Helene #2
September 27th
Dear Reader: I’ve at long last decided to convert this Substack to a pay account. The timing is not coincidental: I am currently on unemployment while the water situation in Asheville remains clouded (pun intended) and I’m unable to take payment from the coffee shops. This will likely be an evolving process as I figure out how to balance pecuniary needs with the desire to be read as widely and happily as possible by people whose attention I value more than their coin. Thank you for reading! (And if you like it, please *like* it! Apparently those likes make the whole thing go!)
We have: a Prius for charging stuff, a gas stove for cooking and boiling water, two full bathtubs for flushing toilets, a neighborhood lousy with grills and stocked freezers ticking toward room temperature, a pair of out-of-commission coffeebars, a staff weeks away from working, relatives a 7-minute drive east who are completely unreachable, one cat, plenty of booze, and time.
On Friday we attempt to drive out to Daymoon to assess the damage, but traffic on the highway is reduced to one lane and at a complete standstill. Meanwhile no one at all is coming the other direction into town, indicating that the road is closed up there somewhere. This is the same route we’d have taken—and the only option—to get to A.’s parents’ house atop Busby Mountain. But they’re the most resourceful and comprehensively prepared people in a 100-mile radius wherever they go, never short on tools, competencies or work ethic. If anything, that particular pair of septuagenarians will end up coming to our rescue.
We go back home and futz about and eat PB&Js. We charge our stuff and listen for radio signals. No local station is transmitting—half our pre-programmed channels are dead silent. The other stuff is hilariously irrelevant. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, at a time like this!? Periodically the shrill static of an emergency broadcast breaks through followed by an automated man warning of flash floods.
We pay a brief visit to the Laceys. Emily and Landis are college friends and fellow Oakleyites a 5-minute walk away. They’re one of a handful of couples in our set who waited until solidly in their 30s to establish exactly one new baby American girl before in all likelihood pulling up stakes on the procreation project. Her name is Millie Louise. She is 16-months old. Her burgeoning vocabulary will come back to play a part in this chronicle. For now I am charmed to the root by her fondness for the complete sentence “I sit,” which she deploys aspirationally and declaratively while mounting suitable surfaces. Landis says if the power outage lasts too long they’ll throw a carport cookout. “Might have to do it anyway because it sounds like fun.” A casual suggestion that perhaps underscores our general information level, which is negligible.
(I recall now thinking, while reading on the window-seat: And the power comes back NOW! … And the power comes back NOW! It wasn’t a thought that stemmed from a rational place. It was a dream I kept repeating into the indifferent world in a way only someone saturated in ignorance could manage.
The last people to know the extent of the disaster are those at its heart.)
We go check on BattleCat. The traffic pattern is funny on 240 westbound, the right lane slowing to a rubber-necking crawl as we approach the overpass spanning the intersection of Tunnel and Swannanoa River Roads. Cars pull off onto the shoulder. People crowd the rail, phones out and shooting. The orderly juncture of commerce and streets has been usurped by a mean, rushing, muddy river full of bobbing U-Haul trailers and trash.
(Later we’ll learn that the receding flood revealed the carcass of an entire cow in the U-Haul parking lot.)
BattleCat’s landlords have sandbagged her and through the glass she appears miraculously unspoiled. A few streaks of water across the concrete floor. I am disinclined to move the sandbags out to get inside. The forecast has consistently been for clear skies and lovely weather in the storm’s immediate aftermath, and in fact the day is gorgeous, but that automated man won’t shut up.
Headed back we stop on the shoulder and join the gawk mob. Where before there’d been the reliably snarled South Tunnel Road, keeper of box stores and Whole Foods, a five-laner climbing up past the mall, now all is mud, flood and refuse. We watch an immense tree carried in the current smack perpendicularly into a stubbornly standing copse and hear an awesome rending of timber.
Helicopters thresh the sky. A police car warbling its siren on low herds us back into our cars.
The highway east had opened up since morning and we make it to Daymoon. Our unpaved lot is a foot of churned mud but the structure is sound and dry. The O and E of our “OPEN” / “NOPE” sign are missing and the P is backwards. The effect is comic punch-drunk, as if the shop, grinning, shows several teeth missing.
Cut off, locked in, the news that gradually penetrates the veil of catastrophe Helene brought with her suggests our own isolation. At least one local station is back on its feet that afternoon, in time for us to learn that all roads are to be considered closed and that the city is implementing a 7-to-7 curfew.
Back home, the LVV gravitates to 20 Valley View, to the Scroggs’s backyard in particular, where Tim is grilling a little something of everyone’s. The news here is absences, specifically those of Helix and his good friend Jordan. Jordan manages a rustic/idyllic wedding resort nestled in mountainous Fairview called Laurel Falls. A tree had fallen on the main house. Shelix and Margit, Jordan’s wife, had spent the day playing Uno and drinking. But four hours have elapsed since the guys left on their errand and they weren’t anywhere near as relaxed as their day suggested they ought to have been.
What we’d heard, and didn’t share, was that landslides in Fairview were taking lives. 9 people are missing.
The Alexes, like the Scroggses, have been a thing for basically ever. They are the axis of a large and various friend group that obviously considers 18 Valley View their hub. On Helix’s side there is poker night and ManCamp Weekend and “the Property,” an expanse of unimproved Rutherford County gone in on collectively by a pool of outdoorsy blokes with more patience than funds. On Shelix’s side are T. Swift cells and reading challenges and cocktail hours in the sun around the kiddy pool. But as classically delineated as their activities, the whole society meshes and shares history and are fixtures in each others lives. A party at 18 is more likely to congeal into a huge circle than divide mitosis-style into gender camps.
When Jordan’s truck finally pulls into the driveway across the street you can see the tension whistle out of Shelix. She tromps across the way to plant a kiss on her husband.
The tree had blocked the wedding party’s exit from Laurel Falls. Worse, its removal threatened the integrity of an enormous picturesque stone chimney and thus of the entire main house. Jordan is stressed, preoccupied. They hadn’t been able to rectify the situation but potential fixes are in the offing. His grandfather knows a guy. The guests were cheerful, considering; those with marooned rental cars weren’t holding a grudge. Of less immediate but deeper concern is the remainder of the fall season, which has just been canceled. October is black Friday for wedding venues. October is black Friday for lots of Asheville: peak leaf season in our heretofore thriving little tourist economy.
I’d been looking forward to October 2024 since October 2023. Since taking ownership of Daymoon in ‘17, no October yet has failed to set a sales record.
Jordan and I talk insurance. I’d heard from a longtime professional that these conditions weren’t the worst for small businesses seeking help, since their insurers were likely to be deep into their own insurers (the re-insurance market) as well.
Our movable feast resumes on Tallboy’s porch. I put the leaf in the table. Grilled chicken, grilled shishito peppers, grilled eggplants, a green salad. Plenty of cold beer yet, plenty of wine. We light candles when that becomes necessary and A. conducts snap surveys around the table, involving the kids. Favorite dessert, favorite candy bar, etc. Tim contributes for group consumption a surprising amount of ice cream, Helix a fifth of Basil Hayden that goes fast. I introduce some of us to Drambuie. Meagan uses our stove to boil water for their family’s evening ablutions. The wind is capricious. We cherish the candle flames, not with uniform success. Morning sun will pick out an exquisite mess splattered with wax.
*Part 3 coming tomorrow
This catches the whole deal! Already I shamefully feel nostalgic for that little window of time where we "sort of knew" it was bad, but had no way of knowing just how bad.