Yahoo News I Never Thought Climate Change Would Drive Me From My Mountain Home
Steady rain fell as my fiancé, Jahn, and I shuffled one night’s worth of belongings and our pets—Georgia, a neurotic springer, and Memaw, a loudmouthed tuxedo—from the house to the car. We were going to spend the night at my mom’s house, 10 minutes away in Canton, a historic mill town in the Great Smoky Mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina. It was Thursday morning, September 26. We griped about how my mom was overreacting about the impending storm, discussing her anxious phone call the night before, in which she talked about trees falling on our house or the hill behind us sliding down and swallowing our little pillbox whole. Didn’t trees stop landslides? we huffed. She needed to stop momming and fearmongering. For all our complaints, though, we knew we would comply. She was the one with stage 2-3 melanoma, undergoing surgery that morning, not us. And I was worried for her.
When I brought my mom home from the hospital that afternoon, Jahn was still working, so I went to get her pain medicine and more dry provisions, in case we lost power for more than a few nights. Overnight, the wind picked up and I was surprised by its ferocity. By morning, a small river ran through the street in front of my mom’s house, but it hadn’t crested the yards. Thankfully, she lived on high ground in a mountain town. The lights flickered off. A few hours later, none of our phones had service—the letters “SOS” lit up in the top right of our screens.
My mom had been right: No amount of trees will stop a landslide. During the Category 4 storm, one of Jahn’s family members died in one, north of Asheville. Her roommate survived by sliding down the hill on their roof. Since landing on the Florida coast on Thursday night, before making its way north, Hurricane Helene is already being described as one of the deadliest and most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history. The devastation is catastrophic: Entire towns washed away. Over 100 lives lost and counting, and many more missing. By Friday, the North Carolina Department of Transportation had declared no roads open in the western part of the state. Scores of people are without power and water. They lack internet access, phone service, medical supplies, and food. I’ve heard people call the situation apocalyptic, but it’s not like the apocalypse. It is the apocalypse for anyone in western North Carolina right now.
Of course, on Friday afternoon, because of the outages, we didn’t know any of this. The rain had stopped, the sun had come out, and everything felt…almost fine. My mom warned me that it’s only after the rain ends that the flooding begins. It takes time, she said, for water to make its way down the mountains. Jahn and I walked to the center of town with Georgia to survey the damage. The sun was warm, hot at times, and white clouds dotted the bright blue sky. The air was thick and humid, and it struck me that this was the same kind of air I’d felt in Florida once as a child, when my family had gotten stuck in a storm there. It was tropical and yet, all around me, mountains. If climate change had a feeling, surely this was it.
Descending into Canton, we crossed a bridge overlooking a historic paper mill and the railroad tracks running along the quaint industrial downtown. In the distance, the town center seemed to float in a dark, iridescent lake. We made our way down to the middle of a street where a small group of people had gathered at the water’s edge. It lapped against the asphalt like a strange urban tide, driven by the wind skirting across it. Ahead, where the street sank, water had risen to the tops of streetlights and roofs. I asked a police officer if it was possible to get back to our house in Candler, a suburb of Asheville. He told me: “There’s no way in or out of Asheville.”
I fell in love with Asheville in 2010, as a 24-year-old field organizer who’d relocated there briefly to work for Organizing for America. Born and raised just outside Nashville, I longed to get out of the Bible Belt, but not the South. Asheville is known to some as the “loophole of the Bible Belt.” It’s a safe place in the South—queer-friendly, liberal. Asheville was a place where I could finally breathe deeply after what felt like a lifetime of shallow sips. In December 2022, I’d moved back with Jahn, whom I’d met in Brooklyn—a New Englander with almost no experience in the South, but who understood (because of his own ties to Maine’s rocky Acadia National Park) the magic, the energy of the mountains, and how you can feel them deep in your soul. A contractor from Eastern Europe who’d helped us build our hearth described this intangible tug as the mountains all around you, hugging you. They heal you, he said.
The next morning, Saturday, our cell service still hadn’t returned and my mom’s hand—on the arm where she’d had a melanoma removed—was so swollen, she couldn’t touch her fingers together. She is on a blood thinner for a heart condition, and so must be cautious of cuts and scrapes, and especially surgeries. As we navigated to the ER, I held a wave of panic at bay—my first true inkling that things might not be okay. The day before, we’d tested the route with her in case we had to use it—hoping we wouldn’t. Without cell data or the internet, the only ways to find out if the roads were clear were either to find a neighbor who’d driven them or to drive them yourself.
The hospital had a skeleton crew and power, but no cell service or internet either, so everything was being processed on paper, by hand. I filled out an admissions form for my mom that included the question “Are you carrying a firearm?” while an elderly woman wailed and moaned to her husband that she was dying, she was going to die, and retched into a disposable vomit bag. Please don’t die, I thought, my heart swelling for her.
While my mom waited to be seen, Jahn and I drove along the eerily empty interstate and discovered that the backroads to our house in Candler weren’t flooded. Long lines of cars formed at gas stations along the way, and several of the stations had bags over their pumps. At the house, our water and power were out. A tree was down in our backyard. We gathered more clothes and the food from our refrigerator and freezer, and then sped to my mom’s to put it away. When we picked her up, her swelling had already gone down—they’d replaced her bandage and told her it had merely been wrapped too tight. It seemed simple, innocuous, and yet, the anxiety I’d been quelling crept to the surface. The visit to the ER had shown me that if my mom needed serious help, it wouldn’t be easy to get. She’d also learned we were under a boil water alert. On top of that, Jahn, an asthmatic, had developed a sore throat. Bad colds can lead to an asthma attack for him. My heart rate picked up and didn’t slow. At the general store across the street, I complained to a neighbor about the lack of cell service. He said: It’s just us now—you gotta rely on your neighbors.
I didn’t know that by this time, my best friend Laura,* who lived in West Asheville, was already in full panic. She was now without power and water and cell services for the third day, and had, like so many of us, underestimated the threat of storm, buying only a few gallons of water for herself, her two daughters, and her husband. She’d seen a neighbor at the store who’d told her he’d lost the bar he’d just opened and poured his life savings into. Another friend and her daughter had gotten chemical poisoning from wading through the water while evacuating their house outside Asheville. This was Helene, but I had no idea. None of us knew anything beyond what was happening to each of us in the moment it was happening.
Sunday morning arrived too early—5:00 a.m. and still dark. My phone still read SOS mode when I awoke, but in the living room, Jahn was hunched over his, tapping the screen. He had service. AT&T would be the first to restore it—even now, six days later, Verizon is still out. I rushed over to him, and we scanned articles and drone footage and photos of the near-total destruction. We were stunned. We’d been completely in the dark. I texted Laura, but it didn’t go through. I texted more Asheville friends and family—no “delivered,” no responses. My mom woke up, and her bandage had bled through. I boiled water, helped her clean it. I rewrapped it with the last clean Ace bandage we had. We had only two gauze pads. She asked me to get her blood-thinning medication from the bathroom. When I opened the bottle, only one pill was left.
Jahn and I rushed out the door with 20 minutes to spare to go meet our pastor, Esta, who we’d discovered would be at our local Presbyterian church until noon. On our way, the same neighbor I’d talked to yesterday told us there were dead bodies floating in the floodwaters in Asheville and people dead in their cars. When we got to the church, we hugged Esta, hungry for information. She warned us that Canton had only two days of water left, and said FEMA was on the way.
Panic set it in. My stomach sank, my mouth went dry, my fingers numb, my legs and hips began to mysteriously ache. It wasn’t that the water plants weren’t working and might magically switch on for us, as I’d naively and mistakenly thought. There was no water left in the entire region. No medical supplies. No oxygen. No insulin. No baby formula. No food. Nothing that people needed for basic survival. With Jahn on a sidewalk outside my mom’s house, I called my sister in Tennessee. The simple act of making a phone call still so precious that I was terrified that if I held the phone the wrong way, I might lose the ability to connect.
“I’m trying not to panic,” I told her. “But I’m totally fucking panicking.”
After working out a basic evacuation plan with my sister, Jahn and I began to search for gas. Lines were long. No one knew of an open pharmacy to refill my mom’s prescription. We tasked my mom with filling Tupperware and stock pots and vases with boiled water, filled the bathtub. There was no certainty we’d actually be able to get out, and we needed to be prepared. On our second gas mission, we lucked out after waiting for a little under an hour at two different stations. We filled our tank and an extra five-gallon gas can. At home, we labored over which route to take. Police stationed on the ramp of an exit we’d taken earlier for gas were handing out flyers to truckers on their way into Tennessee, where huge signs on I-40 flashed with the message: “Interstate closed ahead – no access to TN.” We’d learned only that morning that the road had succumbed to floodwaters and fallen off the side of the mountain. The police told us of a route that would take us straight into Tennessee, but with no internet and no cell data, we had to call my sister, who looked up road closures and flooding on the local state DOT websites.
At the end of the night, I lay awake, my heart racing with panicked thoughts of my mom developing a fever from an infection, or bleeding uncontrollably once we got on the road, as had happened before after other surgeries. We were taking a rural road, which passed through few towns, that wound through the Nantahala River Gorge to Chattanooga. I imagined Jahn, who now had a full-blown cold, having an asthma attack and suffocating on the side of the road. What if we’d chosen the wrong route? What if we ran into flooding and got stranded with no way to call for help, nowhere to walk to?
But after two hours of driving in the dark and misty fog, the sky brightened and my phone began buzzing—all the texts and emails from the last few days rushing in. We stopped at Bojangles for a biscuit, and waves of gratitude and wonder washed over me at the notion that I could just stop there, pay for food, and eat it. It felt at once preposterous and like such an incredible privilege. As Laura said to me: “I will never again take a hot shower or cold glass of milk for granted if we make it out of this.” She had lived in Asheville her whole life. She watched her whole life wash away. So many lives washed away. On the phone today, we talked about the loss, the grief, and the shock. About how surreal it all is. About how no one on the outside truly understands and about how isolating that feels. About how silly work seems. We just survived something huge and terrifying and devastating. Others didn’t survive it. We did. We talked about how the same technology that connects us also separates us—how for the first time since Covid, neighbors were really talking to each other again, strangers were helping strangers. In such a divided world, everyone had the sudden common shared goal of staying alive.
Connection is a common outcome of disasters and one I wish we, as a society, could figure out a way to manufacture without necessity. Because we will all need it in this lifetime. Hurricane Helene was not an isolated event, and you have no idea how delicate the infrastructure you take for granted is until it vanishes overnight.
The guilt of evacuating is real. So many residents stayed and are helping get water, food, baby supplies, and medicine to those who need it most. I’ll be back there soon, on the ground, rebuilding. That’s something Asheville, and all of western North Carolina, has always understood: Banding together to help those in need. Standing up for what’s right. Believing in a better way and manifesting it. Maybe it’s the isolated history of these little mountain towns or the pull of the mountains on a certain type of person—someone who cares for their neighbors, who believes in connection, who’s generous with their resources and doesn’t have to read bell hooks to know that love is an action. It’s why this region will rebuild itself. It’s also why it knows it can’t do it alone. It will take more than a village to restore this incredible place. It will take you, too.
*"Laura" is a pseudonym.
Here are some WNC organizations, businesses, and individuals to donate to directly, who are getting supplies to those who need them most:
Beloved Asheville
Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BeLovedAsheville
Venmo: https://venmo.com/BeLoved-Asheville
IG: @belovedasheville
Poder Emma Community Ownership
IG: @poderemma
Brother Wolf Animal Rescue
Venmo: @brotherwolfanimalrescueinc
IG:@brotherwolfanimalrescue
Asheville Survival Program
Venmo: @AVLsurvival
Rural Organizing and Resilience
PayPal: ruralorganizingandresilience@gmail.com
Appalachian Voices (tag donation: “Helene”)
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