The sanctuary of First Baptist Church is packed full of souls tonight. I see them from my spot perched up in the balcony as they meander through the blue-colored pews; the pews were red at one point and I was told, years later, that changing the color caused quite an upset. Men and women alike sport more casual clothes often donned for an evening church service as opposed to some of the pomp and circumstance morning worship calls for. Something about Southern Baptists is that while we say “come as you are,” you will get a few wayward looks if you do, in fact, come exactly as you are. That said, even a pair of blue jeans is begrudgingly acceptable in morning service, and is more warmly embraced during an evening service. The piano plays softly before service begins in earnest. Fellowship among the congregation this particular evening flows with the usual pleasantries but feels restrained, not curt or impolite, just tinged with a bit of exhaustion around the edges. The air inside the church has a hazy feeling about it, almost smoke filled, but not from the few cigarettes the men, some of them deacons, partake in before coming into church; this is a smoke that is carried among the bodies of congregants wafting like exhaustion and thick with despair. Much has happened in the town of Olive Hill lately—those of us who are young, while the haze is perceptible, do not feel the weight of it as our elders must, carrying themselves as though the final nail has been hammered into the coffin of this small, sleepy corner of the world. Last year’s floods were the wakeup call, the alarm blaring in our faces with a message from the earth, silencing even the divine voice of God. 

In the summer of 2010, two floods hit Olive Hill, one in May and another in July. I was still ignorant of climate change, in a way I long to be now as an adult even though to do so would betray myself, yet I yearn for all the same. At this time I don’t believe “climate change” was the popular term for what was, what is, happening to the planet. No, even then it was still popularly and derisively called “global warming,” scoffed at with the intensity of a pastor who would point his nose up at the mere idea of suggesting that America was not a Christian nation. Of course if America truly was a Christian nation then we would be a bit more steadfast against waging war against some country a man in a suit tells us threatens our freedom. 

One cannot wage war, in the traditional sense, against a flood because to do so would be to wage war on the Almighty and the government has yet to perfect a long-range missile capable of piercing the heavens. No one could think these floods as anything but a “natural disaster,” and for these we seek to prostrate ourselves at the altar, seeking forgiveness of the sins we were convinced had wrought the water out of its creek banks and into the streets. Perhaps President Obama was to blame, or gay marriage, both were hot button issue at the time. The people of Olive Hill were without fault in this cosmic, heavenly blame game. They were blameless, as was gay marriage, but the jury is still out on Obama. Both of the floods that struck Olive Hill that summer were either 1-in-100 or 1-in-1,000-year flooding events—the scientific signifier matters little to people who lost their homes or businesses, but it does go a long way in emphasizing the severity of what happened. The die, loaded by climate change, had stacked the odds against Olive Hill. Tygart(s) Creek, typically a low flowing creek that stretched around Olive Hill and out into Carter County, rose overnight in a stunning fashion.   

I remember the night of the flood in May when the rain started pouring down. Our church youth group had done a performance that closed out on the refrain of the 2001 song “Draw Me Close” by Christian musician Michael Smith. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in a Southern Baptist Church can imagine, with varying degrees of success, what the performance entailed. There were five or six, maybe seven of us, up in front of the church that evening filling out the space between the pulpit and baptismal. The area, where the choir typically sat, was cleared out for us to use as a makeshift stage with the piano and organ sitting on either side boxing us in. Everyone up there had a role to play: one of us was a teenage girl, one was Christ, another an alcoholic, one a drug addict and so on and so forth, you get the picture. I, in my breakout role, played Death (Satan, I guess). The teenage girl progressed through life falling deeper into sin and vice, drawing farther away from Christ as she went down a rabbit hole into hell. Death was the last stop of this journey, and it was my role to tempt this girl to cut her wrists and take her life. 

For those unfamiliar, the Southern Baptist denomination is a big fan of making young people feel like they’re always on the precipice of falling into hell at the drop of a hat. Someone in the hierarchy of church leadership, I presume, had the grand idea along the way that to juice up the numbers of a declining youth population they needed to make them very afraid of hell at all times. At the conclusion of the performance, with the music swelling in response, the girl attempts to break free from the grip of Death, of her sins, and back into the loving arms of Christ. Upon returning to the safety of Christ, He would place himself between the girl and her sin taking the brunt of the violence on her behalf. We all received a standing ovation. 

It was after this performance I would walk out the front doors of the church to see the water cascading down the streets. We may have roused the hearts of man but our mediocre acting could not stave off an angry God. Only in the daylight of the next morning would the scope of damage become clear. 

Hydreco Village, the low-income apartments in town, were submerged; the town’s main street and various businesses flooded; the post office was also hit, as was the town’s library; even the basement of First Baptist Church wasn’t spared as the water rushed into the building. Fortunately, no lives were lost. The following days and weeks blurred under the unified banner of clean up and recovery. Anyone who has cleaned up after flooding will tell you how the worst part is when the water recedes, leaving mud and silt everywhere. There’s only so much a broom can accomplish when it comes to getting mud and silt out of a building and the library books were a total lost cause. 

I spent several days bouncing between businesses helping out where I could. A few of the businesses, including a furniture shop and a boutique store, were owned by church members so I spent a good deal of time in those places. Some mornings I would go down to church with my mom and help prepare food for the members of the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief team who were staying in the unflooded part of the church basement. For a while there it felt like even in spite of what had happened, the town could overcome all of this. The second flood took the wind out of those sails.  

People today still debate the reason as to why the flood was so severe, so damming. Some place the blame on a species of freshwater mussel that lives in the creek bed, or maybe crawdads, something along those lines. With certainty I can say that there are species of freshwater mussels that have come to call Tygart Creek home. Some have been designated as an endangered species while others have all but disappeared over time. Whatever the reason may be, you just can’t go out and dredge the creek like some people really want to. The opinion some hold onto is if we could dredge the creek then flooding would be far down on the priority totem pole. This seems, in my view, based on the prevailing sentiment that because it was done when these people were children then it was this that prevented flooding, none of which takes into account how climate change has, well, drastically changed everything when it comes to our wetter world. 

However, some merit can be given to this idea, it’s not a bad idea necessarily, save for the fact that mussels help protect the integrity of the creek bed and, in turn, are rather well suited at preventing future flooding. But to dredge the creek would mean to have men out there working, the visual of something physically being done to help ensure the safety of people rings true in the minds of many who place a solid work ethic as third only to God and then second to cleanliness, but there’s some leeway on that exact pecking order. Yes, the idea of “something” being done in a way that comforts the sensibilities of people goes a longer way than the unseen mussel that, unbeknownst to itself, is responsible for a major flooding event. When reached for comment on the sins of their fathers that resulted in such destruction a local mussel responded as such: “Death to man.” Any idea to the contrary, of holding something, someone else, accountable for such disaster would mean accepting the premise that man, in all our unmitigated wisdom, is responsible for the warming of the planet and the increased likelihood of these severe flooding events. 

This, in turn, makes people accept a level of personal responsibility that is uncomfortable and difficult to fathom. How can a poor man in Olive Hill, Kentucky be just as responsible for climate change as the billionaire who jets across the planet on a private jet or creates an AI powered by gas turbines that chokes our air so people can ask, “Grok, is Adolf Hitler bad?” The answer is that we all share a collective responsibility, for even the poor man contributes to the health, or detriment, of his environment as much as the rich man willingly chooses to kill us all for the sake of the Almighty dollar; the scales differ, but none of us are truly blameless in this regard. A responsibility to strive for better does not care what tax bracket you’re in. It only cares that you do what you can. The town did what it could in the aftermath of these floods.  

Allow me to step back for a moment, to briefly paint a picture of the town of Olive Hill. Nestled in the foothills of northeastern Kentucky, Olive Hill is, in many ways, indistinguishable from several other rural towns that dot the picturesque mountain ranges of Appalachia. Everyone thinks their small town is the best small town, full of the nicest, kindest people with a solid bedrock of (Christian) faith and a socially acceptable number of nonwhite citizens. Even I would tell you that Olive Hill is the best small town, but anyone who’s spent years of their life living there would come to a similar kind of conclusion no matter how true, or untrue, it may be. 

Olive Hill was not a coal mining town; Olive Hill made its fortune in fire brick loaded up on the railroad that cut through downtown and went out to the farflung parts of the state, such as the exotic city of Louisville. The clay underneath the town was worth something and so the workers, in turn, were worth something and a pride wells up in a town when there’s a feeling of collective purpose. To be certain, the fire brick of Olive Hill, much like the coal mined in places like Hazard and Lynch, would go on to power grand and beautiful cities with energy and infrastructure the likes of which could never, would never, be seen in the towns where the resources started their journey from. But coal was King and fire brick was a Duke in a fiefdom full of strife and easily usurped without a second thought—the crown tumbled from his head. 

By the middle of the 20th Century, the economic engine powering the town stuttered, stalled and shut down. The massive shell of a fire brick plant still sits in a low-lying valley right on the outskirts of the city limits. For decades now this artifice to what was once a booming industry, that brought prosperity to the town, has stood a hollow husk and a grim reminder that what once was can never be again. This differs in a key way to abandoned coal mines littering the southeastern part of Kentucky—at least people try to do something, anything, with the coal mines because the identity of mining still remains so central to Kentucky that we yearn to dress up its rotting corpse. The problem with Olive Hill is the town drew the short stick on what dying industry it had to bear the brunt of losing. 

When the second flood hit in July, my parents and I were on vacation in the best place in the world: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Now if you grew up somewhere in eastern Kentucky then you had a couple of agreed upon vacation spots. I’m not sure who declared these spots as the go-to destinations, but they’ve been the same for many years now. There’s the mecca of Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg, and the holy site of Dollywood, Camden Park in West Virginia, King’s Island in Ohio and, if you were really hoity-toity, Disney World (you had to be properly small town rich to afford that one). We were in the car driving through Pigeon Forge when my mom got a call, likely someone from church, to tell her about the second flood. One woman was killed. Mary Littleton, 72, was washed away by the flood waters while she was inside her mobile home. I still think about her. I never knew her, never met her, I know some of her family, yes, yet she still comes to mind when I think back on the floods. Mainly I think about the horrors she might’ve faced in the final moments of her life. Was she comforted by being in her home? Did anything on the walls, on the tables or nightstand, give her a sense of peace? Did she elect to pick up a Bible and read a few of her favorite passages before the end? Maybe it wasn’t so horrific as I imagine, for her sake I pray it wasn’t. 

In Louisville, the city where my wife and I live that has been propped up by the people of my hometown and yours in ways few give any mind to, people think very little of someone who would decide to stay in their home and not flee the floodwaters. It’s not an unreasonable opinion to hold, but it’s hard for some whose connection to land is a concrete jungle to grasp what it means to take hold of a patch of earth and call it your own. Did she raise a family there? Was she raised there? I can’t say for certain why Mary Littleton was in her home when the water came rushing, if she decided to stay despite the risk, assuming she was aware of such risk, or if she even had the means to leave. Her body was found three days after the flood. I pray she’s at peace now.  

The pastor of First Baptist Church, who started there just a month before the May flood, had asked me to put together a video with photos from the flood and cleanup to commemorate one year after the event. Somehow, I had been appointed the young person in charge of technology for the church and was responsible for projection and sometimes sound. The finished product I ended up creating was a glorified slideshow reel in video format set to the song “Blessings” by Laura Story. I’ve only ever thought about this song in the context of the video and no other time; it must’ve been the chorus that caught my attention:  

‘Cause what if Your blessings come through raindrops? 

What if Your healing comes through tears? 

What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You’re near? 

What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise? 

Yes, what if God’s blessings do come through raindrops? Presented in the context I elected to show it in, the message becomes rather clear, “Were the floods not then a blessing from God?” It speaks to a central tenant of Chrisitan faith: God did not promise his faithful a painfree life. This is true. Nowhere in the Bible does God promise his followers that life would be easy pickins’; in fact, Job was put through the ringer more in his lifetime than most. It’s the kind of clear-eyed faith that powers people to move forward, to pick up the pieces and start again with what’s left behind. It feels like a heavy, hollow blessing to me.  

Tell me, what does it mean to “rebuild?” You hear that word tossed around a lot in the wake of natural disasters. Places will be rebuilt, the people there will rebuild and things will, eventually, return to some sort of normalcy, or that’s the hope. In 2020 the West Virginia TV station (by proxy the town’s local station) WSAZ ran a segment on how 10 years later Olive Hill was still recovering from these floods, to say nothing of the other, albeit less serious floods, that occurred in those intervening years. Reading it reminded me of some of the losses that even I had forgotten after 15 years, so numerous were they. You could run that same story today and while there are a couple of new bright spots to the town the general contour remains the same. 

My heart aches, my body is numb to know that no amount of “rebuilding” can truly return my hometown to what it once was, or even what it could be. The problem with rebuilding, in places like Olive Hill or Hindman or Whitesburg or any of the places like it, is that the rebuilding has come decades too late. What is there to rebuild? I say this not with derisiveness toward the people, nor the goal of wanting to do right, but how can you rebuild a town that has been stripped for parts? Yes, you clean up the mud and the silt, get a wet dry vacuum, shelter those who need it, make sure they have food and clothes; when FEMA comes to town you do your best to understand all the hurdles that may stand between someone and the government actually helping them. Years later you find yourself papering the empty downtown storefronts, long since vacant but made all the worse by floodwaters, with motivational quotes and artwork because the bareness of it all gnaws too much on your soul. When you’re in high school you focus on other ways to help “rebuild,” you focus on flood preparedness and “beautification,” and everything else that can be done without doing anything at all. None of this changes the fact that you cannot rebuild using spare parts. The engine is gone. The engine has been gone for quite some time and the time to get a new one has passed you by, but you still hold onto the memory of how the engine purred and how it put money in your pocket and clothes on your back and food on the table. The engine was stolen, but we get spare parts; the transmission can’t switch gears, but we get spare parts; the battery is leaking, but we get spare parts. 

Rebuild, rebuild, rebuild, rebuild. Those mussels need something new to wash away.