Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

Happy 107th birthday, Leonard Bernstein!

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its collisions of overlapping themes; fearless jumps between walls of boisterous brass, swirls of tittering piccolos and swells of velvety strings; and headstrong, disobedient asymmetries that have no doubt awakened every conductor on the planet in cold sweats since 1956.

Here he is conducting his thrilling juggernaut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1989. I know the musicians know the music. I know HE knows the music. But I fail to see any sense of dialogue between them as he conducts. Yet they fly together with effortless confidence and musical delight. It all makes ME break out in a cold sweat, so I can't watch it as I listen in rapture.

You can watch at your own peril. But do take four and a half minutes to just listen.

The 2020 Iowa hurricane

Five years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour here—appeared out of nowhere and with less than 30 minutes’ notice pummeled Cedar Rapids for almost an hour. The National Weather Service literally called it unprecedented.

Roofs were ripped off; buildings were destroyed by hurricane-force winds, high-velocity debris and crashing trees; sewers were overwhelmed and flooded streets, yards and houses; literally all electricity, cell service and light disappeared for over a week … it was a war zone nobody had time to prepare for, and nobody could fully comprehend when it was over.

And our trees. Our beautiful trees. By most estimates, we lost almost 75% of our trees. Many of them were centuries old. They provided essential shade for us and fertile ecosystems for our wildlife and insects. With no place to nest, our birds all but disappeared for weeks and weeks.

My niece—who’d just lost half of her senior year of high school to covid—also lost the young tulip tree she’d chosen and we’d just planted to celebrate her graduation.

And—shockingly ... infuriatingly ... heartbreakingly—people outside of Cedar Rapids had no idea what had happened. Without electricity or cell service, nobody here had any idea what was going on even a block away unless we could get there on our own—and with roads buried under light and electricity poles and massive debris, that was often literally impossible. With virtually zero coverage on the national news, my colleagues on the West Coast had no idea why we’d all gone radio-silent for days. I’d assumed reporters from every national news source had descended on what was left of our city to cover the carnage, interview our citizens and raise national awareness of what had happened. But without cell or TV service, I had no idea that wasn’t the case. Nobody came.

We felt so alone. We had no idea how or where to start cleaning up. People were left homeless and immediately needed covid-safe places to stay. Some of those people were still living in technically uninhabitable housing a full year later.

Gas stations were knocked out without power, and people with low gas in their cars were pretty much screwed. My neighbor and I had to drive almost 45 minutes to find a gas station that actually had gas—and even then we had to wait at least 30 minutes in a line while a gas truck filled the underground tanks as desperate Cedar Rapidians filled their own tanks and as many gas cans as they could find.

Stores had no electricity to run cash registers to sell things. Produce and meat spoiled. Generators were impossible to find.

Three people died.

People and cities in hurricane zones have the benefit of buildings built to withstand hurricanes; protocols in place to manage the preparations, durations and aftermaths of hurricanes; well-publicized warnings that give everyone many days to prepare their homes and businesses, stock up on gas and water and groceries and survival supplies, and get out of town if needed for safety; and the benefits of the aforementioned publicity to generate after-the-carnage relief efforts across the country.

We had none of that. NONE.

And many of us talk about how we’re still kind of resentful when we see other disasters that get lots of warnings, national coverage and organized help.

But we immediately started our slow recovery here. People mobilized to help each other day after day after day. They set up free food trucks and gathered clothing and supplies and bottled water for people who suddenly had none. Churches and other organizations dispatched teams of volunteers to provide all kinds of assistance to all kinds of people. I randomly had just purchased a sharp, really awesome collapsible hand saw, and I found people who needed help chopping up and hauling trees every day and every night after I was back at work and every weekend for months. And I was far from alone.

The city chipped the massive amount of downed trees and made it available to everyone as free mulch. There was so much of it that people were still using it two years later to cover new plantings in newly sunny gardens and yards. Two years later, buildings were slowly being repaired or torn down and rebuilt entirely—though most insurance windows expired two years to the day after the derecho with many repairs still not even started as the backlog of demand slowly cleared. I had very low expectations for seeing foliage the next spring, but even the most stripped tree trunks and stumps were blooming with tufts of green leaves and came back back surprisingly stronger—even though they bloomed in weird ways that are still hard to picture what they’ll look like in the long term.

I'd randomly taken the first of the above three photos of my sister's street on July 4 the year before the derecho because it had looked so lush and beautiful. I found it in a folder on my phone after the derecho and took the next two from the same spot the year after the derecho to show just how devastating the change in our tree canopy had been.

We've planted so many young trees along streets and in boulevards that they've made me extremely contemplative about how trees are gifts from the past to the future. We'd been enjoying trees planted a century ago by our long-forgotten Cedar Rapids forebears, and when our young trees mature we'll be the long-forgotten forebears who've gone to our graves content in the knowledge we'd managed to perpetuate the cycle as we all rose from the ashes.

The world may not have known what happened to us in the days and weeks after the derecho, but I did hear national reports about the one-year anniversary on NPR last year.

So we’ll be recovering for years and maybe even decades, but we relatively quickly got well ahead of what I'd initially expected. 

And we all have LOTS of pictures.