My beloved home, my sacred places, my childhood playground, my hideaway home when times became too hard to bear, was decimated, torn, rendered, ravaged by Hurricane Helene last weekend. We have family up there, we still don’t know if they’re alive. For two days over the weekend we were terrorized because we couldn’t reach our daughter and had no way of knowing if she was one of the hundreds who were swept away by the worst storm our North Carolina mountains have ever witnessed. So if I’ve been a little distant this week, a little more direct and short than usual, it is because my heart and soul is hurting with my people, I can literally feel their anguish from here.
I have heard so many ignorant questions that I could never work up enough spit to rid myself of the venom. Why didn’t they leave? Why do they stay there? Why isn’t the government helping them? Didn’t they have enough warning? I understand some of these, I do, but when you’re in a fight for your life and losing everything you’ve worked for and seeing all that you love destroyed, let me just point out, these questions can come off sounding very callous and ignorant. I’ve also heard statements that they’re a ‘Red State’ who cares…. To which without reservation I will state, may you have the day you deserve… How thoughtless, how empty, how small a person must you be to see politics or religion rather than humanity when disaster strikes? How soft and frankly boring your life must be, hooray for you!. I won’t even dignify your statements with a response as to why you are completely left of field if you think North Carolina can be defined by politics.
We are a people accustomed to a violent climate. A sideways rain here in PA is a rarity and cause for concern, in North Carolina it’s just rain. We have violent hurricanes, extreme heat and humidity, tornadoes, electrical storms, droughts, severe thunderstorms are the norm, the list goes on and on and that’s about 10 months out of the year, the other two we may get snow, but usually we have ice storms downing power lines and dropping trees on our houses and unlike here we don’t have the infrastructure for plows, sand and salt, probably because it’s only needed 2 months out of the year and a big portion of our government funding goes to rebuilding roads, schools and businesses after hurricanes and tornadoes the rest of the year.
Flooding is a natural part of living in the mountains, hills funnel rain down into the hollers and they flood, the watersheds become waterfalls, the roads wash out, the rocks slide and we keep on moving, keep on working and living. No one expected this storm to create this much destruction, we get tropical depressions from Atlantic hurricanes all the time, This time the Gulf got involved and the timing was incredibly bad as our mountains were already soaked to fully saturated by a system coming down from the north that dumped over 10” of rain, some estimates showing far more, over the entire region, several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Hurricane Helene then came in and was projected to take a westward track at the South Carolina/North Carolina border but due to that front and its interference still in the area, she stalled dumping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the already soggy landscape of the entire Southeast. So I saw somewhere, that’s tantamount to the amount of rain that it would take to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times! People couldn’t have possibly been prepared because this kind of event is UNHEARD of, so miss me with your ‘stupid to stay’ commentaries, because many on those mountains have nowhere else to go or don’t have the means.
These are huge mountains by East Coast standards in NC, the highest peak is 6,684 feet and many of these mountain communities have one road in and out and many of them are still one-lane roads. So when you hear they can’t get out, no one can get in, bear in mind that if that one road washes out, it’s a steep climb down and most of that climb will be washes and downed trees. Also if they’re trying to bring in drops from helicopter, it’s steep terrain with not enough open spaces to get close to some of these communities, so you see folks bringing things in on ATV and by mule team having to cut their way through downed trees and traverse mudslides which dropped mountains of mud that now have to be moved and washed trenches some several feet deep . It’s a nightmare and many of these people who are stranded are elderly and infirm. Many would be rescue teams went in on day one and found themselves in need of rescue, that’s how magnificently hostile this terrain truly is and why so much mystery surrounds these hills, the most beautiful things in nature are usually the most deadly. A little empathy paired with education is needed in this situation.
If I seem angry it’s because I am, if you have nothing constructive to offer, offer your silence and we’ll all be a lot better off. One thing we are which you will soon come to understand, is resilient. We were born and bred by this dark and dusty, moonshine soaked mother and we will never give up to desperation. I see it in the neighbors hauling rock by the truck load to fill in washed away roads, building elaborate bridges of ladders and reclaimed wood from the destruction all around them to help the people across the street, down the hill and over yonder in the holler. I love their spirit, I summon that spirit every time I face adversity and in 58 years through many attempts on my life, some self-inflicted, I have survived and thrived because of it and when the mud settles and the water recedes, you’ll see that those people will too, mark my words, they’re far from done yet.
I couldn’t be more proud to be a Tarheel than I am at this moment. I love as fiercely as I hate, remember that when you speak ill of my people.