be with my family, and even if nothing bad had happened, it would be comforting to see my dad’s old gas lamp on the table and hold my smelly dog.

Places that I had been going to my entire life are underwater, and things that I saw every day on my drive to school are gone. When you go to college, it is obvious that some things about the place you grew up are going to change — new stoplights, new neighbors — but nobody ever thinks that they are going to miss monumental things. When I left for school, I didn’t realize that I could miss the event that will go on to shape my little brother for the rest of his life, my mom getting published in a well-read law journal or my dad finding out exactly what he wants to do now that he’s retired. When these things happen, they aren’t going to be the first things that come to mind to tell me on the phone. Technology has made it easier to communicate over time and place, but when you don’t see people every day, things slip their minds.

It is such a strange feeling, living in one place but knowing you are from another, especially when something big — like Hurricane Matthew — happens. Knowing that bad things could be happening to the places and people you love is scary. Last weekend was the first time in my entire life that I have wanted to go home; and while that feeling has subsided, I’m not sure that I’ll ever go back to believing that things will be just as I left them. I’ve never been a person that was proud of where they lived; North Carolina has a lot of problems,including the draining of half a million dollars of disaster relief just months before Matthew hit in order to enforce a discriminatory law. When I left for school, I did not think that I would miss it at all, but the roads in New England are different — as crazy as it sounds, it’s true — and the people speak a harsher version of my language. There are a lot of things to miss about home, and I hope other people don’t have to have a disaster hit before they can find them.