Dispatch from the Apocalypse

“When these people wake up in the morning, they’ll find themselves in a different world.”

These are the words that repeat through the haze of sleep deprivation, when the winds of Hurricane Helene are on us. It’s been raining for three days. The flood began with the 9 inches of water that fell on us the first day. They say another 15 are coming, possibly more. There’s chaos in the air. It keeps me awake all night, praying. Praying to the nearby trees to spare our unprotected yurt on the hill. Praying to the stream coming down the mountain to miss us. Praying for the soil to hold. Hold. Wait. The rains will stop. Please.

These hurricane winds aren't as strong as the gales that batter the canvas of our yurt through the winter. They’re different than those cold, unrelenting chariots building momentum as they charge down the mountain. These warm ocean winds swirl and persist. There’s a heavy mist enshrouding our hilltop, banishing us to our own wild world of “Please.” The trees are thrown this way and that. We are littered with leaves and sticks. Hurricanes aren’t supposed to be this big. Ocean winds aren’t meant to reach us. We’re hundreds of miles from the coast.

Yet, perched in the skirts of the tallest mountains on the East Coast, Helene’s arms are trapped. The rains haven’t stopped in days, and I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that it hasn’t even started yet.

I lay in the darkness, waiting an eternity for morning. I rarely watch anything, so I try on a mindless comfort show to distract myself -- a companion to wait out the eternal night. That’s how I end up watching Gilmore Girls for the first time since high school, phone pressed near my face under the blankets. Me, Lorelei, and a silent litany of “Please”.

Then the cell phone reception dies — slowly, then all at once. My texts going out to family and friends don’t send. All I know, from obsessively checking the radar, is that it’s going to be bad. Our little spot on the mountain is colored dark purple, telling us that it might be over 20 inches of rain and up to 70mph wind gusts. I can’t even imagine what that means.

When the sun rises -- ostensibly, through a veil of storm clouds -- I lay under the covers and wait. Waiting is all I can seem to do, really. Wait and pray to the new goddess of wild chaos, Helene, to spare us.

Sean puts pieces of plywood over the openings of our house-in-progress, only mostly closed in and kept dry with a tarp. He makes coffee in our makeshift kitchen, half-wild with anticipation. From up here, the storm is epic. It churns the leaves and sticks, bending the trees like summer grasses. And we are fine. We are safe. We have no idea what’s happening anywhere else. 

Once the worst of the storm passed, he urges our family to go see what’s happening. We go out on an adventure, dog and kid merrily running down the hill in the rain. We note the big trees that have fallen and the blanket of debris. A thick layer of leaves and branches forms a messy carpet across the road.

Just as predicted… We find a different world.

Our familiar streams are brown, churning rivers. The entire forest is a brown, churning river. The streams spill from their banks and carve new paths on a race down the mountain. Our pond is a lake. A brown river runs out of it, down through the forest toward our neighbors. We struggle to find a way to get down to the pottery studio, or to check on our neighbors near the creek. I don’t even know what to expect. We pass through rhododendron thickets on high ground, searching for a way across the rapids separating us from the rest of the land. Ro sits on top of Sean’s sturdy shoulders, squealing with excitement. Eventually, we pick the safest way and Sean and I hold hands, turning our boots toward the current one solid step at a time.

The pottery studio is safe, thank god. It’s on the floodplain, so I expected to find a river flowing underneath. There’s a dead standing tree leaning over the studio. A while back, my friend Jacob secured it to the neighboring tree with a series of ratchet straps. It’s somehow still standing, which makes absolutely no sense to me, but I’m glad for the family of squirrels that live in there. Hope they’re dry.

“Whoa, holy shit! Look!” Sean exclaims as we approach the bridge. Our bridge was rebuilt by FEMA after Hurricane Fred, a process that took over a year. Sean’s eyes are on the far bank, which is now nearly bare of trees. The creek is twice as wide as it was before. “Look!”

I don’t look. I’m struck silent by the brown, churning chasm where the bridge once stood.

“What?” Then he follows my line of sight. “Oh, holy shit!”

No more bridge. No more access to the outside world.

We hear from a neighbor that all the bridges up and down the creek are gone.

One of our neighbors died while people tried to rescue her from the flood water. Braving chest-deep rapids to bring her to safety, our neighbors were suddenly hit in the back by a massive tree, and she was pulled under. A sixteen year old boy found her body downstream. All the houses on the side of the creek are gone or destroyed. No news has come, yet, from the rest of the Valley. Our universe has shrunk to the size of this small community of mountain folk and back-to-the-land hippies cut off from the rest of the world by brown, churning water.

“There’s a bridge left standing,” says a dripping neighbor on an ATV. “If we can open up the old road, we can access it as soon as the water goes down. It’s rough. But it’s holding.” Then he stops, his blue eyes filling with tears. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

My eyes fill with tears, too. I’m nauseous with anxiety. “I’m glad your folks are okay. We just saw their house.” The water was literally at their door, flowing around both sides in churning rapids. One more inch. One more inch and it may have gone the way of the rest.

Ro isn’t squealing with excitement anymore. Our shock and stress have zapped the fun out of the novelty of the experience. We get her home and make her “hocolate chocolate” by the fire. We explain what’s happening, and hold her, and tell her that she’s safe. She spends the day playing quietly, surprisingly secure in this radically different world. All the modern systems are down. Cell reception, electricity. The water is contaminated by the flood, and accessible only if you’re lucky enough to have a well pump that doesn’t run on electricity. Nearly all of them do.

Our rugged, cobbled together off-grid systems mean we’ve suddenly been elevated to luxurious comfort by comparison. We have hot running water, solar power. We already shit in buckets and compost the waste in humanure systems, so we have that covered. We have two solar-powered fridges on the land, and a generator to keep our freezers running a couple times a day. None of the houses on our group land are damaged. We lean on each other.

We are the lucky ones.

The news comes in, just the Valley at first. The Inn flooded with water up to the second floor. Our Innkeeper friends evacuated on time. We hear news, shouted across the inaccessible chasm of road separating us from the rest of the world. Our nearby town was completely washed away. Barely a brick of the foundation from our Post Office remains. There are millions of people without cell reception or power. We don’t know how long it’s going to be. Weeks, months? The National Guard is being called in, but our rural mountain community — tucked and impoverished as it is — may be one of the last to get relief.

It takes days before helicopters start coming into the Valley, which is the only thing tipping us off that things are really, really bad out there. Communication is done through notes and word-of-mouth. People gather and exchange information. Everyone is talking to each other. Stopping each other. Are you okay? Do you have what you need? What’s the state of this road? Have you heard from __? How many inches did we get?

It was 26.5. That was how many inches of rain it took to bring this Appalachian community to their knees. I still don’t know how the rest of the South is doing, but I’ve heard it’s not good.

News comes in slower for folks further out. The grief and relief chase themselves around in my chest while we secure our basic needs and help where we can. The stress impacts us all. Overstimulated and raw. Overnight, our quiet beautiful mountains have become a war zone of trash and debris. We hear that the next Valley over is even worse. They can’t even tell anymore where the road was, and only 10% of the inhabitants have been accounted for.

When we hear a neighbor is letting people use their satellite internet connection, Jackie and I hike up the mountain with a list of phone numbers to get the word out to everyone’s families. We’re safe. We have what we need. We’re taking care of each other.

-

It’s not the acute event, but the fallout that starts to wear you down. Living through a natural disaster is a marathon. My lifelong struggles with insomnia are gone those first days — I’m dead tired. I try to keep some sense of normalcy for Ro, even though we now walk miles every day to get from place to place on inaccessible, muddy roads. I dream of floods every night, solid ground suddenly floating and moving with the current. It wears you down. The persistent stress of the unknown. Seeing the devastation, the shock, the way every single waterway and floodplain I loved is destroyed, raw and open like a cut. 

I know we’re still at the beginning of the relief effort.

I also know that these events will be more common as the human impacts of global warming radicalize these monster storms bearing the innocuous names of humans. These “thousand-year flood” events, which they’re now calling this, are going to be more common. It’s inevitable.

I still don’t know how friends further away are doing, and I don’t think I’ll feel relief until I know. I don’t know the details of what happened in other communities. My life has shrunk to the necessities. Food, water, propane, gas. We’re building a smoke house to save as much meat as we can, because the freezers are beginning to thaw on top and the generator guzzles precious gas. We meet for dinner every night, talk about our day and exchange news. We’re grateful for our physical books and pre-disaster skills. A neighbor mechanic has been teaching people how to get gasoline out of a car’s tank without risking getting it in your mouth. Folks are living by candlelight. We ration our necessities and count our assets. Relief will come, we just have to wait. Wait and pray. It may be a long time yet.

On the land where we live, my landmates and family deal with the daily inconveniences of rugged, off-grid, intentional community living. Every winter, we live the coldest months without running water. We wholeheartedly chose this path — community process, conflict resolution, and bucket-shitting. We chose off-grid homes and simplicity, in a small Valley where those values are part of the cultural paradigm. We trust and love each other. The fabric of our lives was weaved to hold this moment together.

We are the lucky ones.

—

Thank you to everyone who has reached out. Every day is improving, but we will be dealing with the impacts of Helene for years. If you can find ways to plug in and help, please do. They’re calling this Katrina-level devastation on a wider scale. And, just like every tragedy in the modern world, the News cycle will move on and we will still be dealing with the impacts when the attention is no longer on us.

If you have friends impacted by this storm and haven’t heard from them yet, just know that communications are still down. We, too, are still waiting on news from friends who live in more isolated communities. I’ve heard communications is coming back in some of the bigger towns and cities, but it could be a long time yet in these hollers. They say cell reception will be the first thing to come back — and we are all eagerly waiting. In the meantime, we write notes and talk. We seek each other out in person, on foot when necessary (and possible). Walking, hitch hiking, biking. Talking talking talking.

Sending love to you all. Kiss your family and friends, kiss the screen of your cell phone, kiss your full refrigerator and running water. These things are not guaranteed. Think about what you would do in a disaster, and do what you can to make sure you’re prepared. I learned about this storm only two days before the rains started. You just never know, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the best time to think about it is right now. Have backup systems, know how to use them. Have water and food on hand. You never know when you’re going to need it and it’s better to— in the words of John Michael Greer — “Collapse early and avoid the rush.”

Best wishes and tender squishes,

Kam

Main Video: Jared Dubin, just up the road