Opinion: Despite Helene's destruction, Asheville is still where I want to raise my kids

My 9-year-old son was covered in mud and yelling at me from the open door of our flooded basement.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Bail!” I yelled back.

“What does that mean?” James said.

Sure. He didn’t know what it meant to frantically fill a bucket and haul it up the stairs. But I could tell by his wide eyes he understood we needed to stop the water from washing out the 110-year-old red brick foundation of our home in Asheville, North Carolina.

In the days after Hurricane Helene , I saw something else in James’ face and the faces of the rest of my family. It was them realizing that things would never be the same. Not for us. Not for our friends. And not for our city and other parts of western North Carolina overwhelmed by the deadly storm officials called “generational” and “biblical.”

My family’s losses were far from the worst. We weren’t injured. No trees fell on our roof. No one we knew or loved was swept away by the terrible waters.

But the storm did take things from us. And it gave us things.

My family loves Asheville's French Broad River

For days we didn’t know how bad things were. We were focused on our small disaster: The family bailed. And I cursed our stupid broken sump pump. But my wife, Kelly, hunted down one of the last pumps for sale. Fain, the 11-year-old, and I stayed up late digging a hole and installing it. We cheered as it drained the basement – until the power went out and we were back to bailing. Then our neighbor Pete swooped in like a superhero and showed us how to siphon the water out with garden hoses. (Pete, again like a superhero, is also building an outdoor shower system for the neighborhood.)

We ate rationed food cooked over a campfire. And we thought we had it hard. But when we climbed a hill near our house, we saw the French Broad River .

From the time my children could barely talk, I would say, “French Broad River!” as we drove over the Jeff Bowen Bridge. Like many families, we spent summers floating down the section that meanders by Bent Creek Experimental Forest and through Asheville, where the current slows to a near standstill.

That section of lazy river had turned into a wide, fast-moving monster that ripped apart people’s homes and businesses. Later we learned it had carried people away. There were horrible stories. Rivers had risen with similar fury in other places, like Canton , which was still scarred from the fatal 2021 Tropical Storm Fred – and in Chimney Rock , where the Rocky Broad River virtually wiped that little town off the map.

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Staring at the French Broad, my kids pointed and ticked off places that were gone: the used sporting goods store with an ice cream and sandwich shop. The indy movie theater . A famous barbeque joint . A brewery my wife and I loved.

The parks where we picnicked and the greenway where the boys learned to ride bikes were also down there somewhere – under muddy whitecaps that pushed along massive shipping containers that bobbed like bath toys.

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James said plaintively that he didn’t want things to change. Fain didn’t really say anything. I didn’t know what to tell them, except that things were going to change. And I was sad, too. I also told them we were lucky, blessed even, to have gotten through it as well as we had.

Power came back for us and for a lot of Asheville. But Helene had ripped apart the city water system ’s main lines. Officials said it would be weeks before most had running water to flush toilets, wash dishes, do laundry or take showers.

Schools were also closed. We got in line to pick up water and food.

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Meanwhile, special things happened. People, unable to reach each other by text or social media, found one another, knocking on doors and talking in the street. They gave each other things and stopped to ask, “Are you OK?”

My kids saw that, and I was glad. Fain was proud to carry packs of water to give to people. Many volunteered to check on residents who hadn’t been heard from in days. Neighbors whom I had never met, Skye and Philip, invited me and anyone who needed it to use their internet, one of the only working connections in the city.

It was a great side of Asheville.

Asheville is our home. But it will never be the same.

That made it tough to leave. But I persuaded my wife to accept friends’ invitations to stay with them in rental houses on the South Carolina coast. I told Kelly it would give us the chance to take a breath and reconnect with our jobs. And it would give the boys time to play with friends and take their minds off things.

But even 300 miles away, we talked about Asheville, often with a sense of guilt that we got out and that our kids were OK and that we weren’t back volunteering, knocking on doors or helping in some other way.

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I thought about some of the children and families from public housing that we stood next to in food lines. It wasn’t good that James and Fain were missing school, but I felt like with two college degrees and other resources, my wife and I could figure out how to keep them on track for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure about children who were growing up in the poorest sections of the city.

We know now that the school closures during COVID-19 were particularly hard on them – and Asheville has a yawning and well-documented achievement gap between Black and white students that would likely get worse.

We will be going back to Asheville, soon – we think in a few days. We haven’t really talked about what that means. But I’m excited to reconnect with friends and rejoin a community that has shown it is dedicated to itself . That is a place where I want to raise my children. But it is also a place that’s never going to be the same.

Joel Burgess is the Voices editor for the USA TODAY Network.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Despite Helene's destruction, Asheville is still where I want to raise my kids