Today started out feeling like a regular day for some reason. I was helping someone who had no insurance clean up their property. As I was finishing, I noticed there were dozens of orange state and county trucks lined up on the sides of the roads. Apparently there was only one front-end loader available to load the trucks with debris. I asked who was in charge of all the trucks, and a man in a pickup truck explained he was the supervisor. I asked if I could help load the trucks, and he said yes.So I looked for the biggest piles of debris I could find and began to load one truck up after another. It was going so fast that trucks from all over the city started to come to get loaded so they could haul debris out of town to the dumps. One after another, it was only taking me about two minutes to load each truck. Because the crane sits so much higher than a front-end loader, I could see over the truck beds and really pack it in.
At one point there were so many trucks lined up behind me that I did not want to take the time to move forward to the next pile so I started pulling debris out of what was in my truck box. I loaded 10 trucks with what was in half of my truck. It was amazing to me how much larger my truck was than those traditional trucks.
The day ended unexpectedly with something I think I will remember for the rest of my life. A group of citizens and volunteers went out to dinner at a restaurant 40 miles outside of town. Throughout the dinner everyone was talking and laughing, and I could not help but sit back and watch people who have lost so much laugh…and laugh really hard. I’m still amazed that in the midst of all this loss people can still be thankful.
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