Mother Nature’s dominion

Humankind has lofty cerebral capabilities and mechanical abilities to manufacture machines and devise devices that are amazing in their power and complexity.

Still, we are also lowly organ- isms of nature. And if we forget the magnitude of forces at her disposal, Mother Nature can harshly remind us who holds dominion.

Though our consciousness may elevate our perception, we remain minuscule against the earth’s physical framework.

Nature is both part of us and separate from us, which contributes to its metaphorical proclivity in our prose. Whether the subject is philosophical, psychological, religious, amorous, or political, we analogize natural disasters.

“We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake,” Frederick Douglass famously said at his Independence Day speech in 1852. Those events produce irresistible change, which he held as the only hope against seemingly immovable social fortifications.

But while natural disasters have always been with us, we have never before been able to “see” them so quickly and with such clarity.

I’ve never been to Mexico Beach, which is just east of Panama City in the Florida panhandle. It made national headlines as one of the worsthit areas when Hurricane Michael made landfall on Oct. 10. Ironically, in our last trip to the Scenic Highway 30A area I had looked at the little beachside town of a thousand souls as a possible side trip.

Before and after photos often appear in the weeks following major disasters, but within mere days there were such images of Mexico Beach available on online news outlets.

We’ve become numb to the true meaning of words like obliteration, annihilation, devastation; the hurricane aftermath photos gave them new meaning and context. Sitting anywhere in the country with an Internet device and connection, anyone can instantly bear visual a still image of neat rows of roofs in a small town, with streets forming a perpendicular grid. As the timelapse motion starts, the straight lines of streets begin to bend, and sections of roofs start to slide, as if water were being slowly poured over a painted image of the town, smearing the image’s structure and colors. Huge swaths of little roofs disappear, swallowed up and replaced by a murky brown mass.

The bird’s-eye view is surreal and sterile—the viewer is far removed in both space and time from the mass and magnitude of what’s actually happening. On the ground, survivors spoke of the “mud” rolling like ocean waves, with homes shifting and sliding as much as 700 meters (nearly a half-mile).