This week we’re talking about “disaster tourism,” which, yes, is a thing—and has been a thing throughout our brief history on this earth. Just think of all the places we go out of our way to visit that signify lasting tragedy: Pompeii. Gettysburg. Pearl Harbor. Hiroshima. Auschwitz. The assassination sites of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Killing Fields of Cambodia. Ground Zero in New York City. New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Even much closer to home we are attracted to tragedy like moths to flame. We’re not monsters, needing to see and touch and witness others’ loss and pain. Many of us are, first, curious, that curiosity mixed with concern and compassion and sometimes deep personal connection to a place. Often, we want to be there because we deeply need to help. We may be hard-wired for that. Motivations are as variable as DNA.
But it’s important to be clear about those motivations, and thoughtful. People and places in the midst of, or just past, disaster, are so very fragile. We all know what it’s like to feel hurt, or at the very least squirmy, because of well-meaning people doing their darnedest to “help.” We don’t want to be those thoughtless people.
We need to think more deeply about disaster close to home, in the midst of the Camp Fire disaster in Paradise, and just a year after Redding’s disastrous Carr Fire and Santa Rosa’s Tubbs Fire. Why we instinctively do—and then don’t—want to visit these places. And why, in order to have a positive impact, we need to override those initial reactions.
An odd thing about disasters is that our instincts are pretty much bass-ackwards. We need to face that fact full on.
When wildfires in nearby neighborhoods are still smoldering, we desperately want to be there—see it all, do it all, roam the streets, offer a sympathetic shoulder or helping hand. We want to commune with that community.
But, of course, that’s a terrible idea. If we were even allowed to do that, we’d get in the way of firefighters and of the community itself. Many survivors are still in shock. They have no idea what they need, not really, not yet, and may not want to talk about any of it. Not yet—and maybe never, at least not with strangers, because the trauma can be profound and lasting. A year after the Carr Fire, for example, many people in and around Redding still struggle with PTSD, can’t watch flaming Camp Fire coverage on TV, can’t even drive by burned-out houses on the next block without losing it all over again.
Yet later, when the first rebuilt houses are up and surviving businesses are back in business, a lot of us have less interest. Burned-out towns are burned, after all, and they smell bad. And hiking and biking trails, even recreation lakes, once they reopen, aren’t very scenic. There may not be much to do otherwise.
That, however—once it’s finally safe to return, but when the community is nowhere near back to normal—is precisely when you need to go, to spend money there that you could more easily spend elsewhere. To support those brave new, or newly reopened, businesses. To park your camper or pitch a tent even in burned-over wilderness.
It’s clearly too soon to inflict ourselves on Paradise, or newly incinerated areas of Southern California. But it’s not too soon to revisit the Carr Fire, in and around Redding, and the Tubbs Fire near Santa Rosa—to discover what’s new, what’s still there and how best to appreciate it, and how to invest our travel dollars in community recovery. More next time.
