Moon Shadows
Orlando never proposed— he just asked me one day where I wanted to get married. I chose the Grand Canyon. Why not marry in church built by God Himself? And we chose to marry 10/10/10 not because we are numerologists, but because we thought it would help us remember the anniversary. (Both of us forget every year, to this day.)
The day we married, we were climbing up the north rim when hail started pelting us. There had not been a hailstorm in the Grand Canyon in more than 80 years. There are no caves or trees in the bottom of the canyon, so we had to run for a man-made shelter a mile up the trail. When I say run, I mean vertical travel after 3 days of arduous hiking, which is like swimming in molasses. By the time we ducked into the shelter, showers filled the canyon with a clamorous roar. The rain cleansed the canyon walls of its dust and looses dirt, and we were surrounded by waterfalls that looked to be milk chocolate. I thought that was the most spectacular natural event I had ever witnessed until we crested the rim of the canyon and saw that God had blessed our union with a full arc rainbow over the Grand Canyon.
I have been forever obsessed with moon shadows, so why have I not taken an interest in lunar and solar eclipses until recently? Don’t know— busy I guess:
I attended Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, SC where we were hit with Hurricane Bob in August 1991. We got breaks when the days were too hot and humid to train. The drill instructors didn’t want to explain why a recruit passed out. But a hurricane, apparently, was a training opportunity. My most vivid training memory was squeezing my kevlar helmet under barb wire while my recruit sisters and I low crawled through trenches, dug by the dragging bodies of thousands of Marine recruits who had trained before us. The rain fell in sheets and we were choking on mud while dynamite exploded around us in every discernable direction. Fake combat was exhilarating.
June 27, 1992. 24th Marines arrived at 29 Palms, California, the middle of the Mojave desert, 6 miles north of Joshua tree, and 4 hours from Death Valley, the hottest place on planet Earth. Wanting to train before the sun started torching the sands around us, our commanders woke us next day pre-dawn to run. We formed up outside the A-frame quonset huts in two lines. I was the second shortest Marine in the unit, and the only girl, so they put me third from the front, to help set a pace that the whole platoon could maintain. I don’t think we had run a mile when I got dizzy and began staggering. I was dismayed, embarrassed, that at 19, in the prime of my physical fitness, I was performing so poorly in the company of my male counterparts. The next thing I remember was the master gunnery sergeant screaming, “How the f*** did you guys get beer last night?”
I looked around and saw Marines, bent over at the waist, arms stretched for balance. Later in the day, Master Guns would describe feeling sick, looking back at the platoon and seeing jagged lines of men where we had just been parallel rows. We were running through the desert during a 7.3 earthquake, one of the largest quakes ever recorded in California. I returned to the quonset hut where I slept, away from my unit, to my cot surrounded by the few females in the desert in an era where the male to female ratio was 500-to-1. The girls had just risen, not victims of our exuberant command. They pulled on their boots, lacing them tightly and asked, “Hey Handrahan, did you feel the ground shaking?”
At that moment, I did not know we had felt an earthquake and I replied, “Hell yeah. That was 24th Marines out for a run.”
One girl fell back laughing and said, “Damn. I bet even you underwear is camouflaged.”
Every American of a certain age remembers Hurricane Katrina, the storm that reshaped New Orleans in 2005 and completely obscured the next hurricane, Rita, that nearly destroyed Galveston Island, Texas. Why does no one remember the devastation of Rita? Because Texans are self-sufficient.
In the year before I met my husband, I was living in Austin, working for HEB, the family owned grocery chain that sells more groceries per square foot that any company in the world. Exclusive to Texas, including a few satellites in Mexico and Louisiana, HEB was built on Christian foundations, and has donated millions to the betterment of Texas. They have an entire fleet of eighteen wheelers, ready to deploy at any time to devastated areas, bringing pallets of bottled water, staple groceries and basic supplies.
In 2005, I joined the deployment to Galveston, so immediately after the storm that we were second behind only the National Guard. Our bus rolled in to a broken town. Family businesses with metal roofs rolled up like sardine cans. I remember a barber shop, windows blown out, glass sprinkled like ice on the sidewalk.
We stayed in a premier hotel, two to a bed, with no running water. Our stores had no electricity for several days, and the people of the island were running out of food. The stench was indescribable. We emptied coolers by the pound, rotting meat, rotting vegetables, into a row of what may have been a hundred dumpsters that we had somehow requisitioned. After hours of that, we passed out bottled water, loaves of bread, jars of peanut butter. The locals who worked for our stores went home to broken houses, and their co-workers arrived with chainsaws, cutting out the giant trees that had fallen into their living rooms.
The moments of beauty that followed, still eclipsed by the horror of New Orleans: a plywood sign, propped by a tree stump— “Free chain saw sharpening.” Another sign, outside the same mom-and-pop barber shop with the blown out windows, “Free haircuts to all rescue workers.” Someone had wrestled a barber’s chair out to the sidewalk. We set up there, making sandwiches for whomever showed up to help.
My favorite moment from that trip, as we returned to the hotel, nasty, stinking, to learn the hotel had obtained cots and rolling beds so now we could each sleep in our own space. But still no running water. At some point I said to the crew, “This is ridiculous. We are on a f***ing island.” Not my most eloquent moment, but it inspired a mission. We gathered our hygiene items and filed down to the beach. We soaked in the healing salts of the Gulf of Mexico, and that night the hotel donated an open bar.
