Ellison Langford

Originally published in The Rome News-Tribune
April 29, 2011

 

Pieces of roofing tin dangled from tree branches and draped over fences along Padlock Mountain Road, but the house they had come from was nowhere in sight Thursday.

The shredded tops of cedar trees flung in the roadways filled Cave Spring with the scent of Christmastime as people began taking stock of the devastation caused by Wednesday night’s storm.

Sidney Ford, 49, walked among what remnants of his home hadn’t been flung into Big Cedar Creek or along Jim Shack Road.

“I built this (house) by hand,” Ford said. “I touched every board in here.”

Come September it would have been four years since Ford, his wife Hilda Ford and their sons raised the stone front and vinyl-sided home that was devastated by Wednesday night’s tornado.

They moved to be closer to the community Ford pours himself into through work with the Republican party and at St. Luke Ministries, a Cedartown nonprofit.

“This is the most craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Ford said. “I thank God that I’m here.”

He and his wife had just turned off “American Idol” so they could pay attention to the storm when they heard it coming.

“We got in that bathroom, we squatted down (and) we prayed,” he said. “About the time (my wife) hit that bathroom our house was gone.”

The corner of the house where he and his wife waited was the only part not turned into a skylight.

Thursday morning the contents of their home covered the hillside where they used to have groups of children out to hike and fish.

“It was beautiful,” Ford said through a knot in his throat. “Everybody would want to come out. You could catch big stripers out of the creek. I used it for the Lord. Everything was for the glory of God.”

Ford’s home was one of dozens ripped apart Wednesday night. Other houses were left untouched by the storm but were so surrounded by fallen trees that they were invisible from the road.

Kent and Linda Harris waded through brush rather than climb through the 100 feet of horizontal forest that buried the portion of Mary Mac Road between their house and the rental property owned by their relatives.

“Oh my God, your house is destroyed man,” Harris, 60, told his brother over the phone.

While picking through the brush covering the front of the house, Harris noticed a shiny tin roof jutting from the branches tangled on the road. Harris said it probably belonged to his neighbor who had just had it built on his property 500 yards away.

“For me, I just don’t feel anything,” Linda Harris, 59, said. “It’s so overwhelming and so surreal. I think in a day or so I’m going to collapse in tears.”

While the Harrises were navigating the impassable chaos surrounding their homes, the Hunt family was taking stock of their home off Old Cave Spring Road.

As Michelle Hunt and her husband John drove up their driveway, she didn’t think her home looked that bad — until they got closer and realized the two-story stone structure had been lifted off its foundation and set back down a few feet behind the original base.

They had weathered the storm elsewhere while it shredded their garage and spread the splinters of a 100-year-old barn across their yard.

“It was really pretty,” Michelle Hunt said of the stand of trees that used to decorate their driveway. “These are all 100-year-old cedars. It’s sad.”

Next door, Brenda Brannon’s family was helping her sort through what was left of her “dream home.”

She and her late husband designed the house themselves before constructing it 10 years ago. Rather than take shelter in her basement, she spent the night at a friend’s house.

“That’s my bedroom over there,” Brannon said of the boards and clothing strewn through a pasture of downed trees next to her garage. “Mr. Jackson’s cows are probably going to enjoy my cowboy boots.”

Her living room was a testament to the capricious nature of twisters. The front door had been torn from its hinges and pounded into the floor, but the antique vanity that stood against the wall next to it had slid forward only a couple feet.

“Look at that thing; the mirror’s not even broken,” Brannon said.

Across a living room floor of broken glass, the range hood above her kitchen island hung at an angle where it had been torn from the ceiling. Brannon had decorated it herself with tiles of watermelons and red peppers.

“I cut the tiles and did the grout,” she recalled as relatives gathered at her house to help her salvage what she could.

“I thought I was done crying and I’m not now,” Brannon said. “I just cannot understand the force of nature in this magnitude.”