If you’ve lived in the mountains of western North Carolina, you notice a pattern: Tell someone from outside the region where you’re from, and their immediate reaction is, “Oh, that’s a beautiful city/region/part of the state.” Do we get tired of hearing it? Maybe a little, but certainly not because it’s untrue — it is beautiful out here, and I for one feel spoiled around this time of year to have the fall colors on the mountains as part of my daily scenery.
In the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen some very not-beautiful pictures of Asheville and the surrounding area. Hurricane Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of rain on the southeast. To me, 40 trillion isn’t much more than a huge, abstract number that one can compare to the volume of Lake Tahoe, or 619 days of water over Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, there are some pictures (such as the before-and-after of Chimney Rock, North Carolina) that show you what that amount of rainfall really does, in a more visceral sense.
We were unprepared for Helene, but in the way that we might have been unprepared for a meteor. There was a chance of a catastrophe, but such a small chance that it made no practical sense to worry about. Living in fear is not what mountain folk do, especially not when we can do something about it. And while there were some scary early days, when everyone was still realizing just how bad the storm was, it was amazing to witness that uncertainty evaporating almost overnight into a strong sense of community.
I even felt it myself. As soon as my needs were met, once I had enough water and supplies to last a week and a half, my anxiety immediately gave way to restless energy, and I started looking for ways to volunteer in the areas that needed the most hands. Whether I “wanted” to, I can’t even remember. It just felt important and necessary, because I could. Asheville’s River Arts District was one of those areas hit especially hard, and as someone with close friends and family who make art for a living, it simply seemed like common sense for me to go and lend a hand at Riverview Station.
I had an idea of what kind of mess to expect. I had seen aerial pictures of the floodwaters spilling into second-floor studios on social media, read posts about decades’ worth of the artists’ works destroyed by the surging French Broad. We knew in advance that it’d be dangerous as well; working in any flooded building comes with its own set of risks, even apart from the tons of toxic mud in a calf-deep layer all over the work site.
There were moments where I still got overwhelmed by the scale of the destruction. My first day at Riverview Station, I had been on-site hauling mud-soaked debris for nearly an hour before I realized our “work site” was the remains of a huge parking lot, broken up and washed away by the sheer weight and force of the floodwaters. It had never occurred to me until then that a parking lot itself could be destroyed in a flood.
That didn’t stop me, or the dozens of volunteers that also showed up to work in the muck, and unlike me, many of the most dedicated volunteers were still without running water. Living in Arden, I at least had a hot shower to go back to, but now I know how to decontaminate, change clothes, and follow basic HAZMAT procedures entirely without running water (the key is to pack lots of trash bags and wet wipes). For all of us, we were just motivated by the fact that there was something that needed to be done, unambiguous and plain to see. There were no questions of what had to be done or why, just the task in front of us.
If you’ve ever seen the famous graphite-clearing scene from HBO’s Chernobyl, it felt much the same: I knew that it was a disaster situation, that these were not “normal” circumstances, and I had accepted the certain risks that came with it. I had a job to do, a basic understanding of the situation, and I thought I was ready to work… until I actually stepped into one of the studios.
There was a moment, like my realization with the parking lot, where I saw the contaminated mud inches deep on the ground, coating every possible surface and object around, and the only thought I had for a moment was, “Where the hell do I start?” But, like with clearing radioactive graphite, clearing toxic salvage started for me the same way as I start any difficult and tedious job: with what’s right in front of me. I take a piece, move it out, come back, grab another. If it’s too heavy, someone else will come over to help — often without being asked — and help me pitch it (safely) out of the building. Rinse, repeat, as many times as it took until the job was done.
And finishing even a small job, clearing a room or mucking out a hallway, gave this amazing sense of gratification for everyone around; even the tiniest visible sign of progress made us cheer, however tired we sounded.
Because progress is progress, even a little bit at a time. Slowly, a disaster site starts to resemble a cleanup site, which starts to resemble a construction site, as we piece together our new normal, brick by brick. Rebuilding Asheville and the rest of western North Carolina will continue to be a lot of work in the weeks and months to come. But as far as we volunteers are concerned, the work is that much easier, because the beautiful place we call home is worth the effort.