CHAPTER ELEVEN

Stay Loyal

Before April 16, 2007, if you’d heard of Blacksburg it was probably because you were from around here. Maybe you’d watched the Hokies play on TV once or twice. Then one windy spring morning a student named Seung-Hui Cho killed two people in a dorm at Virginia Tech. A few hours later he chained shut the double doors to Norris Hall, a classroom building on campus, and shot and killed thirty students and faculty members inside. As police stormed the building, Cho turned the gun on himself.

April 16, 2007, marked the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Afterward everyone had heard of Blacksburg. I remember sitting on the couch in our duplex in Ames, Iowa, watching the breathless evening news about the tragedy, the footage of ambulances and cop cars surrounding the kelly green Drillfield. I was a thousand miles away, and the shooting was merely the freshest entry in a seemingly endless series of outrages. A momentary kick in the gut, soon forgotten. I watched, then I moved on.

Once Quinn applied for a job at Virginia Tech, in the same English department where Cho had been a student, the shooting forced itself back into my consciousness. Like most acts of random violence, April 16 had been a horrible anomaly. There was nothing intrinsic to the place in it; it could have happened anywhere. Yet I couldn’t help wondering whether the shooting had cast a permanent pall over Blacksburg. Had that single day irrevocably changed the town? Could people be happy living there? Or would moving to Blacksburg be like a horror film where outsiders buy the house the locals all know to be haunted, then act surprised when poltergeists bang the china about?

After we broke the news about our move to one friend in Texas, all he said was, “Better start carrying a gun.”

In most states, the fame of all but the biggest cities peters out near the border—until, that is, tragedy or disaster sinks in its teeth. Who outside of Missouri knew anything about Joplin before a tornado mowed it down? Or Newtown, Connecticut, before a school shooting freighted it with a singular awful meaning? I’m guessing that if anyone outside West Virginia knows Buffalo Creek, it’s because of the coal slurry flood that Gertie Moore survived there forty years ago. Today you can drive up and down that narrow valley with its brightly rippling creek and see not a single sign of the disaster, not a trailer or tree out of place, but in the collective American memory, the stain is there all the same. In the insult added to injury, tragedy destroys a town, then tarnishes its reputation.

From the outside, geographic infamy could be seen as a branding problem, since a disaster affected what people said about your town behind your back. To locals, the aftermath of a disaster was something else entirely. A tragedy could make a town feel unlivable—emotionally, psychologically, and in very real ways, physically. I returned to the same questions I’d asked about Gertie just after I moved to Blacksburg: When a Bad Thing happens where you live, why would you stay?

Chernobyl, Ukraine, is known worldwide for only one thing: a nuclear reactor explosion in April 1986 that sprayed the region with radiation in quantities four hundred times those released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Area residents were told to pack for a “three-day temporary evacuation.” More than 130,000 people left and never came back. Their abandoned cities and villages decayed into ghost towns.

In Pripyat, the Soviet model city built to house the nuclear plant’s highly educated workers, forests eventually reclaimed the apartment buildings and the park with its new Ferris wheel. In Chernobyl proper, the twelfth-century village slowly succumbed to mold, weeds, and wet. Before the explosion, 14,000 people had lived in Chernobyl. Almost thirty years later, the town was still considered one of the most toxic places on earth.

To this forbidding setting a few hundred residents—mostly elderly women, known as babushkas—defied official orders and returned to live as subsistence farmers. Ostensibly, everything in the nineteen-mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl was poison. Government officials warned against eating the carrots and radishes they planted in their own backyards or drinking the milk that came from their goats and cows. The women did it anyway, having decided they’d rather live five happy years near the ancient graves of their ancestors than ten miserable ones in a sterile Kyiv high-rise.

Holly Morris struggled to fathom this kind of bullheaded place attachment. A travel journalist who confessed a deeper connection to her laptop than to any bit of soil, Morris spent several years making a documentary about the babushkas. “If you leave, you die,” the babushkas told her. “All those who left died.” Folklore, she scoffed. Except anecdotes piled up about Chernobyl residents who had agreed to relocate, only to pass away a few months later. Though there’s no official study, the people in the exclusion zone seemed to be outliving their uprooted former neighbors by some ten years. As the babushkas explained to Morris, the transplants “are dying of sadness.”

That wasn’t far from the truth. People who have been forcibly displaced from their neighborhoods and towns—because of war, genocide, famine, disaster, or urban renewal—suffer what the psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove calls “root shock,” a kind of traumatic stress reaction like PTSD. “Root shock, at the level of the individual, is a profound emotional upheaval that destroys the working model of the world that had existed in the individual’s head,” writes Fullilove in her book Root Shock. Without mental maps or an emotional ecosystem of familiar places, routines, and relationships, the displaced suffer anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment, and a propensity for stress-related diseases, including heart attacks. They’re left “chronically cranky, barking a distinctive croaky complaint that their world was abruptly taken away.”

The trouble with place attachment is that to fall in love with a place is to risk losing it and grieving for it. Morris met a group of transplanted babushkas whose village was so radioactive that it had been plowed under by bulldozers. “They’re talking thirty years later about how they still dream about it every night,” Morris told me. “They still want to go home. They’re crying. You’re just thinking, This is so very real and raw for them.”

So the babushkas of Chernobyl risked everything to return to a town that’s existed since 1193. “They have this deep, soulful connection to a particular place that most of us don’t have,” Morris said. As a descendant of immigrants who came through Ellis Island, she can barely wrap her head around such loyalty to land. Many Americans can’t. We’re a nation of immigrants, transplants, and literal trailblazers, people whose DNA appears to carry the code for burning the ships and starting again somewhere else.

And yet for the first time in her life, Morris was inspired to consider staking herself to a piece of land—not an ancestral home, but a spot in the Rocky Mountains, “where my body feels like it’s supposed to be. That’s as far as it comes for me,” she added. “I don’t culturally have a place that feels like home, but I have a geographic, physical feeling of home.”

Home is nothing more or less than the place where you feel at home and choose to stake yourself—maybe not in that order. When we decide to plant roots, often the feeling of at-homeness follows. The problem is that your town, wherever it is, will in all likelihood fall apart someday. It’s not really a question of if, more a question of how. Tornado? Wildfire? Crime? Blight? Sooner or later, every city struggles. What we locals do next, after the disaster, is a key measure of how place attached we really are. How loyal will we be when things go wrong? Will we stay through the flood, like Nancy Barton did, and become a placemaker? Defend our town as a staunch local loyalist, like Gertie Moore? Or will we cut and run?

My Love Where You Live experiments thus far had tested the hypothesis that actively seeking the good things in Blacksburg, investing my time and energy, and immersing myself in my surroundings would make me feel more like I belonged in Blacksburg. For the most part, they had. The bulk of the walking, shopping, eating, hiking, volunteering, socializing, and exploring I’d done in the name of place attachment had been like starting a new relationship: bouts of fear and failure mixed with overwhelming delight.

What I had never tested was whether I had the mettle to make it through a crisis. Would enduring a disaster with my town increase my attachment to it? Or had all my moving around left me ill equipped to tolerate Bad Things? How could I test that, anyway?

I couldn’t manufacture a crisis, nor would I want to. For this experiment, I opted for the next best thing: learning from how and why other people made the choice to stay after their cities’ worst-case scenarios. What could tragedies, and the way locals prepared for and responded to them, teach us about place attachment? Could the April sixteenth calamity make me love Blacksburg more?

One could argue, reasonably, that the babushkas shouldn’t have gone back to Chernobyl. Some places are so toxic, they demand to be abandoned. But the babushkas seemed pleased that they’d returned. In spite of everything, they believed their life was better in Chernobyl. They loved their place more than anyone else I could think of.

Take Micro-Actions

Bad Things in cities (and in life) come in two primary flavors: shocks and stresses. Shocks are acute—once-and-done disasters like fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes, or sudden outbursts of violence, like the ones that have lit up Littleton, Newtown, and Charleston. Stresses, on the other hand, are the chronic challenges of which almost every city has an assortment. Racial and class tension. Crime. Water and fuel shortages. Public health issues. Unemployment.

Both shocks and stresses seem to be bearing down on cities at ratcheted-up speeds, driven by causes from climate change to socioeconomic ills. In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the most well-funded philanthropies in the country, founded the nonprofit 100 Resilient Cities to help cities prepare for, prevent, and mitigate their Bad Things, then quickly recover normalcy afterward. When I spoke with Andrew Salkin, chief operating officer of 100 Resilient Cities, the first thing he told me was that shocks and stresses aren’t created equal. “We point out that cities have been facing shocks for years and years, but the only cities that have died, have died because of slow-burning stress.”

For an example, he says, look at Detroit. In 1950 the city had the highest income per capita in the United States. In 2000 Detroit almost ceased to exist. “That didn’t happen because of a hurricane or a tornado or an Asian beetle infestation. It happened because the city really failed to understand the stresses it was facing.”

It’s easy for cities to get it wrong. All the planning in the world won’t save you if you misidentify your shocks and stresses, if they change midstream, or if they simply pile up too fast. Salkin makes this point about a different city. “When Katrina happened to New Orleans they were planning for a hurricane and they got a flood. When Ike came they were planning for a hurricane and a flood, and they got a blackout. The next big disaster they had was an economic downturn. Then they were recovering from the economic downturn, the flood, and the hurricane, and they got an oil spill.”

When Victoria Salinas became the first chief resilience officer in Oakland, a position funded by 100 Resilient Cities in sixty-seven cities around the globe, she assumed that poverty would be at the top of her list of worries. Soon statewide drought in California was more pressing. Surveys of citizens and nonprofit leaders pointed to a host of additional problems, none of which could be roundly ignored without risking future catastrophe. “Resilience is a huge umbrella,” Salinas told me. “It’s the shocks, like earthquakes or even social unrest. It’s the stressors, like lack of affordable housing, air pollution, or economic issues. So the first phase of all our city’s work is to home in on what, out of all the challenges, are the five most important ones to deal with and tackle together first. It’s a huge range of issues that each city is dealing with.” Subtext: Who knows what’s coming, but look into your crystal ball and figure it out anyway.

If these are enormous problems for a city government official to tackle, how can an average resident possibly help? Resilience stresses tear at the social structure of a city, but so quietly, like termites gnawing at the woodwork, that you don’t notice until your city is falling down around your ears. Stresses make you fearful; over time, they can make you hate where you live.

I found hope in a story told to me by Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political science, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University and author of Building Resilience. Aldrich had been studying the tsunami that killed almost sixteen thousand people in Japan in March 2011. In most parts of the country, some forty minutes elapsed between the undersea earthquake and the arrival of thirty-foot waves. Yet the death rates in the 133 affected cities, towns, and villages along the coast varied from zero to almost 10 percent.

To explain the disparity, Aldrich and his fellow researcher Yasuyuki Sawada, a University of Tokyo economics professor, looked at factors like the average age of residents, the presence of seawalls, and the height of the tsunami when it hit land. Surprisingly, those physical elements couldn’t account for the varying survival rates. What did? Each town’s level of social connection.

Forty minutes was enough time for the able-bodied to travel the two or three kilometers from the lowest houses near the ocean to the highest point in town. It was not always enough time for the sick, elderly, infirm, disabled, or wheelchair bound to do so. Those who survived told Aldrich and his research team that a friend, a neighbor, a caregiver, or a family member helped them. That implied two things: First, someone knew that a disabled person lived in that house and needed help. “If you don’t know someone is there you’re not going to bother knocking,” Aldrich notes.

Second, the helper was willing to endanger his or her own life to save someone else’s. No one knew how soon the tsunami would crash into the shore. Ferrying an elderly or disabled person uphill requires time. Most people wouldn’t bother unless they had an existing relationship strong enough to merit that kind of consideration. “You can’t build that during the disaster,” says Aldrich. “You can’t say, ‘Okay, the tsunami is coming, let’s go make friends now.’ You have to do this before the disaster strikes.”

Aldrich calls this the Mr. Rogers approach to disaster preparedness and recovery—“Won’t you be my neighbor?”—and its effects have been visible in other places. After Superstorm Sandy walloped the East Coast, nearly seven in ten storm victims reported receiving help from their neighbors, compared to around 56 percent who said they received help from the local or federal government or FEMA. Regionally, the communities that recovered the fastest in the two years following the storm had the strongest social resources before the storm—measured as a combination of place attachment factors like social cohesion, helping behaviors, trust, and social control. More social resources in the neighborhood meant more confidence among residents about their chances of handling future disasters.

Any infrastructure that promotes cohesion among neighbors and community members can enhance resilience: wide front porches that invite casual hanging out; shared gathering spaces like parks; and greenbelts where neighbors cross paths. In Madison, Wisconsin, the nonprofit Center for Resilient Cities built the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, a combination reading room/computer lab/café, as a model of how casual meeting spaces and programming can build social capital and resilience.

Simple actions like showing up to community festivals, joining a neighborhood knitting club, or attending the same synagogue every Saturday also build cohesion and trust. Aldrich says they’re a far better investment than building seawalls or, worse, rebuilding a city after it’s destroyed.

Social connections don’t quite form a deflector shield against disaster or tragedy. Shocks continue to happen. Cohesion and collective efficacy, however, can alleviate the effects of chronic stresses in practical ways by making people more attached and invested. And as I learned from placemaking and volunteering, when people are attached and invested, they help.

Victoria Salinas, the Oakland chief resilience officer, told me, “We’re a city that’s very cash strapped, that doesn’t have enough money to cut trees, unless it’s an emergency and the tree is falling over. We don’t even do preventive tree trimming in Oakland because we don’t have the staff for it. Instead we have these people who volunteer for nonprofits who follow the city’s procedures and trim the trees.

“That kind of activism and engagement is a core of Oakland’s resilience. It’s something we can use more of always, because there’s not enough resources in the city to meet all the needs. But it also means that there’s so much space for individuals to contribute.”

Cities in crisis are frightening, but they offer one uniquely alluring trade-off: They allow residents more opportunity to create their city in their own image, the very thing that binds placemakers to where they live.

In 2009, the foreclosure crisis was catastrophic for the struggling West Rockland Street neighborhood of Philadelphia. Longtime residents were forced out of their houses. Slumlords took over, bringing in new, poorer renters. Some houses were abandoned altogether. The street, with its school, church, forty-six homes, and seven vacant lots, became a microcosm of poverty, crime, decay, and all the other ills of the inner city.

“What we saw happen immediately was the quality of life degrade,” remembers Emaleigh Doley, thirty-one, a bubbly, curly-haired communications consultant who lives in a three-story row house on West Rockland with her older sister, Aine. “It was the little things. There was way more trash on the street. There were way more unsupervised kids. The vacant lots were getting out of control. And just in terms of how people got along, there was more tension and friction.”

The Doley sisters realized they had a choice: Move away or do something about West Rockland’s problems. Financially, they were in the same sinking boat as everyone else, saddled with a hundred-year-old house that was physically falling apart and financially losing value with each passing day. Moving was a nonstarter. So they began picking up trash and planting flowers in their neighbors’ postage-stamp front yards. Betting on the power of “change you could see,” they planned a clean-and-green event they called Grow This Block. Theirs was the “broken windows” theory of neighborhood repair. Maybe fixing small, visible problems of litter and decay on West Rockland might galvanize neighbors into caring about each other.

They fixed up two or three neighbors’ gardens in advance “as an advertisement of what your garden could be like if you participate in this project.” Aine worked with a neighbor to make large sidewalk planters, the kind you saw in the business district. Some residents asked, “On planting day are we going to get to make those? Because I want one.” “People are really attracted by little things,” Emaleigh told me. “I think that can create a lot of energy.”

Grow This Block gave neighbors something cheerful to talk about, which led to regular block meetings among new and older residents. To make it easier to solicit donations and recruit outside volunteers, Aine and Emaleigh built a snappy website and called their efforts the W Rockland Street Project. Other neighborhood problems they approached with a Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper form of tactical urbanism. When they helped plant a community garden in a vacant lot, neighbors loved it so much they started mowing the other vacant lots. “Once people know they can use something,” Emaleigh said, “people will also feel responsibility and take care of it.” And as with other placemaking projects, places that look cared for become easier to love.

Emaleigh and Aine refer to the W Rockland Street Project as “DIY citizenship,” emphasis on the DIY. Everything they do is meant to be copied by other places. For their next project, making an outdoor gathering place in a vacant lot, the Doleys got an architecture firm to design a community message board that could be assembled for $600—not ArtPlace America money, just car wash/bake sale money. Every step of the makeover would be documented like an Ikea catalog, with photos, price tags, and how-tos. “It’s basically what my sister and I have been looking for,” Emaleigh said.

The Theodore Roosevelt quote that Emaleigh recited to me—“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are”—summed up her approach. Renter or homeowner, she said, there are things you should do to improve a stressed-out neighborhood. Over time you can make your community a more satisfying place to live. Residents will want to stay longer, and they won’t mind pitching in. That’s resilience, and it looks an awful lot like place attachment.

Emaleigh knows that the “Two Selfless Sisters Revamp Their Downtrodden Block” trope makes good copy, so she feels obliged to clarify that, planters and community gardens notwithstanding, West Rockland Street is still beset with overwhelming problems. People who live there are still working poor. Ugly vacant lots still bristle with weeds. There aren’t easy solutions for those kinds of chronic resilient stresses, “but I know that if we weren’t doing this work, that potentially on our block the scales would have tipped to the point of no return.”

Accept That Bad Things Will Happen

Worrying about disaster scenarios does not make you feel good about where you live. It makes you want to stockpile cans of tuna fish in your underground bunker. There can be a fine line between realistically preparing for your area’s most common shocks and stresses—by retrofitting your house for earthquakes or making seventy-two-hour emergency kits—and descending into the kind of crazy doomsday paranoia that leads you to push neighbors away. (That last gallon of milk belongs to me!)

The paradox of resilience is that while anticipating Bad Things can make you feel antisocial, the aftermath of the actual event tends to increase social capital. After Sandy, 36 percent of residents in ten affected neighborhoods said they’d met neighbors they’d never met before because of the storm. Thirty-three percent said that the storm brought neighbors closer, an effect felt most strongly in places where Sandy’s ravages were most devastating. These newfound ties have the added benefit of making residents feel more rooted just at the moment they’re waffling between fight and flight.

Four days after Hurricane Katrina, sixty-year-old Beth Riley still hadn’t seen her house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She and her husband, Jack, had spent the storm holed up in their daughter’s house in Alabama, a four-and-a-half-hour drive away. The television news was a steady stream of New Orleans with a dash of Mobile. Relatively little emerged about how Mississippi had fared, and less than nothing about Ocean Springs. The Rileys’ house was on the water; they wondered whether it had survived intact.

When they finally made it home—this time a ten-and-a-half-hour drive, on roads clogged with panicked Gulf Coast residents—the relatively untrammeled state of Ocean Springs’ main thoroughfare gave Beth hope. Oh my gosh, we’ve been spared, she thought as she looked over Washington Avenue. Then someone said, “You haven’t been down to the beach yet, have you? It’s not all like this.”

Nearer the water, the streets were so matted with debris they were impassable. Beth and Jack parked their car near the police roadblocks and walked the rest of the way. From a distance, their house on Harbor Drive looked okay—doors and windows blown out, but still standing. As she got closer, Beth saw a cushion lying on the ground across the street. “It looked real familiar,” Beth told me, “and I realized it was from our house. I thought, ‘What’s that doing over there?’” Her high school yearbooks and a heavy Pottery Barn sofa were on the lawn, too. Beth couldn’t understand why. As she moved toward the front deck, she realized with a start that the whole front of the house was gone, ripped away like a Halloween mask.

Judging by the mark on the walls inside, the water had reached eight feet. The Rileys’ bed had been dashed into a wall, the kitchen table shoved against the sink. Rotting food spilled out of the toppled refrigerator. Everything they owned had been spun into chaos. “Nothing landed where it should have been,” Beth said. “Almost everything inside was destroyed or scattered.” One of their chairs turned up on the pier. Most of the framed photographs on the walls—Beth’s favorites—were washed away like so much flotsam and jetsam.

Other hurricanes had blown through the Spanish moss–draped town of Ocean Springs (population 17,000). Everyone agrees they were nothing like the 120-mile-per-hour winds and twenty-eight-foot storm surge of Katrina. Connie Moran, an Ocean Springs native who was elected mayor just six weeks before Katrina hit in August 2005, told me that no one had any idea how bad it was going to be. “We knew we were going to get hit, and yet I was on TV the day before reminding people to bring in their trash cans and all the stuff in the yard so it didn’t get clogged up in the culverts. And there were no homes left,” she said, laughing ruefully.

During the storm Moran slept in her mayoral office; afterward, locals straggled in wet, with stories about spending the night in trees. The town’s relatively high elevation—twenty-three feet above sea level—spared them the worst of the damage. In Pascagoula, seventeen miles away, 90 percent of the city flooded. Still, three hundred Ocean Springs residents ended up living at a shelter at the middle school, and four people died, including an elderly couple that refused to evacuate. “It was amazing that we did not have more casualties,” Moran said.

Disaster recovery tends to proceed through orderly emotional phases, like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief in reverse. First comes the Heroic Phase. Motivated by equal parts adrenaline and altruism, people surge forward to help and rescue the suffering. Then comes the Honeymoon Phase, when support pours in from around the country. After Katrina, Ocean Springs acquired several self-appointed sister cities—Islamorada, Florida; Parkville, Missouri; Washington Township, New Jersey—that sent truckloads of equipment and workers or sponsored fund-raisers for the city. Residents who found lost photos and belongings set them out in their yards, like the world’s saddest garage sale, so the rightful owners could claim them. A woman threw a “household shower” at the community center to replace damaged ironing boards, pots and pans, sheets, mops, and toasters for ten Katrina victims she didn’t know. Everyone felt united in a sense of shared experience.

In disaster recovery, as in marriage, the Honeymoon doesn’t last. Eventually, the Disillusionment Phase sets in, with its trademark impatience, anxiety, and exhaustion, followed by the Civil War–inflected final phase of Reconstruction, which is as laborious and interminable as it sounds.

Even as friends helped the Rileys dredge their house of ruined belongings, and the neighbors next door to their rental property cooked them dinner every night for a month, Beth and Jack couldn’t decide which was scarier: rebuilding in Ocean Springs or starting over elsewhere. They filled one side of a corkboard with to-do lists—call the insurance agent, talk to FEMA—the other side with index cards on which they had written places they could move. Annapolis, Maryland, where they grew up? Auburn, Alabama, where their daughter lived? “It was going to be a big investment to rebuild,” said Beth, “and then you’re thinking, We live in an area where you can just lose everything in a matter of hours. Do we want to put ourselves at this risk again? If we don’t, what do we do?”

One in four Americans envision themselves living on the beach someday, basking in the benefits of blue mind, but this periodic destruction seemed a terrible price to pay for a view of the gulf. One of the Rileys’ neighbors couldn’t even bring himself to mow the grass in front of his house, with the ocean leering at him like that.

Local architect Bruce Tolar remembered that after Katrina, every time he drove back to Ocean Springs from a temporary job in Florida, he saw the curbs piled with other people’s swollen books and salt-crusted linens, and he could feel depression lowering like a scrim. He didn’t dare confide in anyone about what he was suffering, because they were likely to be suffering worse. If he ran into a friend on the street and asked, “How’s your house?” the reply would often be, “I don’t have a house.”

It took Bruce five years to realize he probably should have called it quits. At a community meeting in 2000, he listened as other Ocean Springs residents one by one acknowledged what they wished they had done differently when the hurricane came. “I’d take my photos with me,” said one person. Another confessed, “I’d have gotten out sooner.” When it came to Bruce, a bear of a man with a graying goatee, he said, “I wouldn’t come back.” Everyone in the room, including his mother, gawped.

Explaining his logic to me, Bruce said that Katrina was personally devastating in ways he never imagined at the time. The true problem wasn’t just the three feet of floodwater that destroyed the first floor of his house. It was the slow burn of trauma. In the resulting economic slowdown, his business collapsed. He and his wife ended up divorcing, in part because of the terrible pressures the hurricane exerted on their family.

Ocean Springs was safe and clean, the schools were good, and his family and friends all lived there. He knew the town was lovelier and livelier than most places you could go. Bruce thought they were doing the right thing by staying loyal to Ocean Springs, in the manner of the babushkas of Chernobyl. In retrospect, he says, “it would have been a lot easier just to stay in Florida and keep going.” He made a pledge to himself: If another Katrina happened, he wouldn’t stick around to see how it turned out.

Outcomes aren’t necessarily improved for those who stay in place after a disaster. In one study of seven hundred low-income women who moved to new cities after Katrina, Penn State sociologist Corina Graif found that their new neighborhoods boasted higher median family income, more employed people, and less poverty than the ones they left. Another study found that ex-cons who were released from prison shortly after the hurricane, and who were forced by Katrina to settle in unfamiliar neighborhoods rather than their old haunts, had lower recidivism rates by 15 percent. Katrina had done them the favor of making it impossible to reenter their old lives.

Malcolm Gladwell explains in a 2015 New Yorker piece that Katrina victims who abandoned New Orleans for good after the hurricane were largely better off than those who returned. “Katrina was a trauma,” he writes. “But so, for some people, was life in New Orleans before Katrina.” Given that people raised in New Orleans earn, on average, 14.8 percent less than the rest of America—a serious place penalty—why would any of the 1.1 million residents displaced by Katrina make a herculean effort to return to their hometown?

The answer is place attachment. In a field study of 101 Ninth Ward residents who evacuated to Houston after Katrina, Emily Chamlee-Wright, of Beloit College, and Virgil Henry Storr, of George Mason University, found that more than half preferred to live in New Orleans, despite Houston’s better quality of life. Sixty-nine percent simply said, “New Orleans is home.” One man, when asked if it had occurred to him to stay in Houston, said, “No, that ain’t never crossed my mind [not to come back]. This is my home. . . . Why would I leave? This is my home.”

All my research on place attachment had shown me that loyalty to where you live matters. But at what cost? And how do you know when to leave? In the desperate, confusing months after a severe resilience shock like Katrina, no wonder people like Beth Riley struggled to make that call.

Of the large number of Katrina horror stories that Ocean Springs residents had to share, the most wrenching I heard came from a lawyer in town named Alwyn Luckey. As the storm approached, Alwyn packed his wife and children off to Disney World and stayed behind to get the family’s beachfront house ready for a political fund-raiser they were hosting the next day. As the storm scudded toward landfall, a colleague urged him to take refuge in his law office a couple miles inland. “That’s ridiculous,” Alwyn thought. “I’ve been in this house for three or four hurricanes. I’m not going to leave now.” Eventually sense got the better of him, and he threw his dogs, his wife’s good jewelry, and a change of clothes in the car.

The storm raged through Ocean Springs. When Alwyn returned, his house was gone, nothing left but a bare slab of concrete. He had to call his wife to break the awful news. They comforted each other that at least no one had been hurt. It was all just stuff.

Three days later, he was the one to get a phone call. On their way home from Florida, his family had been in a car accident. The SUV his wife, Jeanne, had been driving with her mother and children inside had rolled on the highway. Jeanne was paralyzed. She’s been in a wheelchair ever since.

When sorrows come not as single spies but in battalions, I’ve always leaned toward taking off and not leaving a forwarding address. It never occurred to Alwyn to move permanently. “You live in Tornado Alley in Oklahoma and people wonder why you stay,” he said, “and it’s because it’s home. That’s the short answer about Ocean Springs. For those of us who’ve been here forever, it’s home. You don’t necessarily choose to leave just because it has the attributes of being a hurricane target.”

Or a tsunami target. Or a violence target. Or a toxic radiation target. Disasters and threats that make outsiders say, “This must be nature’s way of telling you there shouldn’t be a city here,” have little effect on the truly place attached. We’re not quite logical about these things. Consider that New York City has been obliterated on-screen no less than thirty-four times by various apocalyptic agents, including aliens, rats, superhero battles, nuclear weapons, pandemics, and nine monsters (King Kong wrecked it twice), yet 8.4 million Americans are still happy to live there.

“The problem,” says Daniel Aldrich, the resilience expert, “is that people are very sticky.” Aldrich has seen this firsthand. He and his wife moved to New Orleans for graduate school at Tulane six weeks before Katrina. The storm destroyed their house and car but taught him his first lessons in where resilience comes from—not from the FEMA check (“which by the way never came”), but from “feeling that we weren’t alone, that we had connections, that we had a broader place in the community. That really drove the process of resilience there.”

Maybe disasters, like any other Bad Thing, are merely incredibly effective vehicles for focusing your thoughts about what matters in your life, the way a cancer diagnosis or an accident does. As Aldrich says, “When something bad happens, what do you really want? A bigger car, a bigger home, more money? Or the belief that we’ll get through this together, with our sense of community intact?”

Beth and Jack Riley took six months to recommit to Ocean Springs. In the end, after they made the pros and cons lists, Ocean Springs had more pros than anyplace else. “Friendship and community are very hard to duplicate or start all over again—at our point in life, too,” Beth said. With the insurance money from their home, they moved a few miles inland, but “we’re happy enough that this is where we’ll stay until we die probably.” She calls Ocean Springs a great place that just has a very bad day once in a while.

In the paradox of resilience, the moment you might profitably consider abandoning your hometown is the moment social connectedness surges. With your grief and loss, you turn to your friends and neighbors. You commiserate. You help and receive help. And eventually, as happened with the Rileys, the strength of your network reels you back, making you want to stay despite everything.

Feel the Pain

Visiting Ocean Springs, ten years after Katrina, I’d passed the remains of a few graying, buckling houses, their windows boarded and their FEMA case numbers spray-painted on the plywood. Ten years and the houses had been neither rebuilt nor demolished. They were left to creep into disrepair, a disturbing memorial to the hurricane’s passage.

Even on swanky Beach Drive, where the newish mansions loomed ten feet higher than their predecessors, telltale grassy gaps marked the sites where no one had yet found the courage or foolhardiness to rebuild. In the midst of Ocean Springs’ almost complete recovery, a few niggly little reminders remained, if you knew to look for them.

That there were no visible scars from the April sixteenth shootings in Blacksburg made it that much harder to fathom. Once, at a PTO meeting, someone mentioned “security measures since April sixteenth,” and I thought, April sixteenth? What’s that? The perplexity of the memory jolted me every time. Oh yeah. That happened here.

April 16 was my town’s personal 9/11, and I hadn’t bothered to learn more about it than the condensed version I’d heard on the nightly news. I couldn’t even keep the date straight. Probably I should have been happy to leave it that way. If by dint of luck, distance, or disinterest I could keep one iota of extraneous sadness at arm’s length, why shouldn’t I?

And I would have, except for a stray thought prompted by Jeff Coates, of the National Conference on Citizenship. He’d been living in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, and afterward he’d noticed that, along with the water in the bay, empathy in the city surged. Compassion for neighbors was the Honeymoon Phase at work, yes, but it paved the way for stronger social ties, civic engagement, neighborhood cohesion, and collective efficacy—the behaviors that help locals get things done. Empathy, in short, was a harbinger of place attachment, or at least some of the behaviors linked to place attachment. “I think you can’t have anything without building empathy,” Coates said to me. “I think it’s the foundational building block” for towns.

For my Love Where You Live experiments, I’d worked at being kind to my neighbors, volunteering and donating money to good causes in my town, and placemaking my city into happiness. I’d tried to really see the humans behind the stores and restaurants and farms in my town, to hold out a hand to them. It seemed like my experiments had made me more compassionate. After so many months of trying to fall in love with where I lived, I looked at my town and saw people that I liked and whose lives I wanted to help improve in some small way. In a city of 43,000 people you can’t know everyone—I’d maybe met 1 percent of who lived here—but my Love Where You Live efforts had made me feel a sense of community anyway. In place attachment scale terms, I could say, “My town isn’t perfect, but there are a lot of things that make me love it.”

We were closer, Blacksburg and I. We’d become good friends. But for good friends to become best friends requires some depth of intimacy, some revealing of the inner self. We’d arrived at the stage of our relationship where, if Blacksburg were a girlfriend, we’d be ugly-crying to each other about our tough childhoods. Truly knowing Blacksburg meant understanding its Bad Thing. That was April 16.

Not every town has a tragedy in its past, thankfully, nor is one a prerequisite for empathy. You can feel compassion and understanding for any shock or stress, for whatever history left your town racially divided or poorer than it should be, killed its once-thriving industry, made it less than you wish it were. You should feel empathy for all the things that drive you crazy about your city. Accept them or work to change them, but first, feel empathy.

My city happened to have a preexisting tragedy, and my hypothesis was that if I could muster more empathy for my town’s heavy history, I’d love it more. The way I thought I could do that was by learning what had happened. Making it more real for myself. For my final Love Where You Live experiment, I wanted to experience an iota of the empathy that disasters produce. I wanted to get it.

One Sunday at church, my friend Joyce handed me an enormous scrapbook she’d compiled about the April sixteenth shooting. Knowing that she and her husband, Scott, had lived in Blacksburg for thirty-six years, I’d asked them to talk to me about their experiences that day. This was the study guide, apparently.

For a week I hesitated to look at it. It had made perfect sense in my head when I had arranged to speak with them. Joyce assured me that they had talked about April 16 with other newcomers. But I still worried that this new line of inquiry was both self-serving and self-flagellating. Was I crossing the line between empathy and voyeurism? I couldn’t tell. The scrapbook sat there for a while, looking intimidating, until one afternoon, in the dim of my bedroom, I spread the binder open and began leafing through the plastic sleeves stuffed with family letters, newspaper clippings, and journal entries.

This was their story: On Monday, April 16, Scott, a professor in the engineering, science, and mechanics department at Virginia Tech, was in his office in Norris Hall when Seung-Hui Cho began firing into classrooms one floor below. A colleague across the hall ran downstairs to see what was happening. He was killed. Scott called 911, and the operator told him to barricade himself behind his desk. He stayed there until police banged their way inside, guns drawn, and escorted him out the door. In a daze, he wandered home.

Joyce and Scott had lived in Blacksburg so long that when the identities of the thirty-two dead were released, they knew a quarter of them personally as colleagues, friends, acquaintances, or friends of their children. What to me were names in a list, to Scott and Joyce were real people who had families and loved their work and ran carpools and sat in meetings and played on the volleyball team. I spent a couple hours reading Joyce’s scrapbook, crying, then feeling terrible about crying. Why am I crying? I don’t deserve to cry!

The strange thing, said Scott, when I later sat with him and Joyce in their living room, was that his current students didn’t know much about the shootings. Incoming freshmen had been just ten years old when April 16 happened, and if they remembered the day at all, it was hazily. For Scott and Joyce, it’s like hardly any time has passed. To this day, Joyce panics a bit when she hears more than one police siren at a time. Scott still has a hard time walking through the second floor of Norris Hall, even though the classrooms where Seung-Hui Cho rampaged have been converted into a Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. He seemed surprised to find out that the eighth anniversary of the shootings was coming up. “Has it really been eight years? I guess it has.”

Bursts of man-made violence could understandably make locals skittish or suspicious. In Blacksburg, April 16 made residents more tender with each other. Southerners are inclined to say hi to strangers anyway, but after the shooting, “you could be at the grocery store and somebody would burst into tears, and everyone understood why they were crying, and somebody would give them a hug,” Joyce said. “There was just a community feeling.” Not Virginians by birth, Scott and Joyce had long ago fallen in love with Blacksburg. April 16 cemented their loyalty into a fierce protectiveness.

“Is there a difference,” I asked them, “between people who were here in Blacksburg for April sixteenth and people like me who weren’t?”

Joyce paused, then said, “Yes, but I don’t think it’s one where we say, ‘This is our tragedy; you can’t take part of it.’ But if they weren’t here, they certainly don’t have the same feelings, the same connection. It’s just something that happened here, rather than something that happened to them here.”

There was that eternal line separating me from them, no matter what efforts I made to cross it. And yet in mid-April, I felt newly alert to the anniversary of the shooting. I found myself tearing up in parking lots and restaurants for no good reason other than that there were people around me who had weathered an enormous storm. The saying “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” came to mind. After talking to Scott and Joyce, I had a better understanding of what the hard battles were. That made me more inclined to be generous and gentle.

Each year Virginia Tech organizes memorial events the week of April 16, including a 3.2-mile Run in Remembrance in honor of the thirty-two dead. At lunch one day, my friend Megan asked me if I planned to sign up. “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel a little weird about it. Are newcomers allowed?”

“I think so,” said Megan, who’s newer to Blacksburg than I am. “My whole family’s going to run it. Well, ‘run’ may not exactly be the right word. I run about as fast as my kids walk.”

For an avid nonrunner like me, signing up for the “3.2 for 32” was a chance to test myself. Did I genuinely mean to remember what had happened in Blacksburg? Or was it all just words? My empathy felt real enough, but maybe the race would provide the experiment that proved the results to myself. “Maybe there was a time when the run was mostly for families and survivors, but not anymore,” Joyce confirmed. “Now anyone can do it.” I signed up.

The bright morning of the run, the Drillfield was choked with people. Someone yelled the Hokie battle call of “Let’s go!” and immediately the chatter ceased and the involuntary response cry rose up: “Hokies!” With Quinn and Ruby—Ella had gone ahead with some friends—I found a spot in the back of the pack among the walkers. White flags were raised to signal the moment of silence. Ten thousand people hushed.

For an eerie minute, I didn’t hear a child whisper or a baby cry. Around me were students in tank tops, parents gripping baby strollers, gray-haired faculty members fumbling with their iPods. I couldn’t tell who’d actually been present in Blacksburg for April 16. In the quiet, we all remembered the day in our own way. Then the balloon arches lifted and we collectively began slow-motion shuffling down Drillfield Drive toward the campus duck pond.

I’d be lying if I described the run as a solemn march of grief. Once the moment of silence ended, the route erupted in sound. Laughter and a cappella singing and shouts of “Keep it up! You’re beautiful!” faded in and out as I trotted along. The marching band was playing near the football stadium, where a bottleneck had formed, hundreds of us pressing forward like we were waiting for a ride at Disneyland, then at last shooting into the tunnel the football players used to enter the field on game day. In a fever of team spirit, someone shouted, “Let’s go!”

“Hokies!” I called back, like I knew what I was doing.

There’s nothing more egotistical than telling the world how someone else’s tragedy makes you feel. I’m still conscious of the fact that I’ll never truly understand Blacksburg’s resilience shock. After the 5K, a line of visitors filed past the horseshoe of thirty-two Hokie Stones, one for each of the lives lost, that form the April 16 memorial. I had no inclination to join in. That space still felt too sacred for outsiders.

Still, I’d seen that as I invested emotional energy into considering my town’s shocks and stresses, my empathy had increased. Like battle buddies, Blacksburg and I were tighter because I knew what the city had been through.

Growing up in Southern California, a child of earthquake drills and occasional tremors that knocked knickknacks off the fireplace mantel, I felt a grim pride in being a person who lived through earthquakes. Other people would say, “Oh, no, no, no, I could never live in a place that had earthquakes,” and I’d shrug and say, “You get used to it.” Undertext: No big deal to us hardy souls.

I suppose that’s what I mean by resilience. You know some of the Bad Things your city is dealing with, and you love your city anyway. In a perverse way, you love it because of the Bad Things. You start to wear your resilience like a badge of honor: “I made it through a six-point-oh!” or “I survived Katrina.” You start to see yourself as someone who endures.

Of course, you can always move away. Sometimes that’s the better (or only) option. But when we let them, shocks and stresses bind us to our town. At least some of the placemakers I’d learned about through my Love Where You Live experiments—Nancy Barton creating the Prattsville Art Center after a flood, Belva Davis working with neighbors after Detroit’s economic collapse, Brian Mogren starting St. Jane House as a reaction to chronic stresses in North Minneapolis—were inspired by their community’s hardships.

In that sense, disaster is a loyalty proving ground, the thing that changes your town but doesn’t define it. Although if it does define your town, that’s okay, too. As Joyce told me, she doesn’t mind if when people think of Blacksburg, they think of April 16, “because there’s some sympathy there. Maybe they’re thinking kind thoughts. At least they know where it is.”

Love Your City Checklist

Create an emergency contact list for your neighbors. You’ll be one another’s first line of defense in case of a disaster, with the added benefit that now you have their numbers to invite them to your Sunday Night Dinner.

Take a broken windows approach to your own street. Are there small signs of chronic stress, like trash in the street—or, for that matter, literal broken windows? Start a cleaning and greening program like the Doley sisters did, or work with your neighbors on other solutions. (It’ll have the place attachment benefit of building collective efficacy.)

Read about your town’s history so you have a better sense of what it’s been through. Even small towns tend to carry local history books in the library.

Treat people in your community with kindness. Make your town a more gentle place to live. When you’re tempted to blow up at a neighbor or a slow-moving store clerk, invoke some empathy by imagining what hard battles the person might be fighting in his or her life.

Make your own personal resilience plan. Identify the most common shocks in your region—earthquakes, floods, wildfires—and figure out what you need to do to deal with them. Do you need a weather radio? A supply of water? Make an evacuation plan and assemble seventy-two-hour kits for each member of your family. You’ll feel less stressed if you know what to do when a Bad Thing happens.

Learn to be more self-sufficient by picking up helpful practical skills—gardening, hunting, canning, clothing repair. They’ll be super handy when the zombie apocalypse occurs.

Find out what your city is doing to prepare for resilience shocks. Read about, for instance, new plans to prevent flooding. It will tamp down your anxiety and perhaps present ways to become civically engaged—if only by cheerfully paying the new storm-water abatement tax.