The Lakes of Georgia

For half a day, everything was perfect.

After one of my fellow Corps Members told the team on Tuesday she was leaving, half a lifetime ago, everyone had been sleepwalking. It was like a death in the family, hearing that one of the people you’d laughed with and trained with and been bored out of your skull with was pulling up her roots and leaving for home pastures, that she had declined this program and our duties and everything we were supposed to go out and do. Everybody took it differently, but nobody was unscathed.

Chelsea, in the name of team morale, had us go and play hooky for a day. We’d already worked a forty-hour week in four days, less one visit to the CDC, and one more day of fluorescent light and sitting on the computer might have laid half the team low. So we slept in ‘til ten o’clock in the morning, had the rest of the morning and early afternoon free to walk around or loll on the beds in our rooms or go to Applebee’s or fried chicken and mozzarella sticks, whatever, and around 2:30 we all piled into the van and headed for a little trail next to a big lake. It was the best decision any one of us had made since getting here.

Picture a forest of great big oak trees, showering red-gold leaves onto the forest floor, with little winding paths leading down to the water where you have to climb down roots and rocks and jump down onto one huge stone before scrambling the rest of the way to the beach. Picture a beach of red clay and sparkling mica and all kinds of rocks littering it—clear quartz crystals, black pancakes of basalt, a hundred kinds of rocks so soft they crumble at the touch. Feel, if you can, your feet sinking with a squelch into the sandy bottom of the lake, which busies itself rolling past your ankles and curling between your toes like the world’s best massage. Observe the glittering clouds of silt, dotted with a million specks of mica that sparkle in the sun, that billow up from the bottom whenever you take a step.

That lake was irresistible. Ringed with orange and shading a beautiful blue-green the farther out you go, it demanded we abandon our propriety and just dive in. One by one, we shucked off our shoes and socks, stripped down to our underwear or T-shirts and plunged into the ice-cold waters to meet curious fish. We skipped those flat black stones for what felt like miles across the water, made impossible dives for overthrown Frisbees that usually ended in a huge SPLASH, slathered ourselves with mud from the bottom and flung it at each other and laughed and laughed.

All too soon, it was time for the magical afternoon to slowly wind its way down. We’d long since wandered out of the water, drying out in the warm sun and reclining on our rocky thrones, snapping pictures of each other and playing the-floor-is-lava with boulders and pebbles on the ground. Clothes had to be donned, dignity reassumed (as much as it ever was), shoes found and rocks collected. As we trekked back up the hillside, lazily tossing memories and chuckles back and forth, Summit Five could scarcely help but feel a deep sense of peace.

Fifteen hours later, we would be eating up I-85 on the way to an unknown future on the East Coast. One of our team members would be on a bus back to Mississippi, having left the program for good. Another would have just returned from the hospital and most of the rest of us would be exhausted and stressed from a sleepless night and morning of packing and driving around Suwannee. For now, though, we were leaving Paradise.

Pointing North: First Signs of Sandy

All the clouds are pointing north.

It’s still I-85, passing exit Forty-Eight A in a town I’ll never visit in a state I barely know, passing breaking waves of traffic down a fresh black highway, and all the clouds are beckoning us on.

Like divers, like dolphins, they sit like endless schools of fish in the sky, huddled and waiting for the great plunge. The northern ends are invariably darker gray verging on black, little wisps of fog hanging ominously off the bottom, while the southern ends are light, fluffy, harmless cumulus. They have that streamlined shape where they actually do come to a point at the northward end, flattened on the bottom and tapering in the front and puffing out in the back.

It’s an armada that would have put Spain to shame, great darkened galleons on either side of us, above and behind and all around us, plowing slowly through the great wide sky. They pass over the trees of gold and brown and pine, the six-lane highway dotted with green signs, the parasitic rest stops and fast-food establishments that suck a little life from the travelers before letting them go again, gluttons of the roadway. They pass over factories and fireworks stores and used-car dealerships, far above crumbling bridges and autumn leaves and inane billboards, far over our little van. Inexorable, unstoppable giants heading mindlessly north.

Onward we roll, passing blown-out tires in the middle of the road and calling out “yellow car! Yellow car!’ every now and again, listening to Bon Iver and digesting the Arbys we had for lunch and snacking on occasional cookies as Hildie eats up the miles to the pre-staging area.

And all the while, the clouds are marching on.

Fema Corps Moves North: Tales of the Red Bag

-->This is your red bag.

Clothes go in first: socks, boxers, T-shirts with witty slogans on them, blue FEMA Corps T-shirts with “FEMA CORPS” emblazoned on the back and a real patch on the right bicep, not just a decal but a patch actually sewn on. Black dress pants, neatly folded. Brown sandals that need to be glued back together for the dozenth time. Khakis and bandannas and that stupid vest that everybody had to pack all disappear into the cavernous maw that is the red bag’s biggest pocket, there to reappear neatly folded and pressed and somehow taking up far less space than the laws of physics say they should. Willpower trumps reality every time in this area and this area only: packing for a spike.

Next is the gewgaws, the consumables, the borderline necessities. A deck of cards, a pair of toenail clippers, cords for various phones and razors jumbled together into an incomprehensible muddle, half a bottle of shampoo, a straggly bar of soap inside its protective blue shell. A brand-new copy of The Count of Monte Cristo shares space with a blue hoodie and a windbreaker, both of them coiled up into hard balls of cloth. A pair of blue jeans that you just discovered have a rip in the crotch are wadded up in the last pocket of space available, just on top of half-a-dozen folders full of bank information and handbooks on how to be a Community Relations Specialist and a bunch of mostly useless class notes.

All of this detritus probably weighs as much as a respectably sized suitcase, but through an ingenious system of clips and straps, you can carry it on your back for a little while and not collapse. In your other hand, or hanging off your shoulder, will be a personal bag (laptop, charging cord, personal folder and marked-up copy of your senior thesis that are worth more than their weight in gold to you, red Frisbee and peanut butter crackers for the road and a water bottle with a carabineer clip hanging off the side. Detergent and Listerine go in a separate bag that used to hold a brace of potatoes, safely double-bagged and waterproofed. Sleeping bag and pillow, the one crammed under the seats, the other resting comfortably in the back of the van with the rest of your team’s gear.

Red bags always travel in packs. We have nine of them piled up high in the back, ten sleeping bags because somebody from our sister team left theirs behind, countless pillows and blankets and water bottles and laced-up black leather boots. Personal gear shares space with team gear; there are boxes and bags of cutlery, pots and pans, garbage bags, dishwashing soap and sponges and other ingredients of a daily nomadic life. We’ve taken all the food we can—bags of cereal, granola bars, endless bottles of Gatorade, anything that can live in the pantry for longer then an opera—but all the perishable stuff had to go. We managed to give much of it away to a needy family in our motel, but bags of grapes and cylinders of yogurt and carrots and cartons of soy milk tumbled one by one into a garbage bag because there simply wasn’t any way to take them eleven hours to the north.

That’s why we’re on the move. We’re headed up to maybe, possibly, if our FEMA overlords and the whims of the storm smile upon us, respond to Hurricane/Cold Front/High Tide/All-Around Monster Storm Sandy as she tears towards the East Coast. It is entirely possible that we will not lift a finger in the relief effort; it is entirely possible that after driving up to [location omitted, but it's east of the Mississippi] to be “pre-staged” and hunker down and wait for the wind and the rain and the snow to pass us by, we will be told that there is no need for our services and isn’t the weather in Atlanta nice this time of year? and go back to the Sun Suites Motel in Suwanee, Georgia. But all that is still safely parked two days into the future. The happiness of reunion with friends we haven’t seen in a month, the jolt of electricity as the storm sweeps over our city, the bitter disappointment or wild jubilation of being told whether we’ll finally get to do what we were trained to do, all of that is yet to come.

For now, as the Starks would say, winter is coming. And we’re headed to the fight.

Waiting for Hurricane Godot (I mean Sandy)

The phrase "jailhouse lawyer" has always been one of my favorites. It refers to a prisoner whom, due to an enormous amount of time on their hands and a similarly overwhelming interest in a particular issue (like the law pertaining to their case, for example) will become a stone-cold expert on the subject. Interest + time = supreme competence. Now, I'm not saying that FEMA Corps is becoming expert on the path, prospected landfall and media reports regarding Hurricane/Frankenstorm Sandy, but we're getting close.  It seems like Sandy is certain to make landfall on the East Coast, and given that it's a really humongous storm and that the East Coast is full of people and expensive buildings, several media outlets I've seen are predicting over a billion dollars in damage.

Before I continue, wherever I'm going, I'd like to put something to bed real fast. During FEMA Corps's four weeks of inactivity and six weeks of training, the point has repeatedly and persistently been raised that we work only during disasters. Therefore, if you're rooting for the Corps to get off our tuchases and start performing the work for which we were intended, you're also indirectly rooting for widespread destruction of some very nice places that looked much better when the buildings worked properly, not to mention immense human trauma and suffering. Can we put that idea down once and for all, please? You want to do work, and you want to help people. That's natural, human and totally logical. You want to serve communities in the way you've been trained to do. That way just happens to be disaster response. It's not your fault that that has to coincide with a disaster; disasters just happen and there's nothing to be done about it. The storm doesn't care about what you want, it just does what it does. Enough discussion on this tired point already.

So where was I going? Yes. Twenty-one teams, plus the Vinton contingent, are currently eying Hurricane Sandy as she grinds toward the East Coast. Barring a miracle, she'll touch down somewhere, and unless the concept of logic decides to turn inside out and eat itself, FEMA Corps will be part of the response effort. 

Where will we be? Will Summit Five go anywhere? It's impossible to say. The thinking here is that they won't need every single team, but that's pure speculation. My TL just texted us asking everybody to keep her informed of their location (if we go away from home or whatever) in case we need to pack up and go on short notice, but that too is just a precaution. We really don't know anything yet about whether we'll be needed, although I've volunteered to come in and work the weekend shift at the Region 4 Coordination Center if needed. 

I don't know. This is our chance to go out and use our skills, a chance to finally end a month of inactivity, a chance to go help people in need like we were always supposed to do. But the previous paragraph aside, I find it almost indecently selfish to be even thinking that way. Sandy is predicted to hit some of my favorite places, filled with some of my favorite people and their families. If it made a U-turn and headed off to go bother the Azores instead, I'd be overjoyed. 

For the next 72 hours, FEMA Corps--and everyone in the path of the storm--will be waiting on tenterhooks. I just hope this whole thing ends with everybody I know over there still OK. To my friends in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and D.C: keep your heads down and stay safe.

More Viruses, Fewer TPS Reports

In another example of cross-pollination among government agencies, today Summit Five visited the maddeningly named Center(s) for Disease Control and toured the museum that I had no idea they had on-campus. Just to get it out of the way: according to everything they told us, there is actually no secret bunker--Walking Dead style--hiding in the basement to serve as an impenetrable refuge against zombies. The nice Bostonian lady who guided Summit Five around told us they didn't like the series "because it's so ridiculous", but praised the efforts of pandemic movie Contagion, which at least used parts of the CDC in its movie (the Walking Dead blew up the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center instead).  

That doesn't mean zombies are entirely absent from the CDC. Once we made it to their communications department, the image of a dead-eyed girl peering over the top of a wall was on half the walls and every Powerpoint slide we saw, not to mention plastered on the back wall of somebody's cubicle so she can stare at the back of his neck all day (I question this decoration choice). Our tour included its share of pandemics and diseases that are only marginally less terrifying than zombieism, though: HIV/AIDS, Legionnaires' disease, Lassa fever, Ebola/Marburg and half a dozen more. I've been reading about those since I was in high school biology class and borrowing Mrs. Zauner's copy of Level 4 Virus Hunters of the CDC, which was about a worldwide search for horrible diseases. Scientists skulking through the African jungles, looking for the source of a mysterious deadly virus that gruesomely disfigures and kills its victims? Fiction doesn't have a patch on a story like that!

The problem with the CDC museum, spacious and well-designed as it was, was that stories like that one were extremely sparse. It turns out that the CDC, like some other government agencies I could mention, has many more unexciting duties than exciting ones. For every story of the hunt for Legionnaires' disease, there were half a dozen nutritionists' experiments or iron lung machines or copies of the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (I shit you not, that's what it's called. Dead Puppies Monthly would hardly be a more depressing title). Maybe part of growing up is realizing that the world isn't always as awesome as the highlight reels make it look, but I would have preferred to learn that lesson somewhere other than one of the supposed Coolest Places in the Universe.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. We saw only a tiny fraction of the huge, sleek, beautifully modern campus; one museum and one third-floor conference room does not a comprehensive portrait make. And we only met three or four employees, including one guy with a ridiculously curly gray mustache that would put Teddy Roosevelt's to shame; I would have liked to meet more people and hear more of their stories, how they got to where they are, why they wanted to be where they are. Maybe that'll come on some future trip. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be a bureaucracy where it's all about the job and not about the work. I'm from a family of musicians, a profession where it's rather difficult to succeed without a passion for what you do. Apparently that's the exception rather than the rule in the corporate world.

FEMA Corps's Day Off From Work is to Do More Volunteer Work. And It's Awesome.

Here’s the funny thing about Summit Five, FEMA Corps: We have our priorities totally backwards from the way most people tend to have theirs. Four or five days a week, our team sits in an office all day and does a) office work, b) filming and editing for random projects or c) not much, which is some people’s dream job but tends to make us feel bleak and listless. One or two days a week we pile into the van, head downtown as if to go to work, pass work, rejoice, continue to Piedmont Park (Atlanta’s answer to the Elysian Fields) or some other fun place and spend a third of the day doing volunteer work. We lift, carry, stack, sort, serve (things like tofu) and set up whatever needs setting up. That’s our vacation. And it’s awesome. How fun is that?

This familiar scene was the order of the day on Saturday, as Summit 5 journeyed into the heart of Atlanta to help set up the 22^nd annual Aids Run/Walk benefit event. All of us were, and remain, hungry for physical labor; editing videos and writing statements is all very well, but it’s less direct and physically demanding than most of us would probably like. At such an event as an AIDS Walk, there are tables and chairs and boxes to move; there are hundreds of cases of water that need to grow feet and walk 100 yards, there are tents to be set up and broken down, trucks that demand to be loaded and unloaded and endless boxes of popcorn, for some reason, that formed a massive wall blocking access to a park road and had to be moved elsewhere. Enter Summit Five. I’m proud to say that twenty minutes into the workday, my immediate supervisor designated my half of the team as people he’d like to hang onto for the rest of the day, please and thank you, because we got our work done in half the expected time.

In fact, Summit 5 and an army of other volunteers helped the Aids Run & Walk burn through all its tasks so fast that the whole thing got done a solid hour early and had plenty of sitting around during it. We had army ROTC and navy ROTC, which is apparently also a thing, helping out; we had local college students and a few Americorps alums and high school students and random people off the street forming human chains and passing hundreds of boxes down the line to rest in a small mountain on the grassy roadside. You had boxes full of cinnamon-flavored popcorn flying through the air, bouncing from person to person like so many rubber balls, careening down the line to rest in a pile the size of a Hummer. Good people, coordination and a common cause apparently equal getting a lot of work done very quickly.

But the word ‘work’ itself is a total misnomer, which is what I was trying to intimate earlier on. It simply doesn’t apply. ‘Work’, at least in my mind, is something that you’re made to do by someone else; it connotes drudgery and unpleasantness. Given that I’ve worked at a pool, sold cell phones and been a communications intern, I think I’m entitled to that worldview. Volunteer activities, shall we say, are actually enjoyable on a bunch of levels. It’s great to be doing physical labor, it’s great to be doing it for a good cause, and it’s even better to be doing it with your team. I’m a little alarmed by how readily and willingly I’ve adapted to that philosophy. Who knew that people did volunteer work because they liked the feeling, not just because it was a good or necessary or valuable thing to do? I certainly didn’t, but it’s been a pleasure to learn.

I wonder if there’s a word for work that has no negative connotations. Is there a word, in English or elsewhere, that suggests ‘labor that gladdens the mind and the soul’? If pressed for a phrase, I would suggest the word that I have often ended these sorts of posts with: righteous. It really does feel like righteous work, satisfying body, mind and soul alike. And did I mention that it’s actually fun? Both the TEA Walk and the Aids Walk were genuinely enjoyable. Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes, after a whole miserable day of being a good kid and five happy minutes of being an annoying little shit, inspired Hobbes to say that “virtue needs some cheaper thrills”. Maybe both of them were looking in the wrong place.

As Douglas Macarthur Put It, "I Have Returned!"

I don't know how the world survived without me (hint: easily), but Tisdel's Tirades is back up and running as of this moment. It turned out to be a miscommunication with my boss that was the problem, and I know people generally use the sanitized 'miscommunication' as a stand-in for 'all-out screaming cat fight', but in this case I genuinely misunderstood what she was getting at. It turns out that the Department of Homeland Security frowns upon posting the physical layout of one's workplace online, which is a more than reasonable thing for me to not do. Just about everything else is, as they say, kosher.

So I'm back. Posts will come. Here are the three that experienced a temporary life interruption: "Daily Life in FEMA Region 4" (formerly "Daily Life at the Rock"), "On Misuse, Missed Opportunities and Just Dealing With It" and "Editor's Note and Updates From Atlanta". (One wonders if that particular euphemism would be common in a culture with practicing necromancers and a side of political correctness.)

Because several people responded to me putting my email address out there and declaring it open for questions, I've decided that's a thing I'm going to keep doing. If you don't feel like leaving something in the comments or want a longer or more detailed answer than I gave in a post, or have any questions at all about life as a FEMA Corps member, please don't hesitate to email me at andy.tisdel@gmail.com and I'll take care of you. If you have a Corps-related question that you think a lot of people are wondering and you'd like me to write about it, I'm always looking for post ideas.

Temporary Blogging Hiatus

Extended Editor's Note:

Today, I was asked to remove several posts from the blogosphere. I have done so. Until I can hash out the why of things, a) they will stay gone and b) the blog will be on a temporary FEMA Corps hiatus. You can expect some posts in the meantime--I have an excuse to post some of the backlog that's been on my computer for a month, like yesternight's Doctor Who paean, so that's something--but there will be nothing about FEMA Corps until I can get this settled. 

If you have questions, comments, criticisms or funny pictures of cats, please send them to my email address at andy.tisdel@gmail.com. 

As long as I'm speaking directly to my readers, I'd like to just say thanks for tuning in. I'm not the greatest at responding to comments immediately, but I do read and appreciate every one, and I appreciate even more that so many people have found their way here. Thanks again, all y'all, for reading.

Daily Life in FEMA Region 4

Sadly, Summit 5 FEMA Corps is not staying at Alcatraz, but we're content to settle for the less famous Rock. Our forty-five hour work week--bumped up an hour daily to give us a cushion of extra time in case we need sick days--almost invariably takes place in that building's garden-variety office environment. That's mostly why I haven't been writing much of anything about daily life for the past few weeks, because most of it is invariable; we all work ordinary office jobs, occasionally scrounging projects, and dream of a better (read: more work-filled) tomorrow. But it's been two and a half weeks, so what the hell. Here's a bit about life at the FEMA Region 4 Coordination Office. 

 After backing in the van (the NCCC stipulates that when backing up, you have to have one person on the ground directing the driver), we pile out of the vehicle we've christened Hildegard--Hildie for short--and head into the FEMA offices. Almost everyone has moved into the back room that our sister team, Summit 4, used to occupy before they left for greener pastures. It contains the same workstations as outside, but it has a door we can close to create a laughing, fun-filled space that's full of inside jokes. Work still gets done (of course it does, FEMA overlords, what are you talking about?) but it's certainly happier and more collegial in there then when everyone was on their own.

Speaking of work, it can be sporadic. I'm working on a database of FEMA media contacts, reporters and editors that we can turn to in time of trauma to email out press releases and disaster information. It's not glamorous work, but it needs to be done; before Summit 4 co-worker Rhonda and I started hacking away at it, the database resembled a Southern jungle overlaid with kudzu and other damnable climbing, hanging vines. Now it's more like a Japanese formal garden. Each state in the eight-state Region 4 (not to slight the Commonwealth of Kentucky) now has a list each of radio, TV and newspaper contacts; cluttering lists have gone the way of the dodo and everything has been re-formatted. I'm currently working on incorporating media contacts from the last six months into said lists, a task which is almost certain to leave me mad in the way that H.P. Lovecraft's unfortunate academics usually ended up. PRNewswire fthagn!

We've got unusual projects, too. Tomorrow (or this morning, depending on when you read this) is the Great Southeast Shakeout, wherein a handful of East Coast states--plus the West Coast and a few countries worldwide)--will do a simultaneous earthquake drill at 10:18 AM, Eastern time. Summit 5 will be going to a local school that FEMA works with and doing a short session with a few of the kids, explaining what earthquakes are and how they work and what to do when one hits. I'm petrified, but the team seems to like the idea, so I guess it'll be fun. We also scripted Monday and filmed today several clips that outline the do's and don'ts of talking to the media (tip: if buttonholed by a conspiracy theorist, you're supposed to actually treat their question as though the asker was not mental).

But the work is still mostly occasional, dependent on when accommodations can be made for what is essentially a bunch of interns arriving to do random tasks. I've become very fond of the phrase 'to butter the cat's paws' in describing our tasks, but as I mentioned the other day, it is what it is. These are the vegetables of FEMA. Eating them will hopefully pay off, somewhere down the line, when we're walking the streets of a hard-hit town instead of typing numbers into a Dell computer. We're all making our own accommodations with our less-than-sexy jobs.

Doctor Who Interlude: I Legitimately Like Matt Smith Now

Editor's Note: I'm having a bit of a dry spell writing about FEMA and writing here, so I'm falling back on my store of on-computer documents. This is very non-NCCC; it's about Doctor Who, one of my favorite TV shows. In fact, this is also very SPOILER-FILLED, because that's how these things tend to work. So if you have not yet watched Season 7, Part One, and intend to not have it spoiled for you, it would not be the world's best idea to keep reading. (I am this anal about spoilers because I hate them, so I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.)

When you consider where Doctor Who was halfway through Series Five compared to today, halfway through Series 7, it is just incredible how we got from there to here.

Consider: at the start of Five, the show had been entirely reborn. We had a new Doctor, new Companions, a new television czar in Moffat, and an entirely different look and feel to the series. Russell T Davies shot Series Four in high definition, but with so many of the crew and staff leaving after Four, Five looked entirely different. It was bright, cartoonish, unrelenting. Five struggled, and to an extent, Six did too. Certainly there were great moments scattered throughout both, but in my opinion, they did not compare to the heights of Davies’ tenure.

There’s always a period of adjustment from old-Doctor to new-Doctor, but Matt Smith took longer to settle in than most. I think a large part of the change was that we, the viewer, saw David Tennant doing what he did. We saw him laugh, we saw him grieve, we saw him scheme and we saw his boundless energy and excitement—but it was always him showing us what he was capable of. In Moffat and Smith’s first two seasons, they often enough showed Amy and Rory and River reacting to or talking or speculating about Smith’s Doctor, but with comparative rarity did they let him show off his own complex, less-goofy self. Even in the great introspective episode of Season 5 (the “Peruvian folk band” one), Smith himself doesn’t speak for his Doctor’s inner darkness—some other actor does it for him.

In Series Seven, that’s all gone away. “The Power of Three” was as deep and complex a portrait as any Doctor has shown in the new series, it was Matt Smith doing the portraying along with his Companions, and more importantly, everything worked! Smith played a fantastic episode! “The Power of Three” was brilliant, and I’ll tell you why. One of Doctor Who’s recurring flaws under both Tennant and Smith is that events never seem to have a lasting impact on the Doctor. He can be castigated and dissected and exposed by his enemies, hurt or betrayed by his friends, but I rarely got the sense that it has a major impression on him between episodes. It’s wiped away and gone in time for the next adventure. This was true in Davies’s time because of that worthy’s largely episodic approach to Who, where most episodes were unconnected to each other except by the vaguest references. Moffat took the show in a more serialized direction during 5 and 6, but that was still true for the most part… but not in “The Power of Three”.

Matt Smith’s Doctor, in his hearts of hearts, is a six-year-old boy. Throughout Smith’s tenure, he can’t stand to stay in one place for longer than it takes to defeat the bad guy… until he has to. He’s happy running around the universe with Rory and Amy as friends, but a better word would be as a family. Where the First Doctor was a grandfather to his Companions, Matt Smith—in a very real sense, plot-wise—is their child, and he needs their love and support more than he ever lets on. Both of those things come out in “Three”, and it’s incomparably touching.

Smith has carved out his own identity as a Doctor. He’s grown into the role over the past three years, and he’s distanced himself from his illustrious predecessor, a task I thought was impossible back in early Series Five when Smith was acting like a zanier, shallower version of Tennant. Make no mistake, though: Smith is walking on his own. It's shining out of every corner of the show. Instead of the romantically tense Doctor-Companion relationships that defined Eccleston and Tennant’s tenures, Rory and Amy act as Smith’s parents. Amy’s flirtations with the Doctor are ancient history, and limited actress River Song has had a limited role.

Moffat and Smith are comfortable enough with this Doctor to do deeper, more introspective, more self-referential episodes like “Three”. At least this far through S7, the endlessly tangled plotlines of S5 and S6 have been junked in favor of something closer to Davies’s episodic format—but tied together through the emotional evolution of the Doctor in a way that Davies and Tennant never quite reached. There’s not been a bad episode in S7 yet, and it’s starting to give me exciting flashbacks of S4, when every single episode was solid or better. As Part 2 of Season 7 approaches, I can only hope Smith and Moffat continue their upward trajectory even though Rory and Amy, who gave the show so much of its energy, have taken their bows. Based on the evidence to date, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

Stories From the Together Empowering Asian-Americans Walk

For much of the morning and into the afternoon, the Together Empowering Asian-Americans Walk (henceforth TEA) reminded me of nothing so much as a high school cross-country meet. In both, you wake up at some horrendous hour (4:45 AM for TEA), climb into your van or bus, travel across a good part of your chosen metropolitan area, and spend most of your morning setting up tents, seeing to the distribution of water and food supplies and setting up parts of the course itself. The combination of the early morning, the desire to run and a crisp, bright fall day made me want to strip down to a checkerboard singlet, slip on my undersized running spikes and get ready for the day's five-kilometer adventure. (To avoid scandalizing the hundreds of people in attendance, I did not do this. Today.) 

It apparently takes a lot of behind-the-scenes logistics to set up such an event; I only ran in high school, while others did the hard work of making it possible for me to run. Water, soda, bananas, apples and various Asian lunch options must be prepared and put in their proper places, ready for fifteen hundred hungry marchers. Signs and banners must be manufactured and produced on time, bright pink "Rock the South!" T-shirts handed out, tents and chairs set up, trash picked up and a thousand other niggling details taken care of. My FEMA Corps team--wearing, for once, traditional NCCC grays instead of FEMA blue--were among the army of nearly two hundred volunteers who helped make the whole thing happen. 

I had a grand time, 4:45 AM wakeup be damned. Besides the sense of righteous accomplishment from performing a task early in the morning, I'd never volunteered at such an event before, so I just learned on the fly. While most of my team members were getting people registered or handing out food, I blundered into the purview of food czar Diana Lui, who put me to work moving supplies--32-packs of water, 12-packs of soda, giant umbrella tents, plastic tubs--down to the finish line. It was great fun. In short order, we set up a finish line and food tents, and I was inveigled into being part of the tofu-serving table, which deserves its own story because holy tofu, Batman.

Tofu is a culture all its own. I know it only as "the thing vegetarians eat instead of meat", but apparently tofu holds a place in Asian cultures comparable to hamburger among white Americans or chicken among black Americans. (That last comparison was made by my friend Shingarai, who can say that without getting pilloried, while I cannot... just so you know.) My table had a mini-assembly line putting tofu in tiny shot-size cups. There was an immense cauldron, large enough to fit a rolled-up sleeping bag, full of bubbling, gloopy, gelatinous white tofu, plus a normal-size pot full of sugary ginger syrup sitting next to the cauldron. Somebody would dump the tofu in the cup, someone else would drop some syrup on top and hand it to a third person, who would stick a spoon in it and arrange it in a tray. We must have made 450-500 cups that way and all of them got eaten. 

Here's what I'm saying about culture. Right after the walk ended, our assembly line was swarmed by scores of people wanting tofu. After the initial rush, I (and a couple of others) started peddling tofu by the tray to people sitting on the grass and eating lunch. Asian-Americans (henceforth Asian for brevity) my age typically turned down the tofu or took it under mild protest, but the older folk loved it. Everybody wanted a cup, and lots of people took three or four to share with their relatives. One woman who must have been in her eighties flagged me down from across the tent to get cups for her and her friend. Now, judging by accents or lack thereof, most of the older generations were born overseas, while most of the younger folk (who turned down tofu) were born in the U.S. I'm not trying to draw an overarching cultural conclusion from one serving of tofu, but I found the trend quite intriguing.

The TEA Walk in general seemed to lend itself quite well to cultural learning experiences, so much so that Service Learning Initiator Shingarai had us discuss it afterwards. It was certainly unusual to be almost entirely engulfed by Asian faces; I was probably part of the five percent or so of the crowd that did not claim Asian ancestry. And I definitely found the self-avowed "Pan-Asian" spirit of the event, sponsored by the Center for Pan-Asian Community Services (CPACS) intriguing. National and cultural divisions were downplayed in the crowd and in the speakers' remarks; people spoke to each other in a dozen languages, but everybody was wearing the same pink shirts. CPACS is apparently a place where people surrounded by difference--even in a community so heavily Korean the language is on every commercial sign, Asians of any background are still a relatively small minority--can go to be surrounded by similarity. 

I guess I can relate, in a small and different way, to the feeling of entering a space where people share feelings and beliefs similar to my own. Disclaimer time. Racially and sexually, I'm so pasty and straightlaced as to be a model of the dominant cultural ideal in this country, and have nothing to complain about on that score. Speaking as a Jew, though, I know what it's like to be surrounded by gentiles almost all the time. When I went to Israel, it felt like coming home, but it was also profoundly weird. Hell, just being on a bus full of Jews was weird, never mind an entire nation. I can definitely relate to the sense of wanting to be among your own, though. 

So that was the TEA walk. I got to do some volunteer work, I got six Individual Service Project hours, I got some exposure to cultures different from my own and I got some things to think about in the bargain. If this is a typical NCCC weekend, I'm down to keep it going.

FEMA's Logistical Firepower: A Tour of the Atlanta Distribution Center

If you took the house I grew up in—basement, two floors, attic, three bedrooms, fireplace, front steps, a regular middle-class American home—and put it in the FEMA Atlanta Distribution Center, which Summit 5 toured this morning, you could tuck it away in a corner of one of their gigantic storage rooms and quite possibly never find it again. Hyperbole? Of course. But not by a whole hell of a lot. FEMA’s 406,000-square-foot Death Star of a warehouse is lined with endless twenty-foot-high shelves, packed with disaster relief materials and office supplies. According to their painted-on numbers, there are at least one hundred and seventeen loading/unloading docks where supplies can be hauled onto tractor-trailers, a dozen of which sit outside. To make sure that all those supplies stay safe and the Center is able to ship them in a disaster, the building itself is ridiculously reinforced. If you set fire to its specially constructed walls, it would take at least two solid hours to burn through to the supplies inside. And the building as a whole is designed to resist winds of up to 129 miles per hour—a Category 3 hurricane.

This is FEMA’s material muscle. Distribution Centers, scattered around the country and managed by FEMA Headquarters, are where FEMA keeps the supplies it draws upon in times of need. Our guides, Logistics employees who shepherded us through this vast space, told us that the warehouse contains 2.6 million MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). I saw the room where they keep them and I don’t think they’re exaggerating. It was all massive shelves stocked floor-to-ceiling with huge shrinkwrapped cubes made up of 48 MRE smaller boxes (for easy loading and unloading), each one filled with who knows how many individual meals. FEMA typically relies on volunteer agencies and state & local governments to take care of the immediate needs—food, shelter, clothing—of disaster-affected citizens, but this is a just-in-case reserve. Numberless cases of bottled water, all different brands. Tarps for the roofs of damaged homes, twenty boxes per shrinkwrapped stack. Huge rolls of blankets. Medical equipment belonging to Health & Human Services stored in long steel boxes on one side wall. Even—I swear—H1N1 facemasks, labeled “N-95 Respirators”.

The Logistics branch (inevitably known as Log) is responsible for setting up Joint Field Offices, the statewide nerve centers from which FEMA and state officials manage the disaster response process. Their job is to essentially take empty buildings, abandoned Wal-Marts and the like, and convert them into fully functioning offices. In seventy-two hours or less. It’s absolutely impossible, but they do it anyway, Seabee-style. The Distribution Center is where they apparently store all that office material. We walked (inside the yellow lines, so as to reduce our chances of getting hit by a forklift) past cabinets, tables, IT equipment of all kinds, cubicle walls, office supplies and herds of rolling chairs. Over in a relatively tiny corner (a mere 2,800 square feet) sat Region 4’s own supplies: extension cords and fax machines, printers and ink, fire extinguishers and trash can liners and UPS sleeves. You could lose the Ark of the Covenant in that area alone and nobody would ever find it until the next hurricane hit.

The most amazing part of the whole place, though, was the machinery & maintenance room. FEMA apparently has its own stock of generators, scores of them sitting in nice straight rows, hulking green boxes that looked like video-game bosses. Markings on the side specified their generation power: 35 kilowatts, 54, 60, 72, even one white monster the size of a Volkswagen with “160 KW” stenciled in black. Other, smaller generators came with their own portable lighting systems, four lights on a telescoping pole that goes straight up in the air, complete with wires and levers and hand-cranks to get them up to their full size. Small FEMA personal transport vehicles abounded: green golf carts, orange-and-black buggies, a random man-sized tricycle sitting next to a stack of orange crates.

My mind nearly exploded with sheer cool when I saw the Urban Search & Rescue open-top vehicles, six-wheeled camouflage-colored monsters equipped with thick off-road tires. And that’s not even mentioning the Mobile Command Operations Vehicle, one of twenty-one FEMA buses that function as command centers in the field, up on a giant mechanical lift for routine maintenance. (Just so we’re clear, that’s a full-size bus. Inside a building. And it took up a tiny fraction of the available space.) The MCOVs have a built-in generator, phone and Internet service, twelve laptops and workstations and a satellite dish on top. And in case that wasn’t awesome enough, the walls can slide out if the workers inside need more room, or bird-wing out into roofs that can shelter other workers sitting outside. The one we toured sported a fridge/freezer, TVs, comfy chairs for the driver and shotgun, and (for some reason) three pool noodles sitting in the back. I can only assume they use those to beat on underperforming employees. (Only a joke, FEMA overlords. Please don’t make that come true.)

So that’s a Distribution Center. According to FEMA.gov, there are four more scattered around the continental U.S., plus three offshore (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam). This is apparently what Logistics does during a disaster: trucks haul their massive asses up to those loading docks (seriously, 117 of them, plus several larger doors where buses can drive into the building), where the corps of FEMA forklifts deposits box after box of supplies and materials before they head off for parts unknown. This gargantuan apparatus is how FEMA gets its supplies to disaster survivors who need them, and is it ever impressive. I’ve always been a fan of huge amounts of heavy machinery, but even for me, the scope of FEMA’s mechanical and logistical might is staggering.

On Misuse, Missed Opportunities and Just Dealing With It

In 1945, my grandfather (henceforth Opa) was drafted into the U.S. Army. At the time, he had been in college for electrical engineering for three years (having been declined when he turned 18 because of poor eyesight), but in his own words, “my draft board decided that the nation could no longer do without my service”. Anyway, you would think they would put him in the Army Signal Corps, but nope; he was filled in as a regular GI, never mind his engineering background. That was a disappointment, but he did get to use a different skill eventually. Opa is Austrian by birth and spoke fluent German, and through the good offices of a friend, he wound up as a language instructor for a group of soldiers in New Jersey.

It wasn’t what Opa had wanted, but he made the best of it and, I can only assume, did a damn good job of teaching a bunch of GIs how to speak basic German. But when that unit (minus Opa) was eventually sent overseas, their destination was... wait for it... the Pacific Ocean! Even though the U.S. had occupied Germany after the war, and could probably have used a few good German-speakers,  it was off to the not-very-German-speaking islands of the Far East. Sixty-six years later, my Opa is still pissed at the government about that.

My Opa got screwed. His skill-set, and that of his unit, went totally unused. He was frustrated, and who wouldn’t be? But when that happened, he had no choice but to shut up and do his new job, because that was what the Army expected of him. So he went to New Jersey, bitching all the way, and did the job they wanted. It wasn’t glamorous and it sure as hell didn’t use him properly, but it was service in its own way.

I can’t speak for all of FEMA Corps, but judging by what I’ve heard from friends across the South and the East Coast, there are quite a few frustrated people who aren’t getting to use the training we just spent six weeks receiving. Instead of being out among the rubble, talking to survivors and helping communities, we’re pushing papers and fixing databases. Traditional NCCC appealed to me because of its direct service, its reliance on hard labor whose effects you can see. You really have to do mental gymnastics to connect office work to the visceral sense of service so many of us are looking for.

Now, in my grandfather’s time, the response to being misused or underused by the guv’mint was to shut up and do your job. I think it’s a bit harder for FEMA Corps because we’ve been told we’re so incredibly special to date. All of our instructors, the higher-ups in our chains of command, the deputy head of FEMA and the head of the CNCS have told us how great we are and how important it is that we’re standing here, ready to serve. It’s easy to get an overlarge head that way. We find it harder to just deal with our circumstances because we expected better or more glamorous work, or just because we know we’re capable of so much more. A lot of people have come up with a lot of panaceas for this feeling—find ways to be excited about your job, know that you’re carving out a role for those who come after you, take lots of FEMA training courses and stay positive. Here’s my two cents: you just have to shut up and do your job. Or, in the more moderate language of today, you just have to deal with it. (I love and take after my Opa.)

Yes, it’s a challenge. Yes, it’s not what we wanted. But the work will come. If it doesn’t—if there are no natural or man-made disasters, nobody dies, no communities are wiped out, no lives overturned for the rest of our time as FEMA Corps Members—that would be goddamn fantastic. But we can be pretty damn sure that it will not. The work will come, be it in nine months or two weeks or tomorrow morning. If you go home now, if you drop out and your team gets deployed without you, you’re gonna miss out on doing the work you really want to. We’re putting in time now so we can do the awesome stuff later. It’s the FEMA equivalent of eating your vegetables before dessert. Our expectations were so high, after six weeks of training that seemed endless at times, for us to go out in the world and finally, finally get started--but there’s no work for us right now, so here we sit. It’s nobody’s fault, and FEMA is trying to accommodate us the best they can (at least as well as any employer can find work for a dozen unexpected interns). We just have to make the best of it and wait for now.

Normally, this is the part where I’d tie the post back to the opening analogy, but I’ve pretty much shot my bolt with that story. Here’s another one. Long ago, one of my cello teachers told me—and this is true—that it was much harder to play slow pieces than it was to play fast ones. “Any idiot can play fast pieces,” she may or may not have said (paraphrasing like crazy). “It takes time and patience to play the slow ones.”

 It’s easy to rush to the aid of a community. It’s hard to sit around and wait. But you know what? We can do that. Because we’re FEMA Corps and they didn’t hire a bunch of ordinary people to be a FEMA Corps. They hired a bunch of awesome people who are dedicated to doing whatever they have to to help others. If that means putting up and shutting up for awhile, that’s what we’ll do. It's not sexy, it's not as fulfilling as we'd like, but you just gotta go to New Jersey and do what you're told. It'll all pay off the day we get out in the field.

Editor's Note and Updates from Atlanta

--> Editor’s Note: I want to apologize for the lack of posts recently. I’m definitely not going to be posting daily for the foreseeable future. Part of this is because I’ve recently been concentrating on other writings, such as book-related editing or posts for my Oak Creek Patch Packers blog (which you can read here, if you’re so inclined) and at the end of a day that starts at 6 AM and ends, after a commute and an eight-hour day and sundry team events, probably around 8 PM—I only have so much writing energy in me. The other reason, which I’ll talk about below, is that during FEMA training interesting and thought-provoking things were happening daily. In an office job, well, anyone who has ever had an office job knows they ain’t conducive to creativity and inspiration.

That’s beside the point for now, though. Here’s the skinny. Like many teams around Americorps’s Southern Region and beyond, Summit 5 has little to do right now because there are no disasters happening. Community Relations teams like ours, who thrive on immediate response to disasters, are really stuck in the doldrums. We’re in a holding pattern, waiting for something to happen so we can get in the fight.

In the meantime, my team is passing the time in Suwanee, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. The hotel has cable TV and there’s an Applebees two doors down, so one way or another my Packers-watching needs are being filled. We’ve visited a couple of parks in Suwanee for PT (Physical Training) plus a gigantic outdoor park, Piedmont Park, in Atlanta proper. We’ve eaten out a few times at local restaurants, even on our limited budget, and did a little exploring downtown. It’s early, but we’re slowly getting to know the city.

That includes volunteer work, which a few of us need like food or sleep. My whole team is volunteering at an AIDS Walk downtown next weekend (I think I have this straight) and a few people, including me, are going to help set up another fun run/walk Saturday morning. It’s wonderful weather for it. Georgia in October is just the right amount of cool and crisp, warm enough to run around in shorts but just brisk enough to make you shiver now and then. It makes me want to slip on my old spikes and go for a five-K run in the early mornings, Shorewood Cross Country style. I really like that. Hell, I like the vast majority of things about being here, even the over-congested morning drive to work. That gives me time to listen to music, read or catch up on writing.

The work is something else again. I’m treating this like my second internship in the past three Octobers, because that’s essentially what it is. It has that same feeling of work that does need to be done, but the full-time employees are too busy to get to it, so it’s our job to get it done. I’m creating updating media contact lists in a vast database; when there aren’t any projects there, I’m taking FEMA classes through the FEMA Employee Knowledge Center. (Up to seven in the past two days. Today was the inner workings of the National Emergency Management Integration System.) A lot of people have had trouble with the kind of work we’re doing, i.e. not sexy or what we wanted, but I’m not one of them. As my college professors know, if you give me pretty much any topic to concentrate on exclusively, I’ll get incredibly into the sucker. Even databasing.

Life, overall, is good. I like my team and my roommates, we’re exercising a lot and eating decently well, my request for an absentee ballot just got to the Shorewood Village Clerk, I get to see my friend Sage on Saturday if all goes well (going to a Pride parade after the walk is over—Atlanta is outdoorsy!), I’ve started working on my book again after a long period of training- and blogging-enforced inactivity, and I landed in a great city, or at least pretty close to one. If only the Packers were winning more often than 40% of the time, it would be perfect.

And On The 27th Day, We Rested

For Summit V and for (I think) all of FEMA Corps, today--10/6/2012--is our first day off in the last twenty-seven. That's a hell of a sobering thought. 

If I recall correctly, we finished our last week of classes at Vicksburg nearly a month ago, Monday 9/10 through Friday 9/15. That Saturday was a travel day to get to Anniston, Alabama, where we then had two straight weeks of FEMA training through Saturday 9/29. Sunday 9/30 was a travel day as well, and we've worked the five-day week since that time. So today is our first day off since Sunday, September 9th, when the Packers were busy getting stomped by the 49ers. Happily, Columbus Day is this Monday, so us federal employees will get a well-deserved three-day weekend, barring the machinations of a mischievous Fate.

What did Summit V do in all that time? 

We learned about more about FEMA--its language, its teaching style, its mission and goals and duties--then I thought we could possibly absorb. We crisscrossed the Deep South, got lost on back roads, got to know one another, shared inside jokes and popular songs and little happy conversations. We ran, biked, sat on walls, played Ultimate Frisbee and hung out and BSed in the Building 322 lounge until curfew came and the TLs kicked everyone out. We sat in the classroom for hours upon hours, learning in groups, listening to Powerpoints, getting alternately bored silly and extremely into what we were hearing. We learned to shove everything we owned--practically, anyway--into a capacious red bag and take it wherever we went. We began to integrate ourselves into the culture of a FEMA office. And all throughout, we had fun.

I have no idea what the next month will bring or where it will take us, but one thing is for sure: our training is over and we're out in the world now, ready to respond. I can't wait to see where we end up.

Tales from Atlanta's Early Mornings (REPOST)

Editor's note: Yesterday's post wasn't working for whatever reason--apparently only the title was appearing, not the text--so I'm reposting the text in a different space and seeing if it works.

The sky is an unfamiliar steely blue, the ground below lit with a constellation of bright red taillights. A low rumble and hum surrounds our van as uncounted trucks, vans, buses and cars shamble slowly towards their destinations, congested like fragments of mucus in some gigantic pair of lungs. Landmarks, already verging on familiarity after just three days, dot the roadside: a billboard for Body Works here, a used car dealership there, a doomed electronics store vainly proclaiming “We Match Internet Prices!”. A fancy sedan cuts in front of our van, three lanes in two seconds, and muttered invective curls up from our seats like cigarette smoke.

This is Summit Five’s predawn ritual, a kaleidoscopic whirl of blinking turn signals, hasty directions and lusty pop songs on somebody’s iPod. At six A.M., alarms beep and whistle like R2-D2 and everybody commences rising from the dead. (I sleep in ‘till 6:15; I don’t mind being second-last in the shower.) We five young men walk as if the air were Jell-O, plodding in the general direction of a toothbrush or a bowl of knock-off Apple Jacks or “where the hell did I leave my shoes?”. There are bag lunches to be packed, usually a PB & J or cold cuts with a little mayo. Today, all the sandwich-making materials have seem to have migrated into the girls’ room, prompting a sleepy-eyed Shackleton-style expedition and plenty of grouching at each other.

Have a look at Summit Five as we sit in the van. Everyone is dressed more or less identically: khaki pants covered in pockets, blue shirts emblazoned with the words “FEMA Corps” covered by blue windbreakers sporting the Homeland Security logo on the left breast. Today, I have left at home my pride and joy, a pair of black leather steel-toed boots affectionately dubbed “shit-kickers”*. I don’t think anyone’s wearing them today--those boots were made for slogging through mud, not sitting under a desk. A few people sleepwalked out to the van at seven A.M. and remain in their own private comas, earbuds in their ears, heads lolled back against the seats. A few bright-eyed souls sing along to the music, a mix of the team’s favorite pop songs, or bob their heads in their seats. Every so often, our chauffeur of the day will ask for guidance and changing lanes, and the back seats wearily sing out “You’re okay” or “hold up!” Like a skein of yarn in a vast tapestry, we weave in and out of the great Atlanta traffic jam, so thick you could spread it on bread and serve it for lunch.

 Just for a moment, heading down a smooth Georgia hill, the wider panorama of the landscape becomes clear. Tall, bushy trees frame a world of dense fog, rolling terrain and piercing sunbeams still low in the eastern sky—then it’s gone as we churn down towards our destination, a scattering of black glass cubes encircled by fences and concrete barriers. A genteel security guard scans our government IDs, hanging faithfully around each of our necks, and waves our people on through. The sky is brightening as we grind through the parking lot, past two sets of glass doors and another gray-shirted guard, into a world of air conditioning and fluorescent lighting and creaky, cranky Windows laptops. I grab my black bomb-resistant case, remove my own persnickety machine and go prospecting under the desk for the proper places to plug laptop and Ethernet cords. Around me, the rest of Summit Five is doing the same, replacing earbuds in their ears and calling up the FEMA training website. New orders come in over the Blackberry and everyone settles in. It’s another day at the Rock.

*Note to NCCC overlord readers: in the version I submitted to Erika, this was rewritten as "mud-kickers".

Driving to Work in Atlanta, Georgia

The sky is an unfamiliar steely blue, the ground below lit with a constellation of bright red taillights. A low rumble and hum surrounds our van as uncounted trucks, vans, buses and cars shamble slowly towards their destinations, congested like fragments of mucus in some gigantic pair of lungs. Landmarks, already verging on familiarity after just three days, dot the roadside: a billboard for Body Works here, a used car dealership there, a doomed electronics store vainly proclaiming that “We Match Internet Prices!”. A fancy sedan cuts in front of our van, three lanes in two seconds, and muttered invective curls up from our seats like cigarette smoke.

This is Summit Five’s predawn ritual, a kaleidoscope of blinking turn signals, hasty directions and lusty pop songs on somebody’s iPod. At six A.M., alarms beep and whistle like R2-D2 and everybody commences rising from the dead. (I sleep in ‘till 6:15; I don’t mind being second-last in the shower.) We five young men walk as if the air were Jell-O, plodding in the general direction of a toothbrush or a bowl of knock-off Apple Jacks or “where the hell did I leave my shoes?”. There are bag lunches to be packed, usually a PB & J or cold cuts with a little mayo. Today, all the sandwich-making materials have seem to have migrated into the girls’ room, prompting a sleepy-eyed Shackleton-style expedition and plenty of grouching at each other.

Have a look at Summit Five as we sit in the van. Everyone is dressed more or less identically: khaki pants covered in pockets, blue shirts emblazoned with the words “FEMA Corps” covered by blue windbreakers sporting the Homeland Security logo on the left breast. Today, I have left at home my pride and joy, a pair of black leather steel-toed boots affectionately dubbed “shit-kickers”. I don’t think anyone’s wearing them today--those boots were made for slogging through mud, not sitting under a desk. A few people sleepwalked out to the van at seven A.M. and remain in their own private comas, earbuds in their ears, heads lolled back against the seats. A few bright-eyed souls sing along to the music, a mix of the team’s favorite pop songs, or bob their heads in their seats. Every so often, our chauffeur of the day will ask for guidance and changing lanes, and the back seats wearily sing out “You’re okay” or “hold up!” Like a skein of yarn in a vast tapestry, we weave in and out of the great Atlanta traffic jam, so thick you could spread it on bread and serve it for lunch.

 Just for a moment, heading down a smooth Georgia hill, the wider panorama of the landscape becomes clear. Tall, bushy trees frame a world of dense fog, rolling terrain and piercing sunbeams still low in the eastern sky—then it’s gone as we churn down towards our destination, a scattering of black glass cubes encircled by fences and concrete barriers. A genteel security guard scans our government IDs, hanging faithfully around each of our necks, and waves our people on through. The sky is brightening as we grind through the parking lot, past two sets of glass doors and another gray-shirted guard, into a world of air conditioning and fluorescent lighting and creaky, cranky Windows laptops. I grab my black bomb-resistant case, remove my own persnickety machine and go prospecting under the desk for the proper places to plug laptop and Ethernet cords. Around me, the rest of Summit Five is doing the same, replacing earbuds in their ears and calling up the FEMA training website. New orders come in over the Blackberry and everyone settles in. It’s another day at the Rock.

First Impressions From Atlanta!

There were some teams that went to Virginia, a two-day trip from Anniston, AL. Some went to Pennsylvania, others to Mississippi, others on still longer and more exhausting road trips. And then there's my team, Summit 5, along with Summit 4 and Ocean 7. We were placed in Atlanta, an easy-peasy two-hour drive from northeastern Alabama. Cue the victory dances. 
Of course, we're going to pay for our insubordinately short journey in daily traffic costs; Atlanta traffic is apparently some of the worst in the U.S., and it shows. A commute that lasted an hour and a half on the way to work this morning took maybe twenty minutes on the return journey (we left well ahead of rush hour). 

Anyway, as I should have begun this post, we've arrived! FEMA Corps is currently lodged in an extended stay motel in Atlanta outskirt Suwanee, GA. We're five to a room and two to a bed. This has inspired some wacky behavior from my new suitemates, which shall remain unblogged-about (hello FEMA overlords!). Food is being bought, rudimentary meals cooked and far-too-early alarms set. A rather severe rainstorm and tornado watch inspired John and I to scout out potential tornado shelters--our best bet is the rather nicer hotel next door--but it appears to have literally blown over. (The foul weather, not the hotel.) The storm did provide some magnificent views, though; he nice thing about motels with doors on the outside of the building is that the walkway between rooms is essentially a gigantic front porch. It also was sheltered (mostly) from the rain, which was gusting so heavily it looked like it was snowing.

Moving on. Today was also the first day of work at the Region 4 Regional Coordination Center (RRCC), where Summits 4 and 5 will be for the foreseeable future. Both Community Relations (S4, S5) and Individual Assistance (O7) are designed to go into action immediately or pretty soon after a disaster; if there are no disasters out there, work is scarce. We can't go to work in the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac like several Public Assistance teams are doing, because that was a month ago and there's nothing for us to do. So until something happens, the two CR teams will be working in CR's parent branch, External Affairs (which I've dubbed "XF"). 

Specific jobs have yet to be handed out, but the options include liaising with state and local governments, liaising with Indian tribes, working with the media and handling Congressional inquiries. Needless to say, all of those options sound ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC to me and if I end up with one of them I will be overjoyed. (There are really no bad options, but those ones happen to line up with my interests, so yeah.) Also, one of the Public Affairs Specialists is a terrible punster after my own heart; he punned "Seminole" with "seminal" in a staff meeting today and my heart fluttered like a trapped bird.

We haven't had much of a chance to explore the RRCC, but it looks appropriately official and governmental. I had several good conversations with FEMA permanent staff throughout the day, including a discussion on FEMA's contingency plans for nuclear accidents, another about Native American tribal sovereignty in Region 4 and a random encounter in the breakroom with a Geographic Information Systems specialist. I also ran into the Department of Defense liaison in the elevator (recognized him from the organization chart from earlier in the day) and had a brief conversation with him; apparently he's an Army colonel. The staff are friendly, my immediate boss seems nice and everyone's willing to talk. I think I'm going to like it here.