Walking out your front door, you rarely consider how different life will be when you return home. When you walk back through that door. Like a portal, you leave one home behind … and return to another altogether.
On September 21, I left Asheville for a road trip to visit family and friends across Pennsylvania.
On October 2, I returned home to a hellscape like nothing I’d ever seen — well, maybe in the movies.
Midway through my trip up North, a tropical storm blazed through my mountain town, an unassuming 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico where it had formed. “Tropical storm” makes it sound like a mere dark, rainy day worthy of a good book and a London Fog.
But 60 to 70 mile-per-hour winds and the constant sound of trees falling will make it difficult to enjoy a book. She may not have been a hurricane by the time she reached the Blue Ridge, but Helene could have cared less what we called her. She was relentless.
“What’s going on in Asheville?” my aunt asked me when I visited her in eastern Pennsylvania, the day after the storm had hit.
I’ll admit, I was in a London Fog state of mind three states away. I’d assumed that Asheville had simply gotten lots of rain: a tree or two falling here, a river rising there. I recalled one of our riverside parks flooding a couple years ago. The bordering road was shut down for a week, maybe less. But then all was well again as the waters receded to normal height.
This was my faraway visual for Helene: one flooded street by a park, safely removed from any homes or businesses. Human lives.
But the footage I’d soon find online from the state of Pennsylvania put me in a state of disbelief for days to come. Biltmore Village, the quaint collection of shops and restaurants just across the gate to the Biltmore Estate, had gone entirely underwater.
Summit Coffee, one of my favorite working spots in town, had been pummeled in our trademark River Arts District, its roof and walls torn and gutted with mud. Our two rivers, the French Broad and the Swannanoa, had crested to about 25 feet, eclipsing records set by the infamous Flood of 1916.
I walked through the River Arts District years ago, noting an odd-colored brick painted high up a building which had marked the height of the river back in 1916. I remember thinking then how fantastical it was for the river to climb that high; how absurd it would be for our river ever to reach that brick again.
To see a new odd-colored brick that will be painted even higher than that brick of 1916 will be a sobering, unthinkable sight.
Unthinkable — and yet all too thinkable. Not a day has passed since the storm when I’ve not been forced to think about the storm — or what followed. The “storm after the storm.”
No power. No internet. No running water. Hardly any cell service. Not for days, not for weeks.
Terms like “potable water” and “non-potable water” entered the Asheville vernacular. Where to find working outlets for phones and laptops became daily treasure hunts. Finding wifi anywhere in town was like the dopamine hit of a metal detector going off in the Sahara. People anchored themselves to library parking lots with their laptops and phones just to get a long enough drag.
Friends and family encouraged me not to return home in the aftermath of the storm. I was not ignorant of the fact that I’d be returning to a near-apocalypse. And while I had a bounty of places I could have wandered — how wondrous! — I felt in my soul this need to return home.
Truthfully, it wasn’t even a decision. Another Tom of yesteryear would have leapt at the chance to live on the road again, hopping couches and guest rooms in this thrill of life on the move.
This Tom of today, however, grew wearied by the notion of additional wandering after eleven days already wandered in Pennsylvania. The thought of another week or two away, or even three or four, exhausted me more than the stark reality of returning home to an apartment without power, without internet, without running water.
Deciding my non-decision, I smiled at my discovery: I now have a home in this life where I yearn to be.
Even a home as diminished as Asheville.
I returned home six days after the storm, taking an extra hour or two to weave my way back, the main interstate collapsed by the floodwaters. I found trees — gigantic ones — downed at every turn, their massive root systems exposed like brains from cadavers. Power lines laid dangled in the streets. Dust and dirt and thick, black mud caked the shoulders and even centers of roads. Darkened traffic light after darkened traffic light adorned belabored four-way stops from intersection to intersection.
Eventually I returned to my neighborhood, now arched by power poles bent at 45-degree angles. My heart leapt as I drove up the hill to my apartment complex. I found two lower-level units emptied of their carpeting and furniture, flooded by the storm, including one which I had the opportunity to select when I first moved here two years ago. My second-level unit was unharmed, save for a few picture frames blown over from two windows left open.
Transferring luggage and supplies from my vehicle, I heard a perpetual hum of chainsaws and helicopters. Fallen trees dismantled down the street; devastation examined from the heavens. I heard this hum for days. We were in a perpetual ground zero.
Driving around town, I saw more than a few trees smashed atop roofs of homes and vehicles alike. I heard reports of dozens of lives lost, with dozens yet accounted for.
I started experiencing this eerie sensation of “survivor’s guilt.”
I should have been here, I thought over and over. Why was I permitted to miss the storm while away on another of my ridiculous gallivants?
I felt guilty that my apartment was spared while two others in my immediate vicinity were not. And why were so many others hurting from loss of property, even loss of life, while I merely had a few picture frames to rehang?
That first day back, I departed for Biltmore Village and the River Arts District, these beautiful places whose devastation I’d only seen online. I needed to see it, live it for myself. Biltmore looked like a bomb had gone off, the roads barricaded and still brown with dirt. Restaurants were in collapsed ruins.
I parked in the River Arts, and I walked for hours. Sidewalks were cracked and slanted; chunks of road had fallen away and were straight-up missing. Plastic bags and trash hung from the trees like ghosts in the breeze. Everything smelled of mud and wet garbage.
One of my most frequently visited restaurants with family and friends, White Duck Taco Shop, nestled along the French Broad, was gutted. All the outdoor tables and chairs were swept away. A school bus was upside down 50 yards away.
I felt the shallow breathing of sadness, along with this growing guilt for missing this first storm. I resolved not to abandon my home for the second — this storm after the storm. Coming home with giant jugs of water, canned food, propane tanks for my camp stove, and other snacks and drinks and supplies, I wanted to ride out this new storm with my city and help as I could.
The first few days home, I pooped in a porta potty outside the fire station down the road. I didn’t know you could still flush a toilet without running water — as long as you could refill your tank. Those first couple weeks after Helene, finding flushing water was just another part of my daily rhythm, along with finding power and wifi to do my writing and other work.
It took a few days to summon the stamina, but I finally emptied my darkened fridge and freezer of all the rotting food — a couple hundred dollars worth, I’m sure. Each evening I cooked canned vegetables and chicken breast over a camp stove in my black kitchen lit by candles.
You know what’s humorous? Upon leaving Asheville in September, I’d ordered a 6-pack of Brita filters to arrive when I returned home, ready for use. That Amazon package never arrived; its contents would have been useless anyway.
Our city’s primary reservoir got annihilated by Helene, and officials have continually said it’s going to be a weeks-long return for drinkable running water. The Y outside of town started offering free showers to members and non-members alike, and I showered there every other day — a 20-minute drive well worth the cleansing of body and soul. A dear church family whose house operates on a well also let me shower and do laundry at their home one day.
When I first got home, I was told my power would return in two days. I naively believed the power company, felt my patience pushed to the brink when two days turned to sixteen.
Millions of people around the world don’t have the bliss of a light switch, I kept thinking. Why am I so spoiled?
By day twelve or thirteen, the power company finally found their way to my street. I tell you, it was like seeing the cavalry. I can’t tell you the joy of finding my lights on when I came home that sixteenth night. Internet would still take another week to come back, however — my first-world patience pushed even further.
Running water returned after three weeks, though not safe for drinking or washing dishes or brushing teeth without first boiling. So, every three days I’ve boiled a giant chili pot of water for such use. Yet another normalized rhythm to my new life.
As of now all of my utilities are back, sans potable water. The water is starting to look less yellow, though.
Hey, I’ll take it.
I’ve returned to Beaver Lake for my morning walks, a somber yet peaceful place with less tree covering than it used to have. Giant, empty spaces now adorn several bends in the dirt path around the lake.
In all my walks around this lake, and in all my walks and drives around town, as I’ve absorbed the weight of physical and emotional devastation at every turn, I’m struck by an unshakable detail:
Entire trees have thundered to the earth … and still their leaves held.
Where 70 mile-per-hour winds brought 70-year-old trees to splintered knees, their leaves like fingers remained attached to their branching hands.
Isn’t that something?
Winds and rains powerful enough to rip a tree from its foundation, crush roofs, and destroy a reservoir and power lines requiring weeks to repair —
— but not so powerful to rip a leaf from the branch.
When everything else is falling, spirits and trunks alike, the leaf does not.
Not yet. Not then. Not for a leaf in late September.
Not when autumn’s call had yet to sound.
It’s poetry, isn’t it? Even a horrific storm like Helene has her limits.
Even evil has its limits. Evil powerful enough to steal a child’s innocence, or slaughter people in war, or bring a community, a city, an entire region to tears.
But not so powerful to quench the light. To halt humanity’s response. To halt the church’s response. To resist a hurricane-force gale of supplies and manpower and love. Neighbors chopping trees, businesses serving free meals, churches becoming distribution centers.
The leaf still holds.
Goodness persists through the dark.
Help is on the way.
Help is here.
Our leaves hold tight, and hope remains.
It doesn’t erase the devastation. Debris will remain scattered about the Blue Ridge for months. Hearts will wince for many years longer. The hurt is near when you look out the window, drive down the street, breathe in this new murky air.
But look at the leaves.
Only now in October, November — all these weeks after Helene as leaves on still standing trees have turned yellow and orange and fiery red — only now have they been given permission by their Maker to fall.
Not from a storm in September.
But from autumn’s long-awaited whisper.
Evil often disrupts our earth, but it cannot break the inevitable. The call of autumn is the reminder that good will win. The sad things will become untrue. The leaves will hold until it is time for them to fall.
I walked back through my front door six days after Helene, and it’s been a wild portal to reenter these last few weeks.
I’ve returned home to a splintered city, yet one that feels more bound together than ever before. Free hot meals at every turn; bottled water as far as the eye can see. Beyond food and water, I see hearts holding one another, giving space for us to grieve. People helping people; souls helping souls.
Even through autumn, our leaf still holds.
If you’d like to give toward Tropical Storm Helene relief efforts here in the Blue Ridge, consider making a donation to my church, Fellowship Asheville.
