Finding hope in Caruthersville

It had only been 10 minutes since I'd come to Caruthersville, but I was already lost. Not wanting to get any more lost, I decided it was time to pull over to a gas station and ask where to find 18th Street. Time to ask where the town's gaping wound was.

A gentleman overheard my questions and asked with a squinting smile what brought me to town. He wondered whether I worked for FEMA, or maybe the Red Cross. I answered that I was just a reporter covering the cleanup effort.

"How come you haven't printed the picture of the tornado? Don't you want people to know why they were saved?" he said, eyes lighting up.

I'd seen plenty of pictures of the aftermath -- one of our own even made the cover of USA Today -- but none of the tornado itself. As a reporter, I was intrigued.

"What picture?" I asked.

"It was taken that night -- actually taken by a friend of my sister. The media doesn't want to print it," he continued. "They want people to keep thinking this was a so-called natural disaster."

"Ahhm, what else would they think?"

He tilted his head at that question, widening his grin at my ignorance. "Have you ever heard of an 'act of God,' or maybe you don't have much use for that kind of talk where you work. You just stick to calling it an F3 or whatever."

Stumbling a little bit, I answered, "We try to stay out of making judgments. We kind of have to stick to the facts we can prove."

"Well then, what if I show you the proof?"

The guy rushed out to his truck and returned with a photo that apparently has been reproduced and widely distributed in town.

"Here, now what do you see there?"

Not much, I had to admit. A dusk sky with an eerily green smudge in the middle.

"That's a tornado, right?" he asked with the knowing tone of a patient teacher. "Now turn it upside down."

I did as I was told, and there was that same smudge looking at me from the opposite direction.

"Now what do you see? You see his face, don't you? And his arm?"

"Who?" I asked, thoroughly confused and trying hard to squint my eyes the way I would at a 3-D poster.

"Come on man, it's Jesus, can't you see it?" And for my benefit, he traced what he believed to be the face and extended arm of a man in a robe.

"Oh, OK."

And who was I to contradict him? You live through a tornado, you come out looking at things differently.

Jesus has been known to appear in shrouds, dreams, even once in some dude's burrito in Arizona. Why not here?

I left the shop with his last words ringing in my ears: "Jesus steered that tornado so it wouldn't kill anybody. You go and print that in your paper!"

I wasn't quite ready to print it, but I thought a lot about what he said while touring the town.

Trees plucked out of the ground and sent crashing on top of homes, roofs popped off like soda tops, appliances flung like dice. And yet ... no deaths.

Most believe the picture is nothing more than a hoax. It looks a lot like one widely circulated on the Internet. There's no proof. But hoax or no hoax, the response of those affected is real and important. Because if you believe you've seen Jesus' face in the twister that just ripped through town, you have a choice of how to react. Either you've been punished or you've been saved.

And the people of Caruthersville seem to overwhelmingly believe the latter. Amidst the devastation, they're even calling their town blessed. No matter what you believe, there's something wonderful in that outlook.

TJ Greaney is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.