The Butterfly Effect -- "Phoenix" (2005)

I am always by your side

I am always by your side

When I went to my hometown -- Joplin, Missouri -- to visit my parents recently, I saw a mural titled "The Butterfly Effect: Dreams Take Flight" on a building at 15th and Main.

That mural was in the works long before an EF-5 tornado struck Joplin just over three years ago, killing about 160 people and destroying the city's largest hospital, its high school, and about 7000 homes:

Lead muralist David Loewenstein of the Community Mural Project, the organization behind the artwork, said that his team decided to feature tornado-related images in the mural because the storm was a recurring image in the drawings created by some 200 Joplin children who the artists worked with.  

The mural features butterflies because a number of children who survived the tornado later reported that they had been protected by guardian angels who took the form of "butterfly people," and because many of the children who collaborated with the mural artists drew pictures of them.

Click here to read a St. Louis Post-Dispatch piece about Joplin's butterfly people.  

Click here to see a CBS Evening News report on the butterfly people.

And here's a secondhand account of one incident involving the butterfly people:  

As the tornado approached, a father and his two young children were outside in their yard.  They did not have enough time to get in to the house for cover.  The father of the kids threw himself on top of his babies and they were on the ground.  The father dug his hands into the ground as the tornado plowed right over them.  The soles of the shoes he was wearing, were ripped right off.  He LOST the soles to his SHOES!  Amazing!  The father and the children stood up, after the tornado moved on, UNHARMED.  The 4-year-old little girl looked at her daddy and said, “Daddy, I saw that big butterfly holding you down."

"The Butterfly Effect" mural was dedicated about four months after the tornado struck.  Click here to read more about the mural and the dedication ceremony.

Click here and you'll be taken to artist Loewenstein's website, which has a good photo of the entire "The Butterfly Effect" mural.  

The mural incorporates not only butterflies, but also depictions of clean-up activity, references to Joplin's history, and a phoenix -- the mythical bird that is reborn from the ashes of its ancestor.

Langston Hughes

The mural contains two excerpts from "In Time of Silver Rain," a poem by Joplin native Langston Hughes.  (Hughes wrote the poem for playright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, after she told him she had cancer.)

These lines from the Hughes poem appear in the far left panel of the mural:

In time of silver rain
The butterflies 

Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry

These lines appear in the far right panel, just above the depiction of the phoenix:

And trees put forth 

New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky

Here's a closeup:

Here's a photo of another portion of the mural:

Click here and you'll be taken to a more detailed explanation of the mural's content.  

There's now another public project in Joplin that uses the butterfly in symbolic fashion.  Last month, on the third anniversary of the Joplin tornado, the "Landscapes of Resilience" butterfly garden opened in the rebuilt Cunningham Park.   

Click here to read about the butterfly garden, which I missed on this trip but will definitely visit when I return in September.  

The Butterfly Effect is an alternative metal band from Australia.  "Phoenix" was a download-only single released in 2005.  I was looking for a song that referenced the phoenix or butterflies to feature in this post.  I got two for the price of one with this song.

Here's "Phoenix":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: 

Edwin Starr -- "25 Miles" (1968)

I, I, I, I, I'm so tired

But I just can't lose my stride

I've done a lot of walking on my post-tornado visits to Joplin, Missouri -- where I grew up and where my parents still live.  (As Louis XV might have put it, "Aprés la tornade, la promenade.")  I certainly don't walk 25 miles like the singer of this song -- who has a very good reason to get to his destination -- but I do enough walking that my dogs are barking pretty damn loud by the time I return to my parents' home.

I've also done a lot of picture-taking with my trusty Blackberry.  In fact, I've done so much picture-taking that my memory card gets filled up and I have to e-mail the old photos to my Gmail account so I have room to take new photos.  (Given the poopy speeds of my wireless provider's network in Joplin, that's a s-l-o-w process.)

I usually am looking up when I'm walking around Joplin, but sometimes it pays to look down.  For example, here's a thriving pumpkin plant that is growing on the edge of Campbell Parkway, which is a relatively busy street.  

I saw plenty of morning glories along Campbell Parkway, too.

Here are some little wild asters I saw growing near that street:

I've previously posted pictures of a very large and severely damaged tree that stands near the intersection of Campbell Parkway and East 20th Street.  When leaves sprouted from it and other crippled trees last summer, the experts said that didn't mean much -- that those trees would likely die over the ensuing winter.  But this tree has put out even more leaves this year, and I have to think it's going to survive if it's lasted this long:

I've also posted a picture of what is known as the Joplin "Spirit Tree," which stands on East 20th Street near the railroad tracks:

Someone who has rebuilt a house on the 2000 block of Texas has painted a dead tree in the front yard to match that house:

They've decorated that tree with painted butterflies, symbolic of the "butterfly people" -- guardian angels -- who reportedly appeared to some Joplin children during the most harrowing moments of the tornado:

Next to another new house in my parents' neighborhood is a tree stump from which a cross has been carved:

I'm not sure what this real estate agent's real first name is.  (Surely it's not more of a tongue-twister than Nguyen, which may be quite common in Vietnam -- in fact, it's the last name of almost 40% of the Vietnamese population -- but is probably a challenge for those on non-Vietnamese descent to pronounce.)

My parents have long done their banking at the Commerce Bank branch at 20th and Connecticut.  The bank should have checked with a local historian before putting up this sign -- Commerce Bank was founded in 1865, but Joplin didn't exist until several years later.  (Lead ore was discovered in 1870, and the influx of miners seeking their fortunes led John Cox to plat a town in 1871.  Joplin was incorporated as a city in 1873.)

Finally, this sign -- which once read "Joplin High School," but lost the J, L, I, and N in the tornado -- still stands in its original location on the northeast corner of the destroyed high school's campus.  Everyone has agreed that it should be preserved somewhere, although I don't think they've agreed on where it should be relocated.

Edwin Starr (his real name was Charles Edwin Hatcher) had a top ten hit in 1968 with "25 Miles," which was released by Motown but sounds more like a Stax-Volt record.  Starr's first single was titled "Agent Double-O Soul," which was obviously inspired by the James Bond craze of that era.  But his biggest hit, which reached #1 in 1970, was "War."  ("War . . . GRUNT . . . what is it good for?  Absolutely nuthin'!")

Here's "25 Miles":

Click below if you'd like to order the song from Amazon:

Bob Lind -- "Elusive Butterfly" (1966)

Don't be concerned

It will not harm you

From a story about the 2011 Joplin tornado by Todd Frankel that appeared last year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

In the chaotic first days after the tornado, when nothing seemed real, word of the butterfly people began to spread. . . .

These stories, tales of guardian angels, could be dismissed as a child's fanciful imagination. But the stories have taken hold here. . . .

In one, a mother and daughter fled their vehicle as the tornado neared. The girl is 3 years old. In some versions, she is 4. They have no time to reach a nearby house. The mother and daughter hit the ground. The mother covers her child. . . . The tornado passes. They are not hurt. The mother is astonished. "Weren't they pretty?" the daughter asks. The mom is confused. "Didn't you see the butterfly people?" the daughter says. . . .

Marsha Sherrod heard the story while volunteering at a tornado donation center. She shared it with her Sunday school class at Forest Park Baptist. One boy, a quiet 11-year-old, raised his hand. The boy said he saw the butterfly people that night too, Sherrod recalled.

Click here to read the entire article.

Here's a CBS News story about the Joplin butterflies:

When I was in Joplin last month, I walked along the route taken by nearly 5000 participants in the "Walk of Unity" on May 22 (the one-year anniversary of the tornado).  I saw a number of the small wooden stars that had been handpainted by residents (including many children), nailed to stakes, and planted on the street corners last fall in the neighborhoods that had borne the brunt of the storm.  Click here to read more about the "Stars of Hope."

Here's one that was placed on the site of Joplin High School, which was destroyed by the tornado:

(In case you can't decipher what is written on that star, it reads "Laughter is a smile that explodes.)

But I also saw a number of small wooden butterflies, which had been handpainted and attached to stakes that were planted in the ground along the "Walk of Unity" route:

Here's a group of three butterflies:

Here's one more:

That tree in the background of the last picture is the "Spirit Tree," a battered tree that was painted by a group of local artists.  Here's a better picture of it:

Finally, here's a picture of a severely damaged old tree that stands near the intersection of Murphy Boulevard and 20th Street:

On my visits to Joplin last year, I saw a lot of trees that had lost most of their limbs and leaves in the tornado, but had put out a few new leaves.  The consensus was that those trees had been too badly injured to survive the winter, but it looks like this one made it.

"Elusive Butterfly" was a top-10 single written and recorded by folksinger Bob Lind, and covered by many other recording artists (including Petula Clark, Aretha Franklin, Cher, Dolly Parton, the Four tops, and Gary Lewis and the Playboys).  The string arrangement is credited to Jack Nitzsche, best known for his work with the Rolling Stones, and Leon Russell was among the session musicians who performed on the record.

Lind reportedly suffered from drug and alcohol addictions, and dropped out of the music industry for a number of years before beginning to perform again in 2004.  In the meantime, he was an Everglades airboat pilot, penned five novels and a play, and wrote for the supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News, for several years.

The Weekly World News was as over the top as The Onion, but some people took it seriously.  Lind told the Washington Post about a letter to the editor the paper received after running a story titled "Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby," which (of course) featured a fake photo of a smiling Hillary holding a hideous infant:

"We got a letter," recalls Lind, "and it said: 'Do you think we're so stupid that we believe that's Hillary holding that alien baby?  Hillary's too cold to adopt an alien baby.  You put her face on somebody else's picture.'"

(There is a grain of truth to that letter writer's point of view, actually.)

Here's "Elusive Butterfly":

You can use this link to buy the song from Amazon: