Memories of Joplin

What will become of Carmen, that young Mexican girl “without papers,” who had just found work in a take-out restaurant in Joplin? At that time – it was 2008, in the middle of the election campaign and a deep economic crisis – Carmen’s anxiousness about finding a job was so bad she was having difficulty sleeping and was fighting with her partner. That morning she was helping to paint and clean the windows of the taco shop that was opening soon on the main street.

Like Carmen, Joplin was trying to stay afloat through the crisis. But in just one night the town lost everything. The place, which Clarín visited on a journey through the United States on Route 66, is a wasteland today. Joplin is – was? – a strange city. Halfway between east and west, almost at the entry gate to the “Deep South,” which begins a few miles away in Kansas, it boasts some 50,000 inhabitants, but it was difficult to find a living soul on the sidewalk. The main road, which once formed part of the mythical Route 66, was like a desert, with few cars and hardly any people. There were more signs of life in the shops and the homes.

What will have become of Lorn, from the liquor store? A huge guy wearing a bandanna and the owner of a bar full of dusty bottles in an abandoned gas station that seemed like something out of a movie. And what about Mr. Evans? The Korean War veteran, then 83, used to pass his afternoons sitting still, in the doorway of his house full of abandoned junk, watching over his blind daughter.

The tornado passed right through the center of town, on a path of destruction nearly half a mile across. Hopefully it hasn’t ruined Lorn’s or Mr. Evans’ lives. Or destroyed the restaurant where Carmen imagined her future.