Troubled by Water

Kristi Stephens Walker

I have always loved the smell of petrichor. I remember playing in the backyard of my 

Papaw’s house—a bastion of safety in my childhood—and feeling the cold waters of Campbell’s 

Creek ripple over my bare feet, stepping on rocks smooth enough to cross to the other bank.  

I have a distinct memory of sitting on the front porch with my Aunt Pat and inhaling  deeply the scent of rain, filling my senses with the fecund mixture of wet earth and creek life. I felt content there, my breath calm and measured as I watched the rain pour steadily onto the slick grass, my feet up on the banister of the porch getting wet from the downpour.  

As I got older, I loved to open the windows during a heavy rain and let the petrichor fill the spaces inside, while the sound of the storm comforted and moved me to feel creative and nostalgic. I didn’t even know the word petrichor until I was grown. I just thought it was the scent of home. I thought it was, like my home state of West Virginia, almost heaven, and I breathed it in, deep, the scent of it a core memory for me. 

But my relationship to rain has changed. Almost a year to the day apart, I was struck in the back of my head by lightning and evacuated from a 1000-year flood. 

In late July of  2021, I was attending a Garth Brooks concert with my husband and kids. We were excited to finally score tickets and see the show. At home, we got ready, called an Uber, and headed to the sold-out show at Nissan Stadium in Nashville with almost 70,000 other people. 

There was a forecast for rain—possibly a storm—but by the time we were seated we were hopeful that the light rain showers were going to give way to a late afternoon sun that would allow us to spend the next several hours in the open air stadium and enjoy the show. 

Garth never took the stage. We made it through two songs from Trisha Yearwood and Emmylou Harris before a storm began and the concert was postponed. Nearly 70,000 people crammed into covered ramps, concession stands, and bathroom areas to wait the requisite 30 minutes without lightning before the concert could safely resume.  

It never did. We waited so long in that cramped space for a break in the weather, that when the lightning did subside, it was too late for the show to go on. All 70,000 people made their way out of Nissan Stadium toward home. It was humid, we were soaked, and it was hard to breathe. Covid was still a very real threat, and although we were outside, we were crammed so closely together that “outside” felt irrelevant. The crowd swelled and moved toward exodus, like Moses moving the Hebrews through the Red Sea, water on every side. 

By the time we reached the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge, the rain was falling hard and fast. We were at least three blocks from where we could find an Uber to get us home. We walked the last two blocks to a gas station in water ankle deep, our shoes submerged, while my breathing was shallow. 

And then the thunder rolled and the lightning struck. 

People ran for cover, and we joined a few others under the portico of a Subway restaurant. I leaned against the front wall and slid down to sit with my knees pulled toward my chest. A few deafening thunder claps later, lightning struck the back of my head. A baseball bat to my occipital bone, the impact sent its own thunder through my body. 

My daughter tells me she saw the bolt of electricity hit the aluminum rain gutter and ricochet from there to hit the back of my head. I only remember the impact and what felt like a furious and panicked announcement to the people around me that I’d been struck. But my daughter and husband remember that my affect was immeasurably calm.  

“Did you know,” I said, with what my daughter describes as an eerie calm, “that I’ve just been struck by lightning?” I barely remember the moment, and recall nothing of a calm demeanor. 

We called a friend, who picked us up and got us home. A few hours and a call to the doctor’s office later, I was instructed to go to the emergency room for a check up. I was given an EKG to determine if I had sustained a myocardial injury. I was poked and prodded, blood was drawn, blood pressure taken, and I submitted to a battery of exams that resulted in finding that I had a concussion.  

I was ordered to avoid screens for two weeks and to wear my glasses instead of my contact lenses. The exhale took longer.   

One year later, when the rains began that Wednesday night in July, I was playing trivia with my friends from the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop. Our team name was, “Still Waters Run Deep,” a play on words to honor Knott County staple, writer James Still, who was buried just steps away from where were on the campus grounds of the Hindman Settlement School. We did not know as we gathered in the Great Hall that evening, or for the after party on the porch of the May Stone building, that before dawn, an evacuation would be looming and that the vehicles of all three of my trivia partners would be washed away by the flood, lost to Troublesome Creek. 

We didn’t know that within a few hours, over 40 people would be drowned. The rain fell, the party ended, and we went to bed.  

At four in the morning, pitch black and raining, workshop staff tried to get to the cabin I shared with about 15 other women, but were pushed back down by the force of the water coming off the hill, and the onset of mudslides. At first light, we were alerted to the devastation that filled the Settlement School below: the town of Hindman was under water. Soon we learned that other surrounding towns and counties had similar damage. Roads were destroyed and rescues were underway. We were without power and water, and gas from a submerged gas station was suspected to have leaked into the flood waters. The town’s drinking supply was an immediate concern. 

The initial moments of a crisis—that split second where suspension of disbelief begs to be your reality—are the last time an exhale feels full and complete. We inhaled together and, by all accounts, could not exhale fully until those broken, water-logged, hurting, hard-working 

Appalachians in Eastern Kentucky felt the force of our love and the gentleness of our efforts. When the flood happened, I was three days into a workshop with poet Nickole Brown who had given us a charge: Observe. We are writers. It is our job to pay attention. Brown had handed an apple to everyone in the class charging us to pay attention to it over the next few days, noting changes in color, texture, taste—any sensory details to make the ordinary extraordinary. I came home after the flood and went to bed. Nine days after the flood I found the apple in my backpack in a ziplock bag, dark and without enough air. I knew how that felt. 

But we had paid attention. We watched. We listened.  

All of us writers now scattered, we were horrified to hear of people looking for family members. We heard about a sheriff’s deputy who cried as he shared about watching a family float away while standing at the front door of their trailer. He could not get to them. It is possible that his own family and home were ravaged—but he was there, early, and ready to help his neighbors. We paid attention, even while our brains begged us to find an exhale. We almost couldn’t do it, but we had to pay attention to the story of a family that lost all four children, the oldest not even nine, to the rushing waters after the foundation of their home collapsed while they were on the roof waiting for rescue. The Troublesome was living up to its name. 

A luthier at the museum across the street lost untold hand carved instruments: banjos, mandolins, fiddles, everything that brings us the old-time music our region treasures. A few years prior, I had wandered through that archival museum and saw a dulcimer that belonged to Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie on display there. On campus, muddied stringed instruments were removed from their damaged cases and laid in the floor of the Great Hall to dry, like a sacrifice to Poseidon, or the God of the Old Testament, who sent a flood to destroy the earth and ordered Noah to build an ark and take two of every animal onto it. 

No ark arrived here. But holding our breath, many of us walked two by two down the driveway to survey the campus.  Rescue efforts began for the archives when a pre-dawn attempt to save them ended when the creek surged, breaking out windows and pulling the doors off. 

A county away, Melissa Helton was getting the news through social media. Helton is the Literary Arts Director at the settlement school. In addition to the writers’ workshop, the settlement school offers several community education programs whose mission has remained the same since 1902: to provide education and service opportunities for people of the mountains, while keeping them mindful of their heritage.  

Helton woke up before dawn to check her phone and saw weather alerts and catastrophic flood warnings. There was no cell signal on campus. “I got one desperate message into this person or that person at a time and, as the footage was coming across social media, just being horrified, and being so scared and so heartbroken. After finding out that you guys were all safely off campus and had negotiated rides home for the people who had lost their cars, our Executive Director, said, ‘Everyone stay home today. We’ll come in the morning.’” 

Twelve hours after the creek breached the bank, the water had receded enough to maneuver my car down the driveway to the cabin. It was littered with fist-sized chunks of blacktop crumbling from the mudslides and water rushing down the hill. As I drove through the abating waters of Troublesome Creek out of Hindman and back toward Nashville, after waiting hours for the bridge to be passable, I passed emergency vehicles carrying airboats. I peered off the bridge into a valley that offered a mountain of ruined homes, overturned vehicles, sheets of crumbled aluminum and metal, furniture, and, in the midst of a rush of waters, a single baby bed with a fully intact stuffed giraffe. Later, I couldn’t remember if I saw the crib in the wreckage or the news footage. 

And yet, before the rain stopped falling, neighbors were already lifting one another up. 

Donations of water, hygiene items, food, and supplies were being delivered around the clock. 

Archivists and librarians were mobilizing quickly to preserve the most delicate items in the Hindman archives. Restaurateurs from Corbin set up in the dining hall to feed people without gas or water. Hope emerged, in the tiniest and biggest ways to meet needs. 

“That was one of the beautiful things in that disaster recovery was that nobody cared about my politics when they offered me help or asked me for help,” said Helton. “When they came to help Hindman or they came to Hindman for help, they didn’t care about, you know, who we voted for, what we thought about kneeling during the national anthem, nobody cared. Somebody hadn’t eaten, and somebody had resources, and we were in community and that was beautiful.” 

Still, she said, these 100-year floods are happening every single year now, pointing toward the climate crisis. Further, government cuts have threatened numerous programs from the arts to rural hospitals to tutoring programs at the settlement school for children with dyslexia.  

Helton noted her concern for the youth in the area. “The youth in this area have just been hit one after another, and I’m concerned with their long-term mental health. The climate crisis trauma being just one spoke of that terrible wheel they are dealing with.” 

I remember, as a child in Sunday School, learning the story of Noah and the Ark. We even learned a fun song about it, singing and clapping our hands along to the tune:  The Lord told Noah to build him and arky-arky, 

Lord, told Noah to build him and arky-arky! 

Make it out of gopher barky-barky, 

Children of the Lord! 

According to the story, for 150 days, the waters flooded the earth. One hundred fifty days after the flood in Hindman was December 25. But while Helton and the other staff had done yeoman’s work in the days following the flood—and every day since—recovery efforts were not wrapped up in a package with a tidy bow. 

The damage to the archives on the bottom floor became a major concern. “They, all these years later, are still being defrosted and dried,” said Helton, when I spoke to her in the summer of 2025, three years after the waters subsided. She told me that flood recovery archivist Sarah Insalaco continues to work on them, researching other archival plans as well. “She’s almost done cleaning the stuff that has been frozen all these years. And then the next stage is looking to try to replace what was lost.” She will catalog what they have and set up a place to record oral histories.” 

Two weeks after the Troublesome troubled eastern Kentucky, Campbell’s Creek, the tributary of the Kanawha River in eastern Kanawha County West Virginia—my home—breeched it’s banks damaging homes and property and submerging beloved community landmarks. This news, on the heels of the Hindman flood, made me realize how long I’d been holding my breath. How much longer I would need to, still. The creek where I played as a child, my Aunt Pat laughing from the yard and shouting for me to be careful, had swallowed up the park down the street. The ball field where my brother learned to play t-ball was under water. The church parking lot where I learned to ride a bike was covered.  

Last summer when I returned to the banks of the Troublesome, the tragedy of flooding in 

Texas brought news of loss of life to the rushing waters of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, 

Texas. Camp Mystic, a private Christian camps for girls, lost 27 campers and counselors in the flood. A horrified nation watched the ineffable loss, noting another historic flood. But these historic floods and weather events are becoming more common. A 100 year flood. A 1000 year flood. Somehow we are surprised every time one of these historic floods ravages areas that are left. Or hits them again. And again. Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina and surrounding areas in September 2024, claiming at least 250 fatalities and causing untold, irrevocable damage.  

The summer of 2023, the first back at Hindman after the flood, brought trigger warnings and designated sacred spaces as we collectively remembered and healed from the swell and recession of those troubled waters. Our hearts took in the campus: the restoration and the damage all mixing together with our stories—all a living, breathing thing. We embraced one another. We cried. We laughed again. I shucked corn on the same porch where someone played a fiddle tune and someone else led a song, where the year prior, I stood and watched a displaced family of ducks wander in the grass.  

It’s getting easier to stand on the bridge over the Troublesome and take a full-bodied breath. To see the creek behaving back in its banks. To feel that, any day now, the exhale will feel complete.

 

 

Kristi Stephens Walker is a writer from Charleston, WV whose work has appeared in various print and online publications. She recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Sewanee School of Letters. She lives in Nashville, TN.