The Helene-acene

Photo by Sarah. One of many flood-buried beans that pushed through and sprouted after the storm.

Anyone living in Western North Carolina, or any of the other areas devastated by Hurricane Helene, knows that there really are not words to express the feelings, and describe the impact of that terrible storm.  Pictures and videos also fail, somehow, to do justice.  We feel relatively spared in our little corner of Mitchell County even though we had a literal tornado pass by our house and level acres of trees.  Our bridge somehow survived the onslaught when our driveway turned into a river and our creek into torrent.  Sarah’s car was totaled by a maple tree, but our pond held, our old pole barn caught a hundred year old beech tree and was somehow *not* destroyed.  My favorite apple tree was topped, and all the others were damaged heavily. My unharvested Sweet Potatoes in the “Ray Dellinger Memorial Garden” were either carried off to Tennessee or buried in feet of silt (I think I have enough to have seed for next year).  

But we feel so very lucky.  

It’s still all too much to put down into a blog post, even now that I have had time to turn it all over in my mind.  The torn up roads and ruined buildings are starting to be familiar, the all new creeks and rivers startle my mind a little less every day.  For so long, I would feel constantly confused–like I didn’t know where I was–in places I have known for my entire life.  Strangely, when I go to “normal” and unaffected places, I feel eager to go back to where things are horribly scarred–or at least my little piece of devastated home.  I dread going to parts of our area where I haven’t yet been since Helene.

One place I have been, several times, is Marshall North Carolina.  Being riverside and downstream of anything was a bad, bad place to be on any water that drained the Black Mountains or the Roan Highlands. Essentially those ranges poked a big hole in the bottom of the storm in what’s called orthographic lift, and the water biblically poured, and then raged, down.  Marshal is down river from Asheville, and from the first time I ever visited that place, I was nervous about flooding there (I had already lived through one cloudburst flood as a child).  It didn’t help that one building, the old jail, literally had 20some feet of a flood ruler on the side of it.  That jail was, and is, and will be, the home of a wonderful restraunt/inn where us ballad singers would gather to sing old old songs handed down to us with care from generations past.  In the last few months I sang a song there for the resonance sessions, and also shared in a pop-up concert to celebrate the resilience of that particular community. There’s an amazingly well done radio piece on Mutual Aid, Josh Copus and Marshall’s recovery, featuring some of our music.  Please listen to it, because it captures a moment in a way few other attempts have.

Along with Donna Ray Norton, Sheila Kay Adams, her daughter Mel, and a host of other great singers, we’ve also taken our little Marshall Jail Ballad Singers to Floyd, Va, and the Grey Eagle in Asheville, and will soon go to Charleston, SC and the White Horse in Black Mountain.  I really appreciate them having me along.  I also want to thank the NC Music Office and Hometown Strong for having me down to the State Capitol to perform for Roy Cooper and the Rural Leadership Award.  Also thanks to Bob Plott and others who helped find opportunities for my friends and I to share our mountain music when we were otherwise running chainsaws or pushing wheel barrows. 

I’ve been saying that we live in the “Heleneacene” now.  There was Before the Storm, and then After.  Every one of us is marked and made different by this experience.  But I must say that all of it has only underscored how important community really is.  Neighbors are everything, and in a world where it’s easy to retreat into digital communities, we must make every effort to invest in the people that live around us, no matter how they think, or vote, or look, or act.  “Resilience” isn’t a buzzword, it’s how we survive and thrive.   Resilience, the old, old seeds teach us, is not found in uniformity, but in variety.   So here’s to sowing seeds of togetherness, here’s to gathering around old songs and new.  May we join hands, “Circle up, Circle up” and move together into challenges and triumphs.   

Margot and I at the Marshall Jail 2024, Celebrating Marshall's Recovery.