I’m on 421 headed toward Mountain City, Tennessee. It’s October, a sunny day in early October and I’m lighting out for Springfield, Missouri.

Come out of Trade, round the twisty spot near Midway, Roan Creek on my right.

Sign flashing orange: Road Closed.

Because of the hurricane. Sunny today but it hasn’t been sunny for a week. October 2024 and Helene sat on top of us for the entirety of September 27, churning everything into a mash. Now the skies are crystalline blue as if nothing had happened a few days earlier—no one-in-a-thousand-year floods, over a hundred not dead, who-knows-how-many not displaced, the towns of Chimney Rock and Swannanoa and a bunch of other wee mountain towns not washed completely away. Surreal to think on all of that devastation in sun. Surreal when in the middle of it too, staring out the window at school or watching from the open door of my Avery County apartment—one of the hardest-hit counties in the state—watching the rain come down. Lots of rain falls in these North Carolina mountains, and this looked like any other rainy day. A thickness of rain filling the air with its breathy shush like a sighing, as if hushing a child, sshhhh, nothing to worry about. Just rain. Yes, surreal. 

And I’m turning the car around thinking Then the Bridge Gave, which Mona Collier from McRoberts, Kentucky had said. Said I never really realized water could do that […] then the bridge gave. I’m in Midway, Tennessee making a seventeen-point turn thinking about Mona’s words, I saw her speak them in a documentary about the Kentucky floods in 2022.

Road out. The bridge gave. I remember thinking at the time how calm, how matter of fact she sounded, she who had ridden out the center of the ‘22 floods. Now here I am five days after there was rain upon rain, the not unfamiliar thickness, calm, matter of fact, changing the landscape and so many lives.

Drive on back toward Boone in search of another way west. I teach at the university there, but it has closed for two weeks because of the hurricane so I’m trying to get to my wife, who lives and works in Missouri. 

Turn onto 321; just past the North Carolina/Tennessee border and down an especially curvy part and I see the flashing bouncing off the oak and poplar leaves lining the road before I make the curve, then the sign: 

Road Out

I half expected this because I’m coasting an impossible slope toward Watauga Lake, and if anywhere is going to flood it’s going to be this holler among hollers, where that bitty creek flows into Watauga, just south of where used to be the community of Butler until it was flooded in ‘48 when they built the dam creating the lake. The bridge over that bitty creek won’t be rebuilt until 2025.

Turn around again, imagining that bridge behind and below me and hearing Mona Collier.

The Bridge Gave

And it turns out there are no accessible bridges west of here; they all gave out, so I’m forced east for an hour or so, taking in the autumn sun, making my way in a wide spiral curling back north then west at last toward Tennessee and Missouri. 

Thinking about bridges. Thinking about Boone’s King Street which days before had been a thoroughfare with students and residents walking the sidewalks, but where on September 27 no sidewalks were, just water, raging like a river, pitching mocha-frothy against the doors of businesses. Or Bavarian Village by the Walmart, the whole trailer park swept clean away. 

Thinking about the small bridge in my own community, washed out and requiring the residents to park at the bottom of the hill by the mailboxes and walk up to their homes. That bridge won’t be fully restored until late spring, 2025.

And I am finding new kinship with Mona, and with Willa who filmed her—I had lunch with her in spring of 2024. Willa Johnson, journalist and Director of Film at Appalshop in Whitesburg, who had herself made it through the ’22 flood, had had to flee her house at three in the morning, holding her baby boy over her shoulder, trudging through the streaming torrents in flipflops to save herself and her boy. I remember crying, Willa confessed, because I was so tired.

Thinking about the emotional storms moving within us, conjured by this sudden extremity of circumstance, the swift-gathering presentiments of dread, isolation, the diminishing hope of rescue. 

Thinking: well, Mona, Willa, you are bridging that distance in time and space separating now from way back then in 2022, way over there in eastern Kentucky. Helping me with your stories, reaching out as from some Old Testament passage to tell me of your ordeal, issuing quiet lessons of strength, resilience, indefatigability. This is how we did it, you say, and how you can too.

But now I’m driving away, adding a healthy dollop of guilt to my stew of mental torment. I return six days later, and because there are still no bridges, I add a couple hours travelling south by Roan Mountain, through Elk Park and Newland, North Carolina, then up to Banner Elk.

I pass folks in flannels and boots, shoveling mud and heaping their possessions in mountains along the streets or their front lawns, all trying to re-collect in broken pieces, flashes of memory, nightmare images that at the time, the ground-zero of it, had washed over them in febrile overload of sensation. We are all amnesiacs staggering in the sludge and detritus along the banks of a river.

I pass the downed trees, some cut, many still whole, roots and all. Trees lying in great swaths changing the look of every hill and mountain and riverbank. So many trees, such an amazement of mud like a bombastic disaster film from the eighties.

And now I’m thinking of other bridges too. Thinking of my student Madisyn from Fleming-Neon, Kentucky, whose family went through the ’22 flood. They saw the devastation hitting so many in that tiny community and did something: We scraped as much money as we could spare to bring clothes to the school for the people staying there, she said. Then everybody pitched in: People brought food to our porch two and three times a day. I had never seen a town come together the way we have in all my life.

And here in October, 2024, I watch volunteers ranging town and country in unreckonable numbers, families, community members, neighbors. Strangers in my neighborhood staring down at me from the bed of their pickup, telling me they drove all the way from Nashville to help out. Repairing homes, cleaning streets and yards of brush and junk, chainsawing for hours until their forearms vibrate like hornets’ nests. 

Foodbanks. Churches, schools, civic and arts organizations preparing hot meals, serving anyone who shows up. And lots show up. How many free bottles of water were handed out across Appalachia? How many warm dinners made, dry clothes passed along? I’d like to see those stats.

The bridges into the western mountain corners of my state had washed out. So, as happened in Fleming-Neon, this fall of 2024 in Avery and Watauga and Mitchell and Buncombe counties, in towns like Asheville and Lake Lure and Hendersonville and Spruce Pine and Old Fort and Boone and so many other communities all across Appalachia, folks came together and made bridges of their own, connecting people with tools and labor and love, reaching out with food, blankets, clothing, sometimes a boat, sometimes just companionship. 

And I think again of Mona, the bridge gave, and think of these our own human bridges. 

And wonder at it: isn’t it a tale worth recounting, just what, just how much these bridges gave?