Washed Away in Darkness

Sheree Combs

“Get up and move your vehicle. The parking lot’s flooding.” I shot out of bed and sloshed through water in my nightgown. Curtains of rain poured down. The road beside the log house where we’d spent four nights, roared as a creek. Water spilled everywhere, but the enormity of it hadn’t set in.    

“The town and the apartments below the Great Hall are already flooded” Britt reported after a trip across the bridge to the Hindman Settlement School. We kept watch from the covered porch, smelled gas, and cringed as rapid-force water gushed closer to the gas meter in the side yard. Water lines ruptured and mixed with gas and sewage. At 5:00 am we jerked back awake. “Get up. We might need to evacuate. We smell gas, again.” 

A stutter pulsed inside my heart for the people in Knott County, and my home county of Letcher, whose lives were washing away in the darkness. Mountains were formed to absorb, reroute and slow down storm waters, but can’t hold inches of rain when it falls this fast. Not after the mountaintop removal and strip mining that occurred here for decades. Not after their tops were blasted off, and augers gnawed into their beings. Not after rich men failed to reclaim the land as agreed to when granted mining permits. And those who yielded power in Kentucky’s government didn’t seem worried about the mountains or its people when mine owners filed for bankruptcy and slunk out of the massacred hills. Took their jobs, and left the miners once again in poverty, laboring to breathe through the coal dust permeating their lungs.

The people along these creeks would be left with nothing. Children who’d survived two years of COVID, once again faced peril and loss. Rendered less likely to succeed in a world that already shifts the odds in favor of wealthy and middle-class kids. I thought of the elderly trapped in homes – their legs too slow to carry them out of harm’s way.

By daybreak water had started to recede, but flood lines reached the windows in the James Still Learning Center, where we’d sat in classrooms the day before. New words to write, new stories to spin tumbled around in our heads as we walked to and from class. The deep-summer green in the hills and the sublime sunlight encapsulated us in the utopia created each July at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop.

Tops of automobiles bobbed in Troublesome Creek. Muddy water lapped at Uncle Sol’s cabin. Employees and students, eyes dulled from shock and lack of sleep, huddled in the dining hall and on porches. After breakfast, we dream-walked to our vehicles, called out “safe travels,” and drove off towards home. It felt wrong to leave, but those rendered homeless by this calamity would soon need our beds and meals.      

Wooden sheds sat atop guardrails three miles out of Hazard, Kentucky. Peoples’ belongings clung higher in trees than in past floods I’d witnessed. Vehicles wobbled in the water and leaned upside down against the riverbank. A woman stood in a doorway, phone in hand, her home washed off its foundation. The man in the truck in front of me stopped to render aid. Another man flagged me down. “You’ll have to turn around. No one’s getting through here.” I took Highway 80 into London, merged on to Interstate 75 North, and wound my way back into the Bluegrass.

I finally got a call through to my eighty-six-year-old mother in Letcher County. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to. I’m fine. I’ve been worried sick about you there in Hindman.” We drew comfort in each other’s voices. My sister’s phone was out. My brother had died of cancer the year before. I’d be her only familial lifeline until phone service was restored. Mom couldn’t see the water and mud blanketing the streets of Whitesburg, didn’t know the town, schools, homes, and businesses had flooded. From her patio with its view of Pine Mountain, all looked right in the world.   

Three days later I took supplies back to Hindman, cleaned mud out of the Gathering Place, and offered to haul water-logged archival documents to Lexington to be preserved in freezers until they could be cleaned. A steady stream of shock-faced flood victims stopped to load up water, food, a tank of propane, and cleaning products. Some paused to eat a meal. Others gathered supplies and food for themselves and neighbors and hurried back to where home once stood.

They called it a thousand-year flood, but I see no good in naming it. A catastrophic disaster destroyed homes, lives, roads, bridges, schools, communities and towns. Hindman. Topmost. Whitesburg. Blackey. McRoberts. Neon. And so on. Communities now covered in sewage-infested water and thick mud. Many had struggled for years to stay afloat. Their heyday when coal mining was king in these hills, long gone.

In the days that followed, images of the dire situation in the mountains topped the news. Forty-five lives lost. People evacuated in Jackson due to danger of a dam breaching. Thousands of homes damaged or destroyed. Folks trapped up hollers by washed out roads and bridges. No water to wash layers of slick mud off themselves or out of their homes. Portable medical units dispersed to administer tetanus and hepatitis shots. The newly homeless lived in make-shift shelters, churches, tents, schools, and mud-choked homes. Food was dropped from helicopters in remote areas. Men rode horseback up hollers to check on folks. Mercy Chefs delivered meals to community outposts where volunteers handed out food to neighbors and carried it by automobile or on foot to those who couldn’t get out. Folks set up grills in parking lots and on the sides of roads to feed communities, and people poured in to distribute water and food, shovel mud, and heave water-logged furniture and Sheetrock to the edge of the road. Multitudes working to keep folks and hope alive through the humid dog days of August. 

This I dwelt on in the days after I left Hindman in July 2022. The stutter remained in my heart. I had driven back to a normal world with running water, electricity, and a dry place to sleep, forever changed by the harm to my homeland and people.

The mountain peaks remained unscathed by the flood waters. From high atop Pine Mountain, no signs of a decimated town or lives were visible. The luxuriant foliage of deep summer painted the mountains eternal.