Thanks, Helene

On Thursday, September 26th, at 9 a.m., I opened an email from Robert Nicholas, the owner of Marquee – one of many huge graffitied buildings in the River Arts District in Asheville, NC. His email was a serious upgrade from the one the night before, which had said, “According to the latest reporting on the weather as well as the location of Marquee, we are not alarmed but are concerned.”

This new email told all his vendors who rented a booth each month that he wasn’t open to the public and only to vendors who wanted “to take precautions with [our] merchandise.” Robert sent his email at 8:41 a.m., and from my cozy bed in my West Asheville cottage, I couldn’t think of one good reason that I’d rush around the corner in the rain to break down my small booth of jewelry situated on a kiosk directly behind the cash wrap. In the nearly seven years I’d lived in Asheville, I’d seen the French Broad swell twice. But the storms were big enough to cover Carrier Park (a beautiful riverside park with a walking path) and flood the Antique Tobacco Barn, a known favorite to locals and tourists along Swannanoa River. Carrier Park was a bummer because running along the French Broad can often be a spiritual experience, and it seemed to take months for the tractors to clean up all the sandy mud and fix the trails.

“Impossible,” I said to myself. My jewelry was thigh-height, and it was much farther from the rivers than the Tobacco Barn. The owners of the ATB knew full well they were playing roulette and had created an extensive pulley system to elevate their cash wrap during potential flooding.

After spending a little while updating my profile on a third-party website to find writing work, I clicked on another email from Robert, sent at 10:51 a.m. This one had more of an alarming feeling to it. “Due to road closures, we are revising the closure time. Marquee will NOT be open until 2 p.m. We are closing up now.” I never clicked the included link for the weather report and road closures. Why would I? I already knew what would happen. Carrier Park would be screwed. I saw a sad interview online the night before from the brand-new owner of Day Trip, a sweet little bodega at the corner of Amboy and State Street, across from Carrier Park.  I knew he was screwed too, and I’d cried for him. Other than that, it was just gonna be another heavy rain that bummed us all out for a little bit.

The word HURRICANE had not entered my mind once, and I’d long ago started a habit of avoiding news for my mental health. I do not subscribe to any news emails, nor do I enjoy scrolling social media. Nobody mentioned the Big Storm coming, nor did I get one of the blaring alerts on my phone. I went to sleep Thursday night and even forgot to pull in my shoes from the screened front porch. During the night, I felt annoyed with all the noise, and around 2 a.m., I put in earplugs so I could sleep.

Nature lover, adventurer, and NC photographer extraordinaire Jared Kreiss posted a series of slides on his Instagram story, explaining it this way:

“Why didn’t they evacuate? That is the question I keep hearing regarding the devastation and casualty North Carolina and East TN have just experienced. To those unfamiliar with this part of the country, it seems hard to comprehend. So, let me break it down for you:

1) The areas that [were] severely impacted are 300 miles from any coastline and 600 miles from where the hurricane first made contact in Florida. If you know anything about hurricanes, you know they typically only impact coastal areas.

2) Though this region is very accustomed to heavy rain and wind, experiencing a hurricane is unprecedented. They had no way to prepare or even fathom what was about to happen.

3) Things escalated QUICKLY. Hurricane Helene not only managed to make its way 600 miles north to the western parts of North Carolina, but when it did, it STALLED over the region, dumping 4-6 months’ worth of rain in 24 hours. At peak flood levels, one of the rivers was at a flow capacity of 1.2 million gallons per second. That’s almost 2x the volume of Niagara Falls per second.

4) Unlike many coastal towns, this mountain region of the country is densely forested. Heavy winds and rain had already snapped hundreds of trees from their roots, blocking the exits and making them impassable.

5) Also, unlike coastal towns, the rain here cannot retreat into the ocean. The slopes and ridges of the mountains acted as funnels that directed billions, if not trillions of gallons of water into creeks, streams, and rivers – into the valleys where people live.

6) In a matter of hours, rivers surged more than 20 feet beyond their normal levels, unleashing devastating flash floods. Entire areas were overwhelmed – if people weren’t trapped by trees or landslides, the raging waters had them surrounded. Many of the residents live in isolated areas. There was no escaping.”

As my earplugs lulled me through the nighttime devastation, I awoke around 7:45 a.m. Friday morning, still safe in my elevated house. After I wondered if any of my windows would explode and looked at sideways rain with bushes and trees blowing in ways I’d never seen, I finally remembered that I’d forgotten about my things on the porch. My futon was doused, all my shoes were wet, and I kicked myself for not remembering to pull it all in the night before. Okay, maybe this rain was a little worse than the past ones – that now seemed obvious. Then the power blinked off, and I grabbed my phone. The only app I pay for is a weather app that makes me feel like a weatherwoman, and both having a dog and doing outdoor jewelry shows made me obsessed with looking at the different colored cells of weather floating above me. I’d become nearly perfect at knowing how much time I had to take Booda out for a walk before the rain would hit us. I pulled up that app and, at 8:10 a.m., took a screenshot of Helene in all her devastating glory. Then I texted a couple of people, then my phone stopped sending texts.

When I lived in California and took Booda camping, I wisely purchased a little camping stove with green propane tanks that screwed into the side. But it was all in my little shed behind my house – that I now thought might be flooding. If I couldn’t have my morning chai, then I’d distract myself in another way, and I crawled back into bed and stuck my nose into my Mahjong matching cards app that now didn’t shove me ads in between games since there was no internet. How could I know then how precious a phone full of juice would become? Maybe parts of me energetically knew the devastation that had happened, but I had no actual evidence since our electricity, cell towers, and the internet had all gone black. Unless you were one of the ones with your house floating away, there was no way to know how bad it was.

I don’t know how to find the words to describe having slept through a tragedy and energetically experienced it without knowledge of the tragedy. With no working street lights or traffic lights, no power to charge cell phones, and the inability to receive any news from the outside world, the best plan was to find your nearest and dearest and figure out a way to cook and eat all the food in your fridge before it went bad. And hope that you have really good camping lights.

It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that a neighbor on the east side of town, where I was hunkered down, told us about walking to the top level of the mall parking lot on Tunnel Road and seeing the intersection by the Swannanoa River where my favorite Goodwill was. He said, “Part of the road is in the Walgreens parking lot.” It was at that moment that I understood how bad it was, and tears started rolling down my cheeks. Cleaning up a little mud was one thing, repairing roads and all my favorite spots being flooded was an entirely different thing. As the neighbor continued to describe what he saw, including all the U-Haul trucks floating in the river from the nearby business, a part of my extreme sensitivity started closing off. This was capital T trauma, and the little girl parts of me that had already suffered so much in life kept wanting to go to sleep and wake back up, to pretend it was all a dream.

When some intermittent phone service popped back on, I started looking at horribly depressing images of not only Asheville but of nearly all the cutest surrounding towns. Everything was gone. And then the true reality set in.

The thing I never thought I’d experience had happened. I wisely moved away from New Orleans because I never wanted to know what this particular tragedy would feel like, and my nervous system felt fritzed from the beginning. Hearing nearly constant sirens of different kinds became the background musical score to the nightmare, and Asheville transformed into a scene from an apocalyptic movie. On the freeway flying by were huge water rescue fleets with multiple jet skis and so many other large rescue vehicles that I’d never seen before. Driving anywhere in my car brought me to tears. Looking down at the French Broad from the freeway bridge was so jarring that it was numbing. It was four or more times as wide and had riverside business rooftops barely poking through.

So many of my childhood wounds – of being inside of chaos with no answers – started coming up that I went into disassociation mode, and those first few days feel a little blurry. It became abundantly clear that the collective trauma and the extraordinary sadness of losing our sweet little town was going to be too much for me to energetically hold, and I formulated a plan to visit an old friend at the South Carolina beach. On my 5-hour drive, I got too hot from my broken A/C Subaru, and when I stopped for gas, I walked around the Columbia, SC QT, looking for anything frozen I might attach to my always-hot menopause body. A bag of ice was my only option, but then I needed a solution to prevent being doused in melting ice for the rest of my drive. The sweet male clerk had to focus hard on my mumbles about being from Asheville and why I wanted him to sell me one of his black garbage bags. When he came back with a small roll and handed it to me, and I tried to take only one, he looked straight into my face and said, “It’s okay, take them all. You’ve been through enough.” I almost didn’t get out of the QT before turning into a heave-sobbing mess.

I don’t remember laughing or smiling for those first nine days until I pulled into my friend’s beach house with an overflowing bladder and ran into her bathroom. While I sat on the toilet, her French bulldog Smushy came to check me out, and instead of barking at the intruder while his family was away doing errands, wiggled his body with excitement at the possibility of having a new friend. I was so overjoyed at having instant doggie love that I couldn’t help but create evidence that life was still worth living.

Some parts of me feel like a capital S shmuck for running away when the going gets tough. But I also realize that all my recent trauma recovery work has taught me to know exactly what I need, especially in times of high trauma. There was zero chance of me rolling up my sleeves and pitching in right away, as I would’ve shown up a bawling mess over the tremendous loss and devastation of so many people.

Being away at the beach gave me the much-needed distance to make sense of my new reality. Each day has given me more room to breathe and to look into the faces of other humans who didn’t just lose their town to a hurricane. After walking into a Wal-Mart to look for specific water dispensers because we don’t know when we’ll get water back, the gal that I asked for help was so sweet to me that I started bawling. From a lifetime of being shut down, happily being vulnerable with strangers was never my comfort zone. Post Helene, I don’t seem to care if I bawl with the entire self-check-out in Wal-Mart witnessing me.

Maybe experiencing a natural disaster tragedy makes you realize what’s important. Food, drinkable water, community, and the group problem of “How the F do we flush our shit without running water!?” I didn’t think I could write this piece after going back to Asheville, so I made sure I put something down while still sitting by the beach. It’s so pretty and calm here, but I have only two more nights before I have to go back to not knowing when we’ll have potable water. A week after the storm hit, my power came back on, along with daily phone updates from the City of Asheville, talking about the extraordinary difficulty in rebuilding the two water plants that were destroyed. Additionally, all of the water pipes, understandably, have a high amount of debris and sediment in them, so the water problem is not quite as simple as just rebuilding the plants. In the meantime, Ashevillians are so dedicated to being in community that I shouldn’t be so scared to go back because the entire town has figured out how to collect creek and pool water for our toilets. But in all fairness, it’s pretty stressful not to be able to poop and then flush without thinking about it.

The recovering apocalyptic vibe is far from being my comfort zone, but Asheville is where I live. One morning, while getting over my fears in the nearby waves at the beach, I tried hard to imagine each wave as another step toward being available for what I know best – trauma recovery. Who knew that all my earlier life difficulties might prepare me for knowing how to show up for others? Now, I can add ‘surviving a natural disaster’ to my list.

Written almost five weeks later: A friend of mine found a statistic on natural disasters and how it takes approximately eighteen months for your nervous system to process the loss. I got home from the beach a little over four weeks ago and have spent more time thinking about finishing this piece than it will have taken me to finish it, and I think it’s because I don’t know what to say. Parts of me want to create an uplifting ending where I talk about community spirit and how humans can survive anything. But I’m finding that the entirety of the trauma I’ve already experienced in life created a situation where all my young parts don’t feel excited about absorbing any more large traumas. Although we now have water running through our pipes and we can flush toilets, there’s a community joke about how the City of Asheville calls twice a day – once in English and once in Spanish to remind us that our water is not safe to drink and that we must boil it for at least one minute before using it to wash dishes. I wiped out my boiling pot this morning with a wet wipe, and it was covered in a rainbow of yellow-brown-black residue.

The location of my West Asheville house makes it easy to hop on the freeway to get around and go to grocery stores without driving by any of the disaster zones. I stopped getting on social media because it seemed all that I saw were picture updates of the many losses, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I keep telling myself that I’d slowly let it in and that I would drive through the River Arts district, but so far, I cannot. Fittingly, on the morning of November 5th (election day 2024), I decided it was time to let a little in, and I put on my running gear and drove 5 minutes to my usual parking spot at Carrier Park.

After I sent my beloved Booda off to doggie heaven earlier this year, going to Hominy Creek, Carrier Park, and the newly paved walkway along the French Broad – adjacent to the dog park – was where I’d go to spend time with Booda, since we visited one of these places daily. I did a lot of crying and processing the loss of my longtime companion at these spots, and over the months, I’d become attached to these being the places where Booda’s spirit would always be happily playing, eager for me to visit. I couldn’t have imagined the secondary loss that would come from Helene until I got out of my Subaru at Carrier Park, determined to go for my run, no matter how screwed up the path was. While I took in the devastation of the entire landscape, I started bawling because my sweet nature connection to Booda felt gone as well.

In retrospect, it might have been a better idea to have just gotten back into my car and driven home, but instead, I pulled up my go-to running soundtrack and pushed forward. The running path was still technically there for most of the way, but the energy and look of the entire place was different. Other than one man walking his dog, who I think lives nearby, there were only a few transient folks on the path. All the memories of my many runs and many mornings with Booda pounded through me as I navigated fallen trees, swaths of mud, and huge piles of trash and debris. I felt like I was visiting a combination of a gravesite and a haunted house. It was utterly surreal to look at so many sideways trees with bits of random trash still high up and imagine the entire thing being completely underwater only a few weeks before. A forlorn bicycle was the one picture that I decided to take. My run forced me to turn around where the path was entirely washed out as it intersected underneath the Amboy Road bridge, and I stopped for another big bawl while staring at a random, floating storage container that had gotten lodged under the bridge.  

Carrier Park was always a large source of joy as I’d run by familiar faces while my endorphins lulled me toward another positive day in the works. Now, it stands as a memory for another much-too-big trauma. I drove home after my run, sadder than before, and have not been back since. I currently don’t have the guts to visit the dog park area and the adjacent walkway, which also meant so much to me. Hominy Creek is not at all the same and left me feeling depressed after I finally found the courage to visit.

I met up with Rebecca, the other owner of Marquee, for her to deliver back to me the few bits of my jewelry that were lovingly retrieved from the mess. I think I disassociated during parts of her story where she told me about her experience of losing their business and how the water made it nearly to the roofline – approximately 16 feet high. My little Ziplock of a few pieces of muddy, rusted jewelry is now stashed somewhere in my studio. When I look at the bag, it feels haunted.

I’m not sure if I have an uplifting takeaway other than these final thoughts: being human is often an inherently traumatic experience. Just because I’m white and live in a ‘developed’ country doesn’t mean that I can escape tragedy and trauma – the type that the entire world experiences on a fairly regular basis. I thought I was escaping a flood by moving away from the coast, but an off-kilter Mother Nature is doing things her way now. I’ve witnessed people respond to Helene in a variety of ways, and it felt like a positive sign that I knew exactly how to take care of myself, even if that meant leaving the area for nearly two weeks.

The one thing we know how to do extremely well as a species is adapt. Although I never wanted to experience a natural disaster firsthand, I continue to look for the silver linings about how Helene smashed a lot of us out of any lingering life complacency in the same way the pandemic did. I’ve had to stop myself so many times from saying “when the pandemic hit” to “when Helene hit” because it has felt nearly synonymous. So, thank you, Helene, for helping to shave off another couple of layers of fear that keep me from jumping off the cliff of my destiny. I’m also left with a much stronger appreciation for the utter delicacy of this life experience we’ve all signed up for.