Helping Hands

I’m halfway through Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke, and more than anything I keep thinking I shoulda been there. It’s an unrealistic thought–the day Katrina made landfall I was just starting orientation at my first EMS job, the ink barely dry on my license. Matter of fact, I was in a media blackout phase, and I had no idea what was going on in the Gulf–I heard talk about a hurricane, but nothing’s unusual about a hurricane in August. I didn’t tune in until days later, when the scope of the problem finally trickled down into water cooler talk. But still, it’s there: I shoulda been there.

I don’t know if everyone has this reaction, but I know lots of folks do–I’ve seen it. And it’s not just ones who do emergency response or rescue for a living. In my line of work, and just in my regular day-to-day life, I’ve seen plenty of people without any training or professional duty to act spontaneously mobilize in the face of catastrophe, large or small. Some folks just seem compelled to help when it’s needed. It seems a very primal, undeniable sort of urge–when the screams or the blood or the flames appear, they run toward them, and probably couldn’t even tell you why they’re doing it. Others freeze, or run the other way, or whip out their phone and start filming for YouTube… but lots and lots of seemingly-average folks find they’ve got a big S on their chest that they didn’t even know about, when the time calls for it. It’s a piercing, urgent expression of compassion that moves me deeply every time I see it.

In Chris Rose’s book, 1 Dead In Attic, he recounts a moment that brought tears to my eyes for its fierce embodiment of this singular urge:

I remember sitting on my front stoop near the end of the first week of September [one week after Katrina] when a disheveled and seemingly disoriented guy pulled up in front of me in his pickup truck. He had Michigan plates and was pulling a boat behind him.

“Which way?” he shouted to me. “Who’s in charge here? he said.

I had to laugh at that part. No one’s in charge, I told him. But if he wanted to put that boat to good use, I said, “Keep going straight and you’ll hit the water.”

He nodded. And then he started crying. “I’m sorry I took so long, man,” he told me. “I got here as fast as I could.” And he drove off.

I saw him two days later on Canal Street, looking fresh and invigorated. He had been rescuing people and pets every since I’d seen him.

Though rude drivers and belligerent customers and newspaper headlines make it easy to forget, that little seed of fearsome compassion is inside most of us. Under normal circumstances, it may never see the light of day. But sometimes a flood or a gun shot or a stranger collapsing on the floor cracks right through the armor we throw around that seed, and sunlight pours in. That crack may close the same day, or it may not.

The point is this: the cracks happen, the light happens, the seed is there.