A meditation after the storm: What Helene left behind in the North Carolina mountains

I. HAYWOOD COUNTY

On the first Friday night of high school football in Haywood County since Helene, there was no better place to be than a tiny stadium in the shadow of Cold Mountain, a place to gather and a place to mourn. Locals began arriving more than two hours early. They filled the parking lot out back and set up grills and lawn chairs on a hill overlooking the field. They lined the fence down below. They packed the bleachers and left hardly an empty seat 90 minutes before kickoff.

This was an event. An escape. A fleeting Friday night of diversion. It was a communal expression of grief and of support. Of love, for each other and this land they call home. The embraces lasted longer. Old friends shared relief. The game between Pisgah High and West Henderson did not mean anything at all, given all that had happened. And yet in other ways it meant everything, because what else could bring unity like this?

More than two weeks after the most catastrophic storm in Western North Carolina in more than a century, the toll is only barely coming into focus. The raging rivers and creeks have receded, leaving behind broken hearts and roads and trails of debris in the trees, but the loss is incalculable. And how to move on? And to rebuild? And to clean up? How to grieve and persevere? Everyone here is confronting those questions.

They’re discovering, too, that along with everything else it’s done, Helene has revealed things about people maybe they didn’t know about themselves, or each other. Strength, yes. But an unflinching sense of ... hope? Community? It was palpable everywhere from the ruins to a football game.

High school football is not a phenomenon across North Carolina the way it is in Texas. But it is that way in parts of the mountains, and that way, especially, in Haywood County. The aftermath of the storm intensified the emotion. People walked into the gate crying at the sight of it — something almost like normalcy.

There was no admission charge, just a bucket for cash donations for relief efforts. “Give a little, help a lot!” a sign said out front. “Accepting donations in lieu of ticket sales.”

Nothing was normal, though. The way people greeted each other was one tell. The hugs were longer and fuller, often followed by a variation of the same question: “How’d you make it out? How’s your house?” Most people overheard had made it out fine but they all knew someone who hadn’t. And they all knew of places that’d been decimated, in this county and all around.

Two of Pisgah’s players had lost their homes. The team, itself, had lost its home field — Pisgah Memorial Stadium — after the Pigeon River flooded. The river, which runs through downtown Canton, covered the field up to the crossbar of the goal posts. It destroyed surrounding businesses, leaving behind shells of what used to be. Shops. Restaurants. People’s lives and livelihoods.

It was the fourth time the river had flooded Canton in the past 20 years but never before this bad. And it hit just 18 months after Canton lost its 115-year-old paper mill , which for more than a century had been the economic engine of the community.

With its field in disrepair, Pisgah on Friday night moved the game to Bethel Middle School. The Black Bears made the short bus ride south and dressed in an auxiliary gym.

They put on jerseys that read “Mill Town” on the front, despite the closure. They strapped on helmets that said “Toughness” on the back, as if it came in endless supply. And yet maybe it did around here. “You choose toughness,” Ricky Brindley, Pisgah’s head football coach, said that night. “You’re not born with it.” And so that, Brindley said, is “something that we want to preach to our kids, that no matter the situation, we’re going to choose toughness.”

The national anthem played and soon Brindley and his team made the walk down the hill. They ran onto the field to the roar of a community ready for something to cheer. A weathered man named Paul Jones bellowed from the fence, his voice booming, cracking: “You know what to do, boys! So ya better DOOOO IT ! Hey! HEY ! Do it for the community! Do it for the CUH-MEWN-IT-Y !”

Jones’ power had only come back two days earlier. His wife’s oxygen tank had been running low until a friend came through with an emergency resupply. He’d been stranded for a little while in his part of Haywood County but knew a lot of people in the surrounding mountains who’d been stuck for longer; people who’d been suffering more than he had. But he’d been suffering, too, until tonight.

“Tonight,” he said, “I’m in paradise.” Because he survived and he was here, screaming for Pisgah.

II. CLYDE TO CULLOWHEE

When Jones wasn’t screaming for Pisgah, sometimes he was crying for it, and for everything. He lives in Clyde, where more than two weeks after the storm, clean-up was only just beginning. Clyde is a town of about 1,200 in eastern Haywood County, along the Pigeon River; a “Smoky Mountain version of cozy, small-town Americana,” according to the welcome sign.

During Helene, the river transformed the way most all rivers and creeks throughout Western North Carolina transformed: It swelled beyond imagination. In Clyde, it tore through the homes along Broad Street, one of the main roads downtown. Not some of the homes or most of the homes. But every home.

Some had already been gutted by the morning after the football game. Workers in hazmat suits cleared out others. Piles of drywall and insulation and furniture and board games and books and stuffed animals and clothes and carpets and housewares and everything else people owned sat outside. There was a chair. A mattress. A mud-covered washing machine.

There was also a message that someone had written in marker on cardboard and left in front of the madness:

“This is stuff,” it said, and then, in capital letters: “LOVE AND UNITY LAST FOREVER.”

The faint smell of a cookout blew in along the breeze. Just down the street and in front of the post office, a small crew of volunteers from Burlington had brought a couple of smoker grills and enough hot dogs and burgers for 1,600 people. The man behind it all was Jason Ross, a Burlington car dealership owner who became one of thousands drawn to try to help in the mountains after Helene. They’d filled a box truck with donations from the Piedmont.

He and his crew are used to cooking for big groups; they go around the country and enter chili cook-off competitions.

“In good times we go to Florida, everywhere,” Ross said of those contests. In these not good times, he “had an idea to make some meals and bring up and cook. And then the donations started coming. And then we ended up with, I think, 55 bicycles. And everything you see out here.”

He started to cry, and apologized. “I’m just trying to keep it together,” he said, a challenge for any witness to what Helene left behind.

The food line remained steady, with Ross bunning the dogs and burgers and his friend Big Tim Walker manning the grills while Bobby Jo handed out the trays. A team effort. Many of the people who came parked cars with back seats full of things they had saved. Children looked over the toy pile out front. Boxes of new bikes, for kids, waited to be claimed by families in need.

There have been scenes like that all over Western North Carolina, where volunteer fire departments and post offices and churches are transformed. Highways and back roads are full of signs directing people to them. Helpers serve hot meals and hand out supplies at spots converted by necessity to town squares to gather and check in.

A lot of places, though, suffered minimal damage, or none. The drive from Clyde to Cullowhee, for a Western Carolina football game Saturday afternoon, passed through a lot of such places. It was normal life: cars lining drive-thrus, stores open, traffic backing up at stoplights in small towns. In the less affected places, some people felt guilty.

“People ask how I’m doing, and I didn’t even have a tree down,” said Alex Gary, the athletics director at Western Carolina, where students have been out of class since the day before the storm and won’t return until Oct. 21. The Catamounts played Saturday in front of fans for the first time since Helene. During a timeout they honored first responders. A woman who’d organized helicopter drops and rescue missions received a standing ovation.

“It’s a little taste of being back to normal” for Western North Carolina, Gary said of the game, and it was a comforting sight, indeed, to take in an ordinary college football Saturday in Cullowhee. In a lot of other towns, though, Helene brought a discomforting question along with all the devastation: What was normalcy anymore?

III. MARSHALL

Few places speak to that question more than Marshall. Until Helene, it was a beautiful and pristine small town on the French Broad River, about 15 miles northwest of Asheville. Marshall for a long time has been a haven for artists and anyone who seeks the majesty of the surroundings, a postcard come to life down to the old courthouse out of a Hollywood set.

The Wednesday night before the storm, a local veterinarian named Suzanne Sheldon went to the most acclaimed restaurant in town, the Star Diner. It’s in what used to be a Gulf station on the edge of the river. It began raining hard that night and Sheldon, well aware of the forecast, thought:

“Oh, Lord. Here we go.”

“And then two days later, it was gone,” she said of the Star.

About an hour before sunset Saturday night, she and her wife, Melinda, were seeing it all for the first time. They walked across the bridge the French Broad had breached and then down the ruins of Main Street and toward the railroad tracks that used to run parallel to the river but now twisted and dived into the river; a mess of steel rails mangled by the rush of the water and everything it carried with it. In Marshall it still looked more than two weeks later like it had been bombed.

Everywhere Suzanne and Melinda turned, there was a memory. There was Mal’s, the little dive with a pool table and live music; “the best damn bar I’ve been to,” says one Google review among many raves. There was the The Sweet Monkey, not long ago a catering and take-out spot. Now it is a hole in a shell of a building, like everything else.

Sidewalks were caked with mud and eerie mementos, like the stranded kegs outside of Mal’s. A little girl did cartwheels a ways down a dirt-covered road while her father loaded debris in a pick-up. Suzanne and Melinda paced around the railroad tracks, back and forth, seeing nothing but surreal catastrophe. There wasn’t anything they could say, so they stood silently. After a while they held hands while they walked back toward the bridge, taking in the quiet stillness of a town destroyed.

Around the corner from what was the post office, gone like everything else, a man named Erich Hubner was cleaning out the town’s art council. With all its charms, Marshall is a seductive place for the creative. Hubner, well-connected in the community, said he hadn’t talked with any business owner or local artist who planned to leave . The question is when any can come back?

“I don’t know how quickly it will be,” Hubner said. “But it seems like the actual creative spirit is really strong — still — in spite of what’s been the unplanned renovation of Marshall.”

He paused and managed a smile and a joke, amid the water line on the wall behind him that was more than 6 feet high: “Everybody gets a second chance on their floor plans down here,” he said, standing in a place stripped down to the studs.

The inside of pretty much every place in town will need to be reconstructed, one panel of drywall at a time. It’d take strength and it’d take patience, and maybe most of all, it’d take faith.

A message on the boarded window of the florist shop down the street suggested the people of Marshall were up for the task. Five words, scrawled in orange spray paint, spoke for a town without power in the literal sense but hardly the metaphoric:

“We will not be broken.”

IV. BURNSVILLE TO 19E AND THE CELO INN

Who can know how long the healing might take, though? Maybe there could be a timeline to rebuild a road (or maybe not) but what about all the trauma and the grief ? In the worst-hit parts of the mountains, people were still without power or water nearly three weeks after the storm. Their toilets weren’t flushing. Their phones weren’t working, even if they could be charged. In some cases they were stranded.

The sounds of rescue helicopters were ubiquitous two days after the high school game in parts of Western North Carolina. In Burnsville on Sunday morning, a low-flying military-green Chinook helicopter passed over the town square, headed south toward the Black Mountains.

Horror stories were still pouring out there, of people cut off and stuck. In the shadow of Mt. Mitchell, the Sunday morning service at Burnsville First Baptist began with a counselor, not a pastor, leading the congregation in a grounding exercise to “reset the brain.” Name five things you can see, he urged, four things you can touch, and so on.

A church staffer then gave instructions on how to use the emergency toilets. She called herself the “pastor of poo,” to laughs, and offered guidance on how to fill a gallon bucket and force a stubborn commode to flush. The “mini-Wal-Mart,” as she called it — the church’s stock of donated items — needed volunteers, too.

One member of the congregation fought tears to recite a poem she’d written about the enduring allure of these mountains — how “the broken Earth still gives way to the majestic... the beauty in the ashes.”

Pastor Tommy James built his sermon on the story of Job, the Old Testament figure whose faith ultimately overcomes his doubts after he loses everything.

“Life often brings to us things we never, never imagined,” James told his congregation. And so it was with Job, whose losses tested him before his belief prevailed. James hoped the message might resonate but he didn’t “want to try and fix people.” He knew that “some people are mad and some people are really sad,” and that was OK.

“We just want to let them be wherever they are,” he said. “But then hopefully they’ll hear a word or a song that can lift them, even if it’s just for a moment.”

His church was lucky. All members had been accounted for. Across the town square, outside the Nu Wray Inn, messages on three whiteboards underscored how a lot of people around here were not OK.

Some went like this:

“From Dean and Shari

We are alive. Major damage to property.”

“From Beth and Ken

We are alive, house gone.”

On another board, there were two columns with long lists of names — “Looking For” above one set and “Safe” atop the other. Someone had written encouragement in a list of prayer requests: “We are APPALACHIAN: We got this!”

A white board next to that carried the latest info on roads and bridges, which ones had been cleared or fixed.

The stretch of Highway 19E between Burnsville and Spruce Pine had become the main and only navigable artery in a maze of apocalyptic sights. The damage around there, along the Cane River and Cattail Creek to the west, and the South Toe and North Toe rivers a little more east, was as severe as anywhere.

Along 19E, even the Crabtree Creek rose and surged with enough ferocity to destroy homes and sweep away cars in tiny Micaville. The remnants of some kind of children’s playset — purple and plastic — remained stuck against a tree two weeks after the storm. Just around a bend on Micaville Loop Road, State Road 80 remained largely impassable in the days after the storm.

The road climbs toward Mt. Mitchell, the nation’s highest peak east of the Mississippi. Driving it was a lesson on Helene’s destruction. The topography makes it clear. The slant of land so prone to mudslides. The fragility of a curvy two-lane road. The clarity that, yes, anything can just fall down a mountain.

Anything can be swept away, in a strong enough current of mud or water or a mix of both. About 10 miles south of Micaville and up a little ways in elevation, the Celo Inn was one such place. One of those small treasures of the North Carolina mountains, a rustic five-room bed and breakfast on the South Toe River.

Nicholas Maldanado and Kavita Hardy, the innkeepers, had heard all about the flood of 1977, which filled the basement with water. They were prepared for such a thing. But by 9 a.m. that Thursday the river was already up to the steps out front when they fled to a nearby elementary school. A few hours later, after it calmed, Maldanado walked down the hill to see the river reach the roof. The small cottage where he and Kavita lived was gone.

For decades, the inn had been a community refuge and a cherished destination for people who came back year after year. Now on late Sunday afternoon, a mud-covered piano sat where everyone used to gather. The kitchen, a step down from the main room, was coated in sludge. Outside, Maldanado unloaded more trash. He and Kavita had been fighting off depression and shock, he said.

The Celo Community, a nature commune built on an ideal of upholding humanity, had come together to help build that inn. It took almost 10 years, and then in a day it was gone.

V. ASHEVILLE, RIVER ARTS DISTRICT

There are places like that all around up here, ones that no amount of faith can bring back. They are just gone, now part of the terrain that reclaimed them. The mountains are full of decaying remnants of what was; fading testaments to what it took to build a mountain life in the first place.

One such landmark has been the Caudill Cabin, which still stands in the valley of what’s now Doughton Park off the Blue Ridge Parkway. More than 100 years ago the cabin and others linked a humble community known as Basin Cove. The area was known for its fertile farmland and wide fields, and it had to be as beautiful as it was rugged.

In the summer of 1916, awful floods tore through the mountains . According to an account in The Wilkes Patriot, “While the lowlands were being lashed and torn by the raging torrent, great landslides were ripping the very heart out of majestic mountains and hills in many places.”

Most of Basin Cove was destroyed in ‘16, but Caudill Cabin survived. Martin Caudill escaped with his family to higher ground while neighbors died. His old cabin still stands, visible from an overlook along the Parkway and accessible by about a three-mile hike. It begs visitors to consider what life was like more than 100 years ago and how it all ended down there, in the rushing water.

The cabin connected the present with the past as proof that something as humble can withstand terrible destruction. Helene will leave behind physical artifacts like that and will reconfigure some areas, like Basin Cove was reshaped.

Who knows how many hiking trails Helene might reclaim; how many roads might have to be abandoned, how many towns like Chimney Rock or Marshall will only come part of the way back, if that far? It’s always the character of a place, though, that proves most resilient.

That’s true all over the mountains. Certain places have received more attention but all of Western North Carolina is in mourning. To understand the grief, and the early recovery, is to feel the power of both in different communities.

A high school football game in the countryside. An impromptu cookout, near a neighborhood where people lost it all. A couple walking quietly through an historic downtown where the river covered everything.

A Sunday morning service where people learned to cope with trauma. A drive along a road through the chaos. A walk through a beloved inn that has likely served its final guest.

Mid-October is when I often come to experience the divinity of autumn in the North Carolina mountains. This time it was to see what Helene left behind.

Asheville is the unofficial capital of these mountains, a city beloved for its art and food and nature. And yes: its beer. The flood left behind unreal sights and no safe drinking water. It is a city changed forever, in a region changed forever.

Nearly anything and everything that was near the French Broad is gone. White Duck Taco Shop, where lines often stretched out the door at times of peak demand, was under water. 12 Bones and Wedge Brewing always seemed far away enough from the river, but were not. Nothing was safe and nothing is clear.

Destruction at Asheville’s River Arts District is enough to make anyone wonder what’s really possible for a rebuild. What was one of the city’s main attractions is a mess of debris and heartbreak, abandoned cars covered in dirt and favorite establishments washed out. Most galleries are gone. A city official last week said 80 percent of the district was destroyed.

But also: Asheville is still Asheville. It was a fitting sight on Sunday just after sunset in the River Arts District to round a bend along Lyman Street and encounter a monument befitting this moment and city. It was the work of an artist, clearly, a tall scarecrow-like figure perched atop an even taller pile of cinder blocks.

A smile was painted on its face. Its hands were outstretched, thumbs up. It held a sign:

“Hope ... even when the creek rises.”

The few people out and about slowed down to take pictures. All around was endless decimation, debris piles and reminders that a lot of things would be different. Yet Helene reinforced that some things never change. That the spirit of a place and its people can outlast even the worst of storms.