I was in Baltimore visiting my daughter when Hurricane Helene wiped out my hometown of Swannanoa, North Carolina. “Wiped out” is media-speak for “severely damaged.” Swannanoa is one of several communities that were hit exceptionally hard by Helene. Which means maybe 20% was severely damaged or completely destroyed. (All numbers and percentages are my eyeball estimates). This means 80% is okay to fine. I lost a couple trees and got a foot of water in the basement- I’m fine. Some folks are out mowing their yard next door to a house where people died. Life, as they say, goes on.

I caught a ride from Baltimore with an anarchist friend who was delivering requested supplies to a client agency. On the way down, we stopped in Winchester, Virginia, and bought bleach, rubber boots and gloves and an apparently gigantically over-sized generator. We picked our way into town well after dark. The silence and the dark as we got closer to my neighborhood, the smashed and tumbled cars, downed power lines and abandoned houses were eerie. When you see the daily disaster on the news, you probably react, “how sad.” When you see it for real and in your town, the reaction – my reaction – is awed silence.

That 20% however suffered, including many horrible deaths from drowning and from smothering in semi-liquid mud. The worst of the rain came at night, adding darkness to the chaos, the most familiar becoming a death trap in a moment. That’s all I’m going to say about the horrors. There’s plenty of writing about that. This is about the 80%.

ALL BY OURSELVES

The first few days, locals were on their own; no electricity, no water, no cell or internet. Barely any fire fighters and barely any police.   The county had plans for a disaster like this, but not of this magnitude.  My neighborhood of Grovemont, on low hills between the mountains and North of the Swannanoa River, was cut off.  Natural community leaders, following their natural nature, were already leading. These were people who had established trust over the years, volunteering to organize and improve the community. Not in a fascistic way (For that, see Bill Forstchen’s NYT best-seller about the apocalypse in our neighboring town of Black Mountain, One Second After), but as leaders who have earned the trust of the community over time, through their actions.

Folks who had the ability to leave were encouraged to do so, to relieve the pressure on sparse resources. If you had relatives or money for a hotel within a two-hundred-mile radius – go there. Charlotte, Raleigh, but not Atlanta, Greenville, SC, or Knoxville, all of which had their own problems.

Those natural community leaders called a meeting in the town square the day after the rain stopped. Several hundred people showed up ready to work. This organically led to organization and division of labor. Checking on neighbors, chainsaw gangs, a big cookout of freezer meat in the square.  People with tractors took it upon themselves to start clearing roads of debris and the gummy mud that is the big, nasty challenge after the water subsides. Nurses, cooks, IT people; from each according to their abilities. We were on our own and still we made it – which means different things to different people. Yet, we, the survivors, did.     

THE CAVALRY COMES

Within three days, outside help began arriving. The President declared western North Carolina a disaster area. The military and FEMA were more and more present, doing what they do. Spray-painted hieroglyphics began appearing on flooded houses and vehicles;  an “x” with each quadrant indicating whether live people, bodies, and/or hazards  were inside.  Helicopters of every category started chugging low through the skies – military; large, small and in-between, odd little mid-century Popular Mechanics-looking two-seaters, and commercial choppers carrying (presumably) news people, insurance adjusters, senators, on up to the Governor and the President.

Relief centers started popping up like mushrooms. Every church, bar, and  eventually street corner had its separate mound of cases of water (more on that later), random canned goods, and unsorted, uncleaned, used clothing. These were life-saving in the beginning, but by a week in, most were redundant and a little confusing. Still, the urge to “do something” is strong in times like this. The closer you are, the stronger the urge. Soon, single vans, trucks or cars with license plates from as far away as Vermont and Dakota were driving the streets or pulling up to relief centers, giving away whatever they had brought.

The official, FEMA, Red Cross, and state disaster relief sites were quickly established (though not quick enough for those citizens already predisposed to doubt their own government). America is famously overflowing with stuff. That’s how we win wars. Any type of large-scale communal disaster is met with what people here called “the second flood”: stuff desperately needed plus a lot of other people’s throw-aways.

An overabundance of the basics was soon here for whoever needed them. No one starved or died of thirst. There were literal walls of cased water along the highway, mounds of clothing piled in parking lots added to daily by freelance Samaritans. The flooded streets and rivers were lined with the shreds of people’s old lives; the unaffected streets and parking lots were lined with an equal amount of donated stuff to make those shredded people’s lives more like they had been.

What’s chaotic in the aftermath is the coordination.  As each well-meaning local or travelling organization sets up its base, even the redundancy becomes redundant. Beneath the honest urge to help, to “do something,” a very human territorialism flows; this church won’t work with that group, Black Mountain is hogging all the resources,  the south side of the river is getting more attention than the north side. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, so it goes.

A SHORT VISIT TO THE 18TH CENTURY

At first there was no water, no electricity, no internet. In practice this means you can’t flush the toilet, you can’t shower or brush your teeth or do the dishes; no tv, no cell phone, no street lights. The streets after dark were as dangerous as any medieval city.

 I spent that night of my arrival and many nights thereafter lying in my bed in the dark, without the comfort of a  bedside lamp, YouTube, or the ceiling fan: the way people went to bed for untold generations before me and the way many people in the world still do.  It was disconcerting at first; I craved my modern comforts. But soon I struck a new rhythm, a very old feeling and, yes, I’ll go there – a more natural rhythm.  I was asleep by 9:30 and awake at dawn. (Sunset is 7:30, dawn around 8.) If I’d have had chickens, I would have greeted them with the dawn. Disaster is no place for the night-owl or the hipster. Everyone was hauling water.  We had a real fire in the fireplace, with candles and oil lamps the only light.  Even all those little green, red, yellow, blue pin-lights watching silently from around the house, indicators of all the modern robots waiting to serve you, were dark. 

 Again, I’m not claiming any victim status at all here. This was my experience, and as people of the 80% said constantly to each other, “I was so lucky.”  That new life, became comfortable. Missing the 21st century was an inconvenience, that’s all.

But time’s machine only runs forward, and it never pauses.  Slowly but surely, the 21st century returns and we bid a – not “fond,“ let’s say “grateful“– goodbye to the 18th, realizing how dependent we are on and take for granted the electric infrastructure that cradles our modern lives.

A natural sort of evolution took place as some folks got electricity, some got water, some even got internet. A site that was critical one day becomes at least all right the next.

NATURE

There was a redtail hawk pair that had graced our neighborhood for several years. You could see them flying together and daily hear their calls.  After the rain, all the birds were very noisy, calling to each other, “I’m all right. are you all right?”   Now, every day, raising my eyes above the intense yet logical drama of humans, I saw and heard a single hawk calling – I would say “frantically”- for its mate. But now, four weeks in, I don’t see or hear that solo hawk anymore. He or she gave up the search, moved on.

This is also the time of year for bears to be fattening up. And our local bears have learned – as have we all- that nothing makes you fatter faster than garbage. They were gone after the flood, probably up higher in the mountains. But they’re coming back, the evidence seen in the usual burst open bags of garbage dragged a few feet into the woods.

Dogs were lost (Not surprisingly, I’ve heard no stories of lost cats).   Looking at the blown-out river, I wonder how fish dealt with it, or turtles, salamanders. Do you think they just tumbled along in their scales, their shells, or their soft and slimy bodies?

I wonder too about the groundhogs, snakes, chipmunks, with twenty feet of black water racing for hours over their heads. Squirrels were in as great an abundance and activity after the flood as before. What’s their secret? They’re willing to chat, but I’m not willing to listen to their inane chatter.

THE PARABLE OF THE DRY RUNNER

There is a marathon runner story that, while more than once true, is told around the bars where runners gather. A runner collapses and people pour water down their throat to revive them. It doesn’t work. More and then more water is forced down their gullet until the runner expires from too much water bursting the cell walls.

One of the lessons being – adding more of what’s killing the patient has only one result. What would be worse would be vaguely knowing you’re killing the guy and still finding it too much trouble to stop pouring the water. 

Wait? What is this about? 

This.

Human-caused climate change is creating more extreme weather (Such as the storm in question). One of the great escalators is plastic: in the oceans, in the air we breathe, in our very cells. One important resource we received in Swannanoa was literally millions of one-pint, one-use plastic water bottles (“convenient!”). The utter disregard for “recycling” and that’s relationship to global warming and hurricanes- feedback loop. Always in planetary terms vs human terms.

BUT LET ME LEAVE YOU SMILING

1. Like a scene from the Twilight Zone or a Spielberg movie, the first weeks after the storm saw gangs of children playing in the street! Just running around – tag or push-a-kid, some ancient childish horrorshow.  Children playing in the streets like “the good old days.”  What was the cause of this golden-days-of-yesteryear phenomena?  No “personal devices.” As the electricity, and then the internet came back on, the flocks of children quickly drifted back into their electronic cocoons.  

Okay, maybe that’s not that smiley.

1. The human survival reaction of people rushing out, even before the storm was over, to help their neighbors (some they’d even met; some they hadn’t). Stories of selflessness and bravery abound. The man who used a kayak to rescue people from their attics – even though he’d never been in a kayak before. The man who waded into the flood with a  rope to guide his neighbor’s family to safety. The people who stood on the roaring bank for hours, encouraging a man trapped in a tree to hang on. Soon as they could, they found a rope and, after repeated excruciating tries, got to him and pulled him – cold, wet, and naked – to shore.
2. And when it’s done, people have a strong psychologically driven need to tell their story.
3. A strong desire – what many see as a need – to keep this strong sense of community going, resulting in the non-hierarchical, non-incorporated, Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance. An open group that meets (so far) three times a week, sits in a circle, and solves problems on a one-on-one basis.

By the time you most likely read this, it will all be past, over-run, cleaned up or scraped out, and/or irrelevant. Only life-long memories will remain, of a time of horror, followed by a time of community, striving, and that most human, most illogical feeling – hope.