“...mountains drowned;
and gods and demons came out of the South...”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

I.

ASHEVILLE, NC: The water gauge on the French Broad River was reading two feet. 1,620 cubic feet of water were passing through it per second. Not a scary lot of liquid. River rocks were still jutting out under Pearson Bridge, the water white where it spilled over them. Further south, the gauge on the Swannanoa River was also reading: two feet. 158 cubic feet spilled through its thinner channel, moving west to meet up with the French Broad. It was 2 PM, September 25, 2024.

The rain started just before 5. It came from a cold front, air passing west to east. The cool air dragged moisture to the Appalachians — “tugging up and sucking up all this moisture into the mountains,” one meteorologist would later say.  

By midnight, the French Broad had risen almost two feet. The Swannanoa had jumped nearly four. These were big leaps by any measure. Further leaps impended: The real storm, Hurricane Helene, was making its way up from the south, swirling in the Gulf of Mexico, creeping north at 12 miles per hour. Multiple rounds of heavy rainfall are expected due to the interaction of tropical moisture along a stationary front, declared the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on the crackly airwaves of weather radio WXL56. This has the potential to be an extremely rare event, with significant and damaging flash flooding. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper issued a State of Emergency. The Board of Commissioners for Buncombe County, of which Asheville is the seat, followed suit.

North Carolina is shaped like a top-heavy boat. If the southeastern Cape Fear region is its keel and the tidewater region its stern, Western North Carolina makes up its bow. The forecasts from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center were showing the eye of the storm passing just west of that bow, with the potential to veer east to its tip. Flash flooding… may impact areas that do not typically flood, NOAA warned. A hurricane-turned-tropical-storm, then, might blast its wind and rain not through the Outer Banks or Cape Fear or the coastal zones of North Carolina usually subject to sea-born disaster, but inland to the mountains, to a landscape the imagination had trouble associating with tropical storms. 

It rained all night. Not long after the sun rose on Thursday, September 26, both the French Broad and the Swannanoa were at levels the United States Geological Survey deems “a minor flood stage.” 9.5 feet and 10 feet, respectively. And minor was promising major.

People in Western North Carolina threw sandbags in front of their doors. If they didn’t have sandbags, they used bags of mulch. People stocked up on toilet paper and canned food and batteries and Sterno stoves. They charged their phones, cleaned their rain gutters out. They filled their bathtubs with water. Filled their cars with gas. Withdrew cash.

Some people did. Other people had not heard what was brewing. Flood warnings had gone out in newspapers, and on social media, and on the radio, and through government websites and text alerts. But not everyone accessed these sources. Not because they were careless, but because they were working long hours, or had four kids to take care of, or didn’t speak English. (Two-fifths of Americans follow the news closely, while another two-fifths actively avoid it. Of those who do read the paper, two-thirds don’t read past the headlines.) 

It continued to rain. Five inches of rain is what environmental scientists had determined could cause serious landslides in Western North Carolina. By 11:10 PM, Hurricane Helene had made landfall in Perry, Florida, 400 miles away. And by 11:10 PM, Asheville had received 6.62 inches of rain.

“Due to the catastrophic rain in the area, the North Fork Reservoir auxiliary spillway has been activated,” the City of Asheville announced at 6:22 AM on the morning of September 27. “A MANDATORY EVACUATION of the Swannanoa River Valley area is in place.” 

The French Broad was now at 13.15 feet, the Swannanoa at 14.38. The rivers kept rising.

~ ~ ~

Hannah Barnett lives in Asheville with her father and daughter, works at the Dollar Tree. Her people have been in Buncombe County a long time. She owns a Bible whose flyleaves record eleven generations of family history: births, deaths, marriages. Her great-grandfather’s name is written in that Bible. Her great-great-great-great grandfather’s name is written in that Bible.

In West Asheville, along the French Broad River, Hannah Barnett’s great-great-great-great grandfather built a house. A tropical storm came up the coast from Miami, gained momentum, morphed into a hurricane, swung inland into Charleston, South Carolina, and blew its way up across North Carolina until it reached the mountains, raised hell, and brought the skies down. That was The Great Flood of 1916. “Homes swept away along the whole path of the flood,” The Asheville Citizen reported in the aftermath. The Barnett home was among them.

Hannah Barnett’s great-grandfather decided to rebuild it. The first house had been made of wood. This one was to be made of stone. Stone dug and dragged from the creeks and hills surrounding the property, stacked and balanced in irregular interface — small dull silver stones, stocky rectangular rocks the color of sand, sloping gray slabs that would have suited a medieval parish church; gneiss, granite, limestone, quartz, those sorts of stones — to make a sturdy, sober, two-story structure. Stone, with plaster walls three-feet thick, so if the river flooded again, the house would stay put.

It flooded again, in 2004. The house stayed put. Not that it was really put to the test: Water only reached the road, stopped before the driveway.

It flooded again, in 2024. The water reached the road. The water reached the driveway. The water slipped up the front porch, slid into the living room, and around 7 AM, the morning of Friday, September 27, it climbed up to Hannah’s ankles. 

Hannah Barnett started thinking it was time to get out of the house. She wrapped herself in a black trash bag and grabbed her daughter’s medicine.

~ ~ ~

John, Brandon, and The Hellraiser From Halifax were over at the VRQ in East Asheville. VRQ: That’s short for the Veterans Restoration Quarters, and it’s a good place. A beautiful place, in John’s eyes. It had a blue roof and off-white walls and on one of those walls was painted a big American Flag. It’d used to be a Rodeway Inn, and Elvis had stayed there when he’d played shows in Asheville. Then it became a Super 8, the Closest Hotel to the Blue Ridge Pkwy, the advertisements went, until the motel went bust. In 2007, a Christian nonprofit, the Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, bought the vacant building and started putting homeless veterans up there, helping them get work and get stable. John had been in the Army. The Hellraiser had been in the Marines. Brandon had been in the Navy.

The men at the VRQ had been through it. They’d done three or eight or more deployments. They’d gone to West Germany, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or unspecified parts of the Levant they referred to as “The Sandbox.” They’d come back and got drunk until they’d had seizures, or shot up until they OD’d. They’d lost friends and girlfriends and wives. Fucking GWOT, you might hear some of them say, bitterly. GWOT was The Global War on Terror, and it’d upended their lives for nothing.

The VRQ was getting them back on track, though. John, the Army vet from Franklin County, North Carolina, wishes he’d gone into the VRQ 20 years ago, before the 15 rehabs and two detoxes, before he’d needed to get “a washout” of his spine after years of heroin use resulted in an infection, which washout eventuated a two-month coma, wherefrom he awoke unable, for a time, to move anything but his eyeballs.

The VRQ works. Or it’d worked for John and Brandon. John had quit smack. Brandon had quit drinking.

But on Friday, September 27, the VRQ had a problem. You’re pretty much sitting in a noodle bowl, Brandon would later reflect of the motel-turned-shelter’s geographical situation. The mountains are the bowl. You are the noodles. And you’re right beside the Swannanoa River.

The Hellraiser From Halifax went to bed around 2:30 that morning. NOAA was on the airwaves saying, It is important to know where you are relative to streams, rivers or creeks, which can become killers in heavy rains. 

He gets woken up five hours later by his roommate, Todd.

We gotta go, we gotta evacuate! 

The Hellraiser From Halifax is like: What the fuck are you talking about, man? 

We gotta get out of the building, the river’s rising!

The Hellraiser From Halifax is like: Damn. Let me get up, get my clothes on, get going, grab a cigarette.

He goes outside the VRQ, crosses the parking lot to where the little wooden gazebo is. He’s standing there tall in his white beard and wire-rimmed glasses, looking out through the rain at the roofed-over barbecue pit out back. He’s still waking up. He lights his cigarette. The water is at the bottom of the pit, muddy. He finishes his cigarette. The water is at the top of the barbecue pit, touching the roof. It’s risen four or five feet in ten minutes.

He thinks: It’s time to go, this damn river’s coming up fast, man.

He runs back inside, says in his deep croaky voice that sounds like it’s coming from the hollow of a tree: Guys, I’m rollin, let’s get the shit outta here, this ain’t good. 

He grabs some stuff, goes to his car, cranks it up, and drives over the bridge across the Swannanoa, past the Citgo station, past the Quality Inn, toward the emergency shelter downtown at Harrah’s Cherokee Center.

While The Hellraiser is on his way downtown, an entire home is on its way down the Swannanoa. John sees it coming. He’s also fled the VRQ, by crossing the bridge on foot. Now he’s watching the river, in his bluejeans and his gray mullet, from the Citgo station. John looks at the house floating down, and he thinks he sees people inside. When it smashes against the bridge it starts crumbling apart. The roof slides on top of the bridge and stops; the rest goes under and swirls and falls to pieces. Eventually, the bridge splits, too.

~ ~ ~

It rose so fast, the water. By the time Hannah Barnett was set on evacuating the house, water was up to her knees. The front door faced the flooding French Broad. She did not want to go out the front door. The back door faced a fence and a hill. If she could get over the fence and up the hill, she might reach safety. But the backyard was now swamped, and the river continued to swallow it.

Her father, Daniel Barnett, made a human bridge, stretched his body out from the back door to the fence. She climbed over him, above the rising rapids, over the fence to the hillside. On the hill it was raining so hard she couldn’t see a thing. Couldn’t see the ground before her. Could just hear trees cracking and collapsing around, and she was sure she was going to die. She started crawling on her hands and knees until she reached thick briars, shoulder-high, which meant that there was nowhere left to go.

She heard a big crack, this one deadly close, and dove beneath a downed trunk. Another tree collapsed on top of it. And another. And another. She huddled there as the trees split and fell from above for God knows how long, maybe an hour. At one point she looked to her right: A racoon, crouched four feet away, looked back. They stared at each other in mutual terror as the rain spat and the wind slashed the woods. Then Hannah looked back out into the storm. There were still 15 feet of hill to surmount, but where the briars were not the slick mud was — shorn and slid to make a steep impassable mess. 

One more tree split and tumbled down toward her. Oh, fuck me, she thought. Sometimes a curse is a prayer. The tree missed by two feet. The way it fell, its trunk extended from her hideout to the hilltop. It made a kind of ladder. This is my way out. 

Hannah climbed onto the slick trunk and shimmied her way up, up the 15 feet over the mud and briars to the top of the hill. She’d made it. 

After reaching the hilltop, Hannah started the 12-hour walk to Waynesville, where her cousin lived and her daughter happened, by sheer luck, to be staying the night. 

Her father was still down there by the French Broad, though. He hadn’t wanted to leave, even after helping her escape. Impelled by whatever wild motive, he and the dogs, two German Shepherds named Lexi and Remy, had returned upstairs in the old stone home, waiting it out. 

The water crept up the staircase. They waited. The water neared the second floor. They waited still. The water threatened further ascent.

There was a great big beautiful picture window on the second floor, looking out onto the backyard. The backyard was now the French Broad River, seething higher and higher up the side of the house. Daniel smashed the window open and dove out with the glass and the dogs into the churning brown water. He swam — at the age of 65, in a river that was pushing some 92,000 cubic feet per second between its banks — the 12 feet to the embankment. On land, Daniel and his shepherds climbed the hill and walked the quarter-mile upriver to Bowen Bridge.

There were people up there on the bridge. They didn’t seem to be evacuees, though. They were taking pictures, making videos, as the French Broad tore north dragging debris. Telephone poles, whole trees, trailers, semitrucks.

Can I borrow your phone? he asked someone. He wanted to call his family. He wanted to find a ride. Someone said no. He asked someone else. Someone else said no. It was night, and he was a 65-year-old man covered in mud with two soaked German Shepherds in tow. Dozens of people, filming the deluge and desolation with their iPhones, said: No.

To hell with it. He and the dogs crossed the bridge and trekked two miles west to the fire station on Haywood Road. The firefighters gave him a change of clothes, but not a ride or a phone.

They then set out toward a friend’s house. They walked until the older dog couldn’t walk anymore. At some point she just lay down. That point was a Kmart parking lot. Daniel lay down in the Kmart parking lot, too, and tried to sleep.

Power was out in hundreds of thousands of homes. NOAA’s local weather broadcast went down. Internet and phone service vanished. Roads collapsed. The North Carolina Department of Transportation declared, “All roads in Western NC should be considered closed.” At the North Fork Reservoir, 25 feet of ground were washed away; the main transmission pipelines were washed away; the backup pipeline was washed away. And seventy percent of Asheville’s residents found themselves without water.

II.

Much of the soil in North Carolina is red or reddish-brown. Cecil soil and Durham soil and Wedowee soil in the state’s center; Hayesville and Evard and Fannin in the west. From an airplane, as you’re descending, you can see the red against the green, especially striking where the subsoil is exposed, the clay beneath the grass and trees. You see the clay from above, dirty copper background to verdant foreground, and you think: I am coming home.

When the clay mixes with water the color is that of a nail found in an abandoned woodland cabin. After it rains the rivers of North Carolina are rust-colored. The Cape Fear River turns the color of an old penny. The Haw River turns the color of an old penny. 

When Tropical Storm Helene passed through Western North Carolina, when the French Broad and the Swannanoa crested at 24.67 feet and 27.33 feet, those rivers were the color of an old penny. A week later, when the waters had receded, they were back to the color of a dead wet leaf, and the formerly flooded land was bared.

That’s gone. It’s gone. These were phrases you would hear in the ensuing days, as the extent of the damage became clear. Of a home, an apartment complex, an entire town. Riverview Apartments? That’s gone. Chimney Rock? It’s gone. 

Something grim happens to place names in catastrophes like this one. They cease to denote places. Instead, they denote disasters. Chimney Rock, Marshall, Swannanoa, Black Mountain — for a time they brought to mind not the towns themselves but the destruction they’d endured.

There was the damage to land and the damage to life. People saw mud-spattered horses running lost along the road, and dogs panting lost before front porches. Bodies were found under “piles of debris and trees.” Bodies were recovered “10 miles from the family’s home.” And with a predictability that did nothing to temper its sting, the body count rose. Ten North Carolinians confirmed dead on September 28. Thirty-six confirmed dead on September 29. Fifty-five confirmed dead on October 2. One hundred and fifteen reported dead a full week after the storm hit, on the day I arrived.

When you imagine a flood you see the rivers heavy with wreckage. You see the sludge oozing into doorways and windows. The water lingering stagnant and malevolent on the roads and sidewalks and the floors of homes people had lived in for decades, grown up in, raised their kids in. The thick muck left over after the water withdraws. Black mold spotting the walls. You do not imagine the dust. You do not see the days of mountain sunlight that dry the mud and roast it, crack it, disintegrate it into a fine reddish-brown powder that swirls in a cloud with a passing truck, that clings to your clothes and lifts to your mouth and coats your car, your shoes, and what’s left of your business or home.

Dust was everywhere the day I arrived in Asheville. No, not everywhere. Downtown was uncannily clean. The streets were intact. The windows of businesses were unbroken. Pritchard Park, in the heart of the city, was as I remembered it, as I’d seen it in 2013, 2014, 2018, 2022, visiting friends in Asheville from the Raleigh suburb where I grew up, or from Chapel Hill where I went to school: a neat little wedge of trees and brick and stone. But you drew closer to the French Broad River, and the dust and devastation started to show.

On Riverside Drive, a road parallel to the French Broad along which the Arts District lies: A green trash can, a square of insulation, a wooden bench, and a shimmering blue bauble — all dumped over a sorry spruce whose needles are dyed with mud, like a demented Christmas tree. Tatters of plastic tarp — blue, black, white, red — are draped over the chain-link fences and powerlines that haven’t been dragged away, as if clothes left out to dry. Tractor-trailers are ripped open and left standing on end. Shiny aluminum roofing lies in the street torqued into casarecce noodles. Stone lampposts are wrenched from the earth, or snapped at the base like toppled pines, or bent in the middle like fractured arms. 

Where it runs through Asheville, the French Broad River flows south to north. So everything that had fallen had fallen north. It all seemed to be pointing you that way. The lampposts and trees, the alluvial smears of silt and gravel. But you walked north and encountered only further variations on the theme of destruction. More overturned cars and collapsed roofs, accompanied by a burnt, industrial stench.

A creek that once branched from the French Broad is dammed now by a mess of debris: static, with an iridescent surface produced by chemical refuse — cosmic colors of indigo and silver and blue, as if confected by Tiffany. I drop a rock to see if the stilled creek will shatter like glass. The iridescent film lets the rock aside, and a small hole of muddy water shows through. The rest of the glistening surface remains eerily unmoved. 

I wander further upriver, where a woman and her two daughters are inspecting the ruin. The woman tells me her childhood church in Marshall, 25 miles north from Asheville, is “gone,” that the farms where she lives “look like lakes,” that an elderly man in Marshall held onto a tree for seven hours crying for help until he couldn’t hold on anymore. Her daughters tell us they’ve caught fish. “Fishies!” They show us the minnows in the cups of their hands; they wriggle and shimmer like mercury. “Go let ’em back in the water, guys,” the woman says eventually. Then she points across the French Broad to an old stone home. “Now, their whole house flooded over there, just to let you know.”

~ ~ ~

The house made with three-feet thick plaster walls and stone dragged from the creeks and hills had stayed put. The water had filled the first floor, then continued halfway up the second, and the house had stayed put. Its inhabitants had leapt out its windows, and the house didn’t budge. 

Hannah is in the brown slush of the yard with her cousin and dad. Her cousin is sorting through sopping bits of paper — birth certificates, letters, deeds — and drying them on the hood of a pickup. Hannah and her dad are hauling out black trash bags of unsalvageable stuff. Her dark hair is in a ponytail, dark half-moons hang below her eyes.

The house had stayed put, but its insides had not. Hannah leads me in after I introduce myself, she tells me that her great-grandmother’s piano was “smashed into 300 pieces.” She points to a corner of what was once the living room. “There’s a couch under there.” I see only sludge. Her dad’s heart medicine is nowhere to be found. Nor the family Bible. “We can’t find it,” she says. “We can’t find it.”

We go back outside. She points to a pond. The pond was once her garden. Peppers, corn, squash, apples, collards. “I had a giant harvest that was getting ready to come out,” she says. She’d been planning to pick it all on Saturday, the day after the flood. “Everything’s gone. Everything.”

From the despair of “everything’s gone” Hannah oscillates to the forbearance of “it is what it is.” “Everybody’s got it bad,” she says. “I keep reminding myself that we’re at least alive.” Her tone and bearing show she believes it: At times she laughs and tosses up her hands up while detailing the destruction. You could see in this attitude a delirious “trauma response,” or you could regard it as plain Appalachian grit — wording that may make you roll your eyes, but which, once witnessed, cannot be denied.

Everything is gone, except the rock shell of the house. She tells me they are planning to gut it and rebuild. Hearing this, I am surprised not to view it as foolish. The river is not drying up. The house still lies on a floodplain. But this is their home. Their family built it. They’ll return.

~ ~ ~

Many of the people staying in the American Red Cross Shelter at Asheville–Buncombe Technical Community College did not have homes to return to, after the flood or before it. They had been sleeping in tent encampments or homeless shelters when it struck. The Red Cross shelter was another waystation on an unsteady path, until they figured out what was next. 

I made my first visit at night. It’d been hours since the sun had set, but the concrete patio outside the shelter was busy, lit up by white lights. One man was pushing a walker around the perimeter. One was riotously FaceTiming a friend. One was drinking what looked to be piss from a water bottle. (I later found out it was vodka, tinted that evil yellow tone, presumably, to avoid theft or confiscation by the Red Cross.) One was pacing frantically to and fro in a backwards hat and white T-shirt. This was Josh. He’d taken a Greyhound from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a Shell gas station on Swannanoa River Road the day before the storm hit. He’d been looking for a change from his life back in Oklahoma. His tattoos hinted at what this life might have been like. On his left forearm was a bullseye, “a target, cuz I used to shoot meth”; on his right bicep was a flask, “cuz I used to manufacture meth.” It was bad timing, this move to Western North Carolina, but he was cheerful. “I’ve met a bunch of pretty cool people here,” he said. Among them the vets from the VRQ.

The first vet I met was Nathan. He was young, 23, and not well. It took me a stupidly long time to realize this. He’d launch into a story and drift off, stare at the floor, snap his neck up and begin a new one in medias res. I thought his lapses in coherency were because he was drinking the aforesaid vodka, but there was some deeper trouble behind his brown crewcut and pale face. The root of which came through. “Growing up, hearing stories” of soldiers had made him see them as heroes, so he’d enlisted in the Navy at 18, as a member of the United Naval Construction Battalion, or what’s known as a Seabee (CB). He’d been deployed abroad in what he called The Sandbox. And had I ever read 1984? Because we’re living in a 1984-style world. Because they’re Eiffel-towering me, and doing whatever they want. I’m at the lowest rung, because—

“Ay. Ay!” Someone started shouting at Nathan. 

We turned.

“I know you. I know you.” A man in glasses and an Iraq-Afghanistan Veteran hat was approaching. “Fuckin Seabee!”

Nathan rose slowly from his chair on the patio.

“Motherfuckin Seabee!” said Brandon. “What’s up!? What’s up baby?!”

“Ahh!!!” — the flare of recognition in Nathan’s eyes — “What’s up?! You made it through! Bruhhh!” They hugged violently.

“You doin’ alright? I’m still here,” said Brandon. His tone was suddenly low and soft.

“You’re still here — I’m still here,” said Nathan.

“I should brighten your day.”

“Hellll yeah brother!”

It came out that they hadn’t seen each other in a year, not since Nathan had moved out of the VRQ to the “Tent City” in a defunct RV park. They could hardly believe it. “Sheeeet!” Nathan kept saying.

“We go way back, dude. He took the crazy route — I took the logical route,” Brandon tells me. (Later, by way of explaining their divergent routes, he says that Nathan “saw people blown up” in The Sandbox.)  

The vets sit on plastic foldout chairs and go over the divagations of shared friends (“He’s pretty down and out right now”), offer each other supplies (“You need water? Or a fresh Mountain Dew?”). We’re soon joined by an older man, an ex-Army guy named John, in Crocs, brown shorts, a plain red T-shirt, and a gray mullet. John’s from the 3,000-person town of Louisburg, North Carolina — “I was born in a tobacco field; I know what hard work is” — and exudes both a werewolfish intensity and a gruff sort of kindness. He’d been hallmates with Brandon at the VRQ — John was room 146, Brandon 149. The two review their rooms’ fates.

“I lost everything,” says Brandon.

“I lost everything,” says John.

“I’d say 75 percent lost everything,” says Brandon of the VRQ as a whole. 

They continue in this vein, but Nathan is quiet, and getting antsy. He starts fiddling with a chain around his neck. He flicks his eyes to me.

“Are you a snitch?” he demands, apropos of nothing.

No way, I say.

“Here, hold on to this” — he puts a chain with two thin, pliable tags in my hand. They read:

Francis

Nathan, L

A Pos

Catholic

Before I can process what’s happened, he’s gotten up and disappeared into the Red Cross shelter. I look in panic to John. He is unfazed. I look to Brandon. He hasn’t even noticed. I relax and figure Nathan’s just run to the bathroom, and I soon forget about the dog tags I put in my pocket.

I stayed with John and Brandon out there on the plastic folding chairs while it got cold and some of us started shivering. John lit a steady stream of gray American Spirits. (“They didn’t have blacks.”) He was soon accompanied in this activity by a tall man in a flannel shirt and snowy beard. 

“I’m gonna be honest about this guy,” John says as the newcomer sits down. “He’s a hellraiser from Halifax. He went into the Marines — what? 17 was this? It made a man out of him early, didn’t it?”

“Made something,” The Hellraiser From Halifax says softly. He does not look like much of a hellraiser. He has sad gentle eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and he speaks in low creaky tones. But his twang does bespeak, if not hell, an origin in Halifax, North Carolina, population 170.

The vets smoked and swapped stories about their deployments in Europe or South America or The Sandbox, about the wind and the rain. “My room pretty much got trashed. Mud in the room. It stinks,” says The Hellraiser From Halifax.

I listened until the night tipped over into morning, and the vets drifted inside.

III.

When the apocalypse comes, the speculative fictions tell us, man will be wolf to man. Neighbor will face neighbor in brutish contest for what resources can be scavenged. The drive to survive will shove out every other. 

The people of Western North Carolina cast doubt on these stories. It is true you heard some accounts, like those of Hannah’s dad, about help being withheld in the chaos of catastrophe. It is true you heard tale of looters siphoning gas from abandoned cars or stealing TVs from evacuated homes. But these were, it seemed, exceptions. What glittered through the grimness was the effusive generosity of the North Carolinians to each other.

You would need abominable eyesight not to see it. The hundreds of handmade signs pointing you to free hot cooked meals, baby supplies, and water throughout Asheville, Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Woodfin. You could tell people that you were not from the area, that you were only staying a few days, that you didn’t want to be a resource-drain — and they would insist you eat their food, drink their coffee, wear their clothes, use their jerry-rigged solar shower that consisted of a trashcan, a ladder, and a garden hose.

And the generosity poured in from out of state. Volunteers came up to the mountains with the Red Cross, Operation Airdrop, AmeriCares, the Salvation Army, Samaritan’s Purse, Team Rubicon, Mercy Chefs.

This all made up what could be called the utopian dimension of catastrophe, this willingness to give and to give. (If it also evoked the dystopian aspects of everyday life, in which people appear less willing to give, and public resources for the poverty-beset are grossly wanting, then….) With people out of school and work, with gathering places closed, with the internet down and phone service scant, there was time to help others, provided you were not the one needing help.

I wanted to pitch in too. It is difficult to return to your home state, to a region of it whose people and culture and physical beauty shaped you when you were as yet unfired clay, to see parts of it in ruins, to see others repairing those ruins, and to remain satisfied with your role as a mere observer. So I applied to a few service organizations. I was shooting for the Red Cross above all, but resolved to go with whoever would take me first.

~ ~ ~

“Chaplains. Chaplains, stand up. Stand up. Hurry, we don’t have much time. Stand up. You’re not that ugly.”

Hoots and chuckles The chaplains stood up. They were wearing blue polyester polos. They smiled and waved from the back of the auditorium.

“Alright, siddown.”

They sat down.

“Chaplains are all around,” the orientator drawled, “and they will be out there with your teams as you work. So have a blessed day. Be careful what you’re doing. And if you need the chaplains, they’re here for you. Thank you.”

It was on my fourth day in Asheville that I joined up with the Samaritans. Samaritan’s Purse, to be precise: the Christian humanitarian organization run by Franklin Graham, son of famed Southern Baptist minister and global evangelist Billy Graham. I didn’t know much about the group before applying. Just that they were helping with the flood cleanup, and my parents liked them, and I hadn’t yet heard back from the Red Cross, overwhelmed as they must have been.

Samaritan’s Purse was orienting volunteers up at Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove, an evangelical event-space in the mountains of outer Asheville. When I got to the Center at 7:45 AM, the lot was full. The license plates let you know that volunteers had gathered from all corners of the South to help out. Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. You walked inside the building, past the stone fireplace and the painting of Billy Graham, and signed in with a cheery middle-aged woman. You received a safety checklist and some glossy orientation literature. You filed off into the auditorium to take a seat and look the lit over:

HOW TO PRAY:

Dear God,

I know that I am a sinner. I want to turn from my sins, and I—

I already knew that. I moved on to the

STATEMENT OF FAITH:

We believe that human life is sacred from conception to its natural end.

We believe God’s plan for human sexuality is to be expressed only within the context of marriage.

God instituted monogamous marriage between male and female as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of—

Hey, I knew this stuff too. I’d been a churchgoing child back in the Piedmont. Abortion: bad. The gays: bad. Premarital Pound Town? Not good. But to know the rules is not, ipso facto, to believe them. If anyone asked, I would agree to disagree with my Brothers and Sisters in Christ. 

After we met the chaplains, we went over the safety checklist with an orientator speaking from a podium. Like everyone else, I was eager to get started, so it was hard to pay attention, but here’s a bit of what I recall:

Falls: Don’t fall. 

If you’re on a roof, that roof ends eventually. 

If you can find a way for a pole saw to be ten feet in the air and cut your leg, you should not be using the pole saw.

We’re here to serve these homeowners and to be the light of Jesus to them.

Checklist complete, we split into crews, pick up our bright orange Samaritan’s Purse T-shirts, and set out to the worksites. My crew members had come from North Georgia and from Western Pennsylvania and from all over North Carolina. A warm-faced woman wearing a red cap that said: God Is Good. A young man whose muscles conferred upon him the aspect ratio of a propane tank, wearing a camo cap that said: Si vis pacem, para bellum — If you want peace, prepare for war.

It was a busy day. We worked on three houses. We mucked out a flooded basement. We cleared a clogged culvert. We climbed up on a roof with chainsaws and pole saws and cut down collapsed trees. The men loved it, you could tell.

“I’m takin’ that back to Pennsylvania! That’s firewood!” One yelped after sawing an oak. 

The para bellum guy stalked around, hacking the shit out of branches with a machete.

After we finished our first worksite, we gathered together. “Okay everybody,” our crew lead said, “We’re going to say a prayer for Mr., for Mr.…,  for whatever his name is.”

Mr. Whatever His Name Was was the one with the mucky basement. 

Lord, we pray to be your hands and feet, went the prayer.

There was this one brother, Travis, around my age, good with a chainsaw, bosom ablaze with the urge to spread the Word. Soon after the prayer was over, Travis started testifying. “We’re just here to be God’s shining light,” he told Mr. Whatever His Name Was.

“I’m more of a science guy,” I heard Mr. Whatever His Name Was tell Travis.

You scooped mud, you sawed wood, you testified. It’d been a while since I’d done regular outdoor work, so I got tired quicker than I’d have liked. Partway through our second house, I sat down and started eating a banana. It attracted the homeowner we’d been helping, an older man with white curls and a handsome though inscrutable face. He was wearing standard older-man clothes — slacks, a button-up — but you felt he was wearing pajamas. There was something enigmatic in the way he shuffled over, as if he were trying to avoid detection or scrutiny. He stood there and reviewed me, like I was a brand-new type of thing.

“Oh. That’s your banana,” he said.

 I agreed, then waited for him to reveal whose banana he’d thought it was. He did not. I finished the banana and pulled out a pack of beef jerky.

“Bheeef!! Jheerky!” he exhaled in the savory tone you might use if Beef Jerky were a well-liked man who’d just walked into a party.

“Yessir!” I said.

This is sort of the way we communicated, Todd and I. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, here in what is ultimately a mournful tale, but it was the first time in days I’d wanted to laugh. 

We spent the rest of the afternoon hauling out shattered bits of drywall and toppled white pines from the property of a man named Brian, who kept a Colt M1911 strapped to his hip and spoke in muffled grunts, as though his mouth were stuffed with gravel. While we worked, he strolled around the yard with his German Shepherd and thanked each volunteer. I reached out to pet the dog. Shnot frenly, he said. I withdrew my hand.

Towards the end of the workday, I stood back with two fellow Samaritans, kindly cousins from North Georgia, to watch Travis buck the last downed tree of the day. As we looked on, the younger cousin turned furtively to me with a sly smile, like he was about to tell a secret, and held out his phone. The secret was a meme: 

Is the cure for male loneliness

[Picture here two rad-looking dudes holding wooden crates in a helicopter]

illegally smuggling aid to flood victims without government approval?

Ah yes, politics, right here in the meme. Naturally, it had taken no time for the disaster and its aftermath to be “politicized.” Although in Helene’s wake there were some who contested the incursion of politics into what ought, in their view, to have been uncritical, even apolitical, support for the relief effort, wherever it might come from. If this view was well intentioned — a wish to still the inane chatter of the election reporters and their many thousands of social media imitators, whose unending speculations about the prospects of the two leading presidential candidates now had exhilarating fuel in the shape of a massively destructive hurricane — it was as vain and unhelpful as wishing that Americans could just care for the sick and stop “politicizing” healthcare. There were factions forming — in Buncombe County, in the media, and online. There were governments involved — county, state, federal. There were billionaires and politicians with something to gain, and North Carolinians with something, or everything, to lose. The situation was resolutely political. And one of the hulking quandaries on which the politics of disaster-relief hinged was: What the hell is going on with FEMA? 

If you heeded some opinionated people who were not in Western North Carolina but on the internet, the answer was: nowhere. If you heeded the FEMA press releases, the answer was: everywhere. If you drove around and talked to homeowners and renters and homeless people whose lives had been tornadoed by the storm, the answer was a plangent: somewhere?

I saw FEMA trucks on the road. In church and grocery store parking lots, I saw the FEMA centers where you could apply for disaster assistance funding: an initial $750 to cover “essential items,” plus a maximum of $42,500 in “Housing Assistance” for home and private road repairs, and a maximum of another $42,500 in “Other Needs” assistance for things like transportation, temporary housing, or compensation for lost personal property. Most of the people I spoke with had either been visited by FEMA agents or applied at one of its centers. Many of these people were still waiting for funds over a week after the storm struck. FEMA was not blocking supplies or “hiding” as the rumors ran — they responded to my emails in minutes, and returned my phone calls promptly. But their answers were not always what one hoped for. 

Whether FEMA was doing its job or whether FEMA was doing enough were two different questions with different conclusions. A week after the flood, the day I arrived in Asheville, FEMA had dispersed $12 million to 14,000 of Buncombe County’s applicants — what amounted to $857 per applicant. By October 22, FEMA had granted an average of $1,367 to 90,000 different households in North Carolina. One might wonder what $857 or $1,367 could do for someone whose home was in the French Broad River, or whose only means of transportation was a totaled truck filled to the seats with stinking sludge. Two weeks after the flood, a FEMA public information officer told me that “maybe a dozen” people had received the full $42,500 in Housing Assistance, a sum that —if you didreceive the maximum — was itself pitifully inadequate to replacing a house rent to drenched debris by water that in its force and swollenness with wreckage resembled less water than liquified aggregate. But those who lacked flood insurance (most people) had only FEMA money to fall back on, and this money was insufficient to rebuild their lives. They were, to put it gently, fucked.

~ ~ ~

You did not see FEMA chainsawing trees in yards. You did not see FEMA employees repairing powerlines. This is, simply put, not what FEMA does — not in their wheelhouse. But many people wanted, apparently, to see FEMA employees doing precisely these things, tangible things. Such people were quick to praise the volunteers and contractors who did them, quick to point at the FEMA employees who did not. This yanks one to an unavoidable deduction. The ultimate plaint underlying such a position, underlying the grievances of rightward good ole boys in Marshall and leftward liberals in Asheville alike, was that “the social safety net” was not strong enough. Feel what you may about how big or small the government should be, here was rare consensus: FEMA should have had a larger role. If this observation is so obvious as to verge on idiotic (of course disaster-struck people want more help from their government), the seeming rarity of such consensus renders it remarkable.  

After finishing my work with the Samaritans, I ate a can of soup, poured a bottle of water over my head, and was getting ready to sleep when I remembered the dog tags that had been sitting in my jacket for days. I have the terrible feeling that Nathan has left the shelter and wandered God knows where. He’ll never get them back.

I drive to the Red Cross and run to the entrance. Is a Nathan Francis still sleeping here? 

The woman at the front desk nods and smiles warmly. He’s still here. “I’ll make sure these get back to him,” she says, taking the tags in hand.

With a lightened heart I go out to the patio. The Red Cross has wheeled out a big TV on a pushcart, and a bunch of guys are smoking and watching the Cowboys beat the Steelers. I spot John with another vet.

“There’s coffee. You want a cup of coffee?” John asks as I walk over, nodding vaguely toward a pot on the concrete floor. He’s holding a cup and a cigarette and looks worn out.

That’s okay, I say.

“You take a shower yet? You should take a shower. We got nice showers here,” he says. It’s a rare luxury these days, with the city’s water system still down.

That’s okay too, I say, I just poured a bottle of water on my head. I start looking around for a chair.

“You don’t wanna get near me. I got something,” he says. He takes a drag and then coughs violently. He crosses his leg at the ankle, hacks some more, then clears his throat.

“Can I borrow your spoon?” he asks the man beside him. The man takes a black plastic spoon out of his breast pocket. John scoops three massive spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee cup, then rummages around in a drawstring bag at his feet. He finds the Splenda and tips it into his cup for an improbably long time.

I ask him if he’s got any updates from the VRQ. Do they have a new place in mind? 

He shakes his head in disgust. They’re looking at properties near the old quarters, right along the Swannanoa again.

“I learned my lesson,” he says, leaning back with his coffee. “I’m going to the hills.”

IV.

Whatever you may think of the improvidence seemingly signaled by the fact that less than one percent of homes in Buncombe County had flood insurance, the people of Western North Carolina assumed, as you probably did too, that a tropical storm could never carry its waters all the way from the coast to the Blue Ridge. Many, having long ago discovered that private insurers would not cover them because they lived on a floodplain, had never learned that FEMA itself offered policies for such zones.

“In the mountains you don’t think about them hurricanes,” a man named Charles tells me one incongruously bright afternoon. “We’ve seen a lot of water come down the holler, but never as bad as this.” He is standing in his yard looking lost, his eyes either shellshocked or resigned. He has a thick lower lip framed by a gray beard, and is wearing jean shorts and hiking socks up to his knees. “We don’t have no flood insurance. We didn’t have none of that,” he says of his home, a neat one-story cottage with a porch and blue shutters. He says he’s still waiting to hear back from FEMA.

His home is, was — one is unsure which tense fits — along a branch of the Swannanoa, not far from the trashed VRQ. He’d been living here a while, working at the Walmart Supercenter in Biltmore Village. His mom had been living here, too, but she’s turning 80 soon, and the house is blooming with black splotches of mold. “She’s going to a nursing home, she can’t come back here,” he tells me. He can’t stay either. He’s leaving tomorrow. I ask where he’ll go.

He seems confused by the question. He looks through me.

“I don’t know where I’ll go. I really don’t.”

Another afternoon, I meet the parents and oldest son of a family of five living in a trailer park beside the Swannanoa River. Living: Here there is no question of tense: Although their home is uninhabitable — the river ran right through it, and they waded to a hillside through water up to their stomachs to escape — they inhabit it still. They’ve lived in this trailer for 15 years, not long after moving from Honduras, and they have no alternative. Like many families in this neighborhood, they are undocumented. I don’t speak Spanish and the parents don’t speak English, so I spend most of my time standing outside the trailer, amid the dust and the mud, the shredded insulation and broken vinyl paneling, talking to the 23-year-old son, Jeison.

The same handful of thoughts keeps ricocheting in his head. They’re not about himself; they’re about others — his family, his neighbors. “They can’t go to school if they don’t have a place to stay,” he keeps saying about his little brothers. “I’m worried about them because they’re not young anymore,” he keeps saying about his parents. Jeison thinks about the woman who had to go identify the body of her baby at a gas station down the road. He thinks about the disabled neighbor who hadn’t heard any of the flood warnings and was rescued only at the last minute, when the water was so high it took a canoe to help her escape. He thinks about all the snakes he’s seen since the flood, which scare him, but also draw his concern. “A lot of animals lost their homes too,” he says, looking down.

 Each time he tells you something that hits like a punch in the throat, he qualifies it with “I’m not complaining.” It would be impossible to get the impression he was. 

I ask him what’s going on with FEMA.

“The inspector for FEMA doesn’t want to see the house because they say it’s dangerous for them. They ask for photos.” A puzzling request, implying that FEMA was unwilling to enter the precise situation it was asking the family to confront.

We go in the trailer. The odor is dense and drugging; it is unbearably of mold. I want to leave immediately, and for this I feel ridiculous: He’s been sleeping here for a week, in a pile of blankets on the living room floor. He wakes up in the middle of the night and they are wet, having soaked up the moisture left over by the floodwaters. He has headaches from the mold and rashes from the wet. His old bedroom floor is sprouting constellations of spores. He lightly taps the drywall and it crumbles.

“We lost everything,” Jeison says. “We don’t have anywhere else to go.” He was holding it together, so I was holding it together, until I said goodbye and got in the car and came apart.

~ ~ ~

Situations like those of Charles and Jeison could make one receptive to rumors of sinister motives and shadowy plots.

One night, I was standing with some local reporters outside a food truck in West Asheville. We walked over to pick up our orders when a man started bellowing — to us, specifically, but also to the public, the earth, the sky. He was wearing a hoodie with the logo of a construction company on it, and his long beard made one think of ragged dendrites or a dissected wicker chair. His face showed youth worn old by work.

“This is one of the only places open!” he said. “Because there’s no water!” Buncombe County still had yet to provide an estimate for when the water system would be fully repaired. The delays were, the man shouted, intentional. It had something to do with FEMA, or maybe just the government in general. They were allocating manpower and resources to places like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure, he said, not because those towns had faced the worst of Helene but because “they wanna mine the quartz and lithium for Tesla! It’s a land grab!”

I listened as long as I could, shook his hand, then with an alloy of relief and reluctance went off to eat, leaving him hollering at our backs. 

He’d dragged into speech the sorts of staticky theories I’d seen online. That the government had engineered the disaster with weather control. Or maybe Tesla had. Or maybe the Democratic government and Tesla were in cahoots. And it was about land and lithium. But didn’t Elon Musk own Tesla, and wasn’t he one of the current Democratic administration’s most visible critics? And weren’t many of the people who were spitting on FEMA praising Musk for nobly shipping Starlinks to Western North Carolina so people could access the internet? And didn’t we feel inspired when, in a viral video, the sheriff of Spartanburg, South Carolina, said “Thank you Elon Musk” on behalf of the people of Chimney Rock, North Carolina? (Musk could afford to buy every resident of Buncombe County a half-million dollar home and still retain the unholy title of Richest Man in Texas, which might make his gift of Starlink kits appear catatonically underwhelming.) And FEMA sucked, because FEMA wasn’t giving people enough money, but we want small government, but we like the military, and the military is also part of the government, and its budget is $841.4 billion, so maybe we don’t want a small government, per se.

There was paranoia in the food-truck-man’s raving, but there was also some bedrock beneath it, a murky intuition backed up by precedent. No, there was no weather-control machine. No, FEMA was not seizing land. FEMA was not conspiring with Tesla to mine seized land. Misinformation, that. From what I’ve seen, the average FEMA employee actually wants to help desperate and needful Americans. But the history of disaster-relief in America is indeed a history of the most desperate citizens getting colossally screwed by the government mechanisms meant, ostensibly, to aid them. If the details were wrong, if no unified master-plot existed, his fear and rage had an all-too-real anchor in the country’s recent past.

“While my heart goes out to people on fixed incomes… in my opinion, it’s the responsibility of faith-based organizations, of churches and charities and others to help those people.” Thus spoke Michael Brown, the Bush-appointed administrator of FEMA, shortly after Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans. Testifying before Congress in September of 2005, he’d been asked to consider why certain low-income people might not have been able to evacuate their homes on time. His reply was that such a question was not quite FEMA’s duty to answer. The charities and churches could help with that one, he suggested. That was the Bush administration’s standard line at the time. Emergency social services were the purview of nonprofits and private enterprise, not government agencies. Brown’s predecessor, a Bush appointee named Joseph Allbaugh, saw things similarly. “An oversized entitlement program” is what Allbaugh contemptuously called the very agency he headed, an agency meant to help Americans when their worlds fell apart.

The latter-day Democrat is supposedly against Bush’s abandonment of Federal responsibility for helping the people of New Orleans rebuild their shattered lives. Yet FEMA’s limited ambition and efficacy in its response to Helene show that Washington’s priorities continue to lie elsewhere. Is it any wonder, then, that after Helene the charities and churches were as or more visible than the federal agents? Is it any wonder that an agency whose annual budget amounts to three percent of the military’s is unable to take the role we would have it assume? Is it any wonder that the long-term, downstream effects of FEMA’s response to events like Irma, Katrina, and Sandy have been the displacement and neglect of the residents who were most drastically impacted?

In the two years after Hurricane Sandy, median rents rose in affected areas at an average of $200 a month. New Orleans rents skyrocketed after Hurricane Katrina. “People rendered homeless by Katrina who had been assigned temporary housing had no guarantee as to length of stay,” the historian Robin Kelley wrote me regarding FEMA’s response to that storm. “Result? Rents more than doubled, preventing poor people from returning.” Rents doubled in places, because supply had withered, and no attempts to control the market were made. Many New Orleans landlords were, in fact, “deterred to rent to evacuees who were dependent on the FEMA rent assistance program,” according to another scholar, because such evacuees had only received rental assistance in three-month increments.

With the dynamics of disaster relief in America being what they are, the absence of any world-shaking effort to help the victims of Hurricane Helene was easy enough to predict. Yes, $750 (or $42,500, if you can get it) is better than nothing. Thirty volunteers in orange shirts hauling trees out of your yard is also better than nothing. But as history shows, FEMA or no FEMA, Samaritans or no Samaritans, many residents here face a shared probable fate: leaving their homes in Western North Carolina and never coming back.

V.

It’s my last morning in Asheville, and dark when I rise. I set out to the Red Cross shelter to say goodbye to the VRQ guys, as the sun starts lifting above the green mountains like an incandescent peach. It shines on new handmade signs by the side of the road, cardboard signs for free hot coffee, free warm blankets. We’re just a few weeks into fall, but you can feel winter coming, have felt it getting closer day by day. I have my windows down to feel the cold.

John is there at the shelter with his mullet and his Dickies — “I got on the only pair of pants I own!” — leaning back in his seat, drinking coffee and smoking his gray American Spirits. But Brandon and The Hellraiser from Halifax are not. They’ve left, John says. The VRQ’s found a new place to put up the vets, at a Quality Inn not a quarter mile down the road from the old flooded-out building, right beside the Swannanoa.

“They said, ‘Get on the bus!’” John tells me, snarling. “But I’m not going back. I’ve learned my lesson.” He coughs. He’s done with the river. He’s done with Asheville. It’s not just the hills he’s thinking about anymore. He wants to go further inland, as far from the coast as he can. “I think I’m gonna head out to Utah, Idaho…” he says, trailing off. I get to thinking about wildfires and the withering Colorado River, wondering if it’s any safer out there, but he finishes his sentence, looking kind of worried, “…I don’t wanna get too cold though.”

We don’t have anywhere else, says Jeison.

Everything’s gone, says Hannah.

I don’t know where I’ll go, says Charles. I really don’t.

I start my drive down from the mountains to the Piedmont with their words. The sky is pure, the sun unimpeded, the air clean and bracing. The French Broad River is running at 2.2 feet. The Swannanoa at 2.57. And mold is growing. People’s homes are rotting. May their voices be heard.

“When it thunders and lightnin’, and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people, ain’t got no place to go”

—  Bessie Smith, “Back Water Blues”

October 2024