A week ago, Hurricane Helene’s trek across western North Carolina dumped some 20-inches of rain on the area. The French Broad River that runs through Asheville, and its feeder rivers like the Swannanoa River, rose to 25 feet above their river beds, whereas normal depth is a little over a foot.
That 25 feet is the height of a two-story building. Every home and business along the riverways are simply destroyed.
It was a lot of water. For example, The Marquee, a warehouse hosting an art collective in the River Arts District of Asheville was effectively completely submerged.
Beyond the immense floodwaters and currents, those in the Appalachian mountains around Asheville experienced devastating mudslides and tens of thousands of tree-falls. Many of us were simply cut off from being able to leave home, and with the cellular system effectively offline, there was no way to call for help.
A week later, still without power, running water, or reliable cellular signal in my home, I’m sitting at the Asheville Middle School on a stone bench next to a T-Mobile community support truck offering Wifi and electricity, as volunteers hand out flats of water bottles and MREs. I’m on my laptop, presumably to do work remotely for my job, but my mind can’t really focus.
I’m absolutely, completely burnt out.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. My home sustained minimal damage. The trees that fell on my land fell on nothing but earth. My family and tribe are all safe and accounted for. We have water, food, and fuel to last for weeks. My job is remote, and I’m still employed.
None of that changes that I’m fucking exhausted just trying to be a functional human being, trying to navigate systems and challenges, trying to take care of my friends and neighbors, trying to hold onto hope and trust. It’s confusing to have my basic physical needs met more than many have and yet to still have my psychological sense of safety and need for routine so thoroughly thrashed. I feel a measure of guilt being “okay but still not okay” when there are thousands who are just simply not okay.
I’m autistic and I have ADHD. If you know anything about these conditions, you can imagine how my way of being requires consistent routine and decision matrixes with predictable outcomes that are in my control to effect; how having to change plans on the fly in the face of chaos is cognitively exhausting. I’ve had at least one meltdown each day for the past week.
When this disaster began, doing anything and everything involved pulling teeth, and every moment required grounded, risk-informed deliberation. If you made the wrong decisions, you could be out of gas, stranded on the side of the road, no battery left in a cell phone for which there is no signal anyway, and no cash to buy help because credit card systems are down and ATMs are inoperative. Power was said to be a week or more from being restored. Water would be up to a month.
I’ve been shitting in holes I’m digging in the woods behind my house for a week now, rather than pouring otherwise potable water down the toilet to flush.
Each day is just one challenge after another. Sometimes the challenges are fun to solve. My only functioning cooking device is a propane grill. Tuesday was my partner’s birthday, and I baked a chocolate torte on the grill using indirect heat, and it was delicious. It was a nice celebration.
And each day has been an incremental step closer to something resembling normal, even if it’s still very much not. Cell signal is getting better. Power returning to gas stations and stoplights has alleviated a lot of the transportation panic that derives from car-centric urban design. Banks have functioning ATMs. Grocery stores have fresh food.
But the thought I keep coming back to over the last week is this: humans are just not made for this.
Evolutionary psychology teaches that because we adhered to a hunter-gatherer/tribal social organization strategy for the overwhelming majority of our species’ existence, our brains’ social engines are still wired for what was successful then. In those tribes, numbering no more than 150 people each, what we had, we shared; where we went, we went together; and who was in the tribe were “our people,” those we bound our fortunes to.
There are about as many humans around Asheville, North Carolina, today than there were on the entire earth 130,000 years ago.
What seems so fundamentally different in our modern, high-population, hyper-individualistic, capitalism-driven time is social trust. In a small tribe of people, there’s no anonymity; everyone you’re bound to is known to you. Social trust in that world is extremely high, deeply intimate, and fundamentally crucial to our survival. But of the quarter-million residents of Buncombe County, all but a couple hundred are complete strangers to me. With so much anonymity, social trust takes on a very different shape.
In the modern world, social trust relies on faith in human-created systems and perceptions of abundance: that if we queue up and wait our turn, there will be food on the shelves to feed ourselves, water when we turn on the tap, gas when we pull up to the pump, and safety when we return home at the end of the day. The pervasiveness of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and property crime proves it does not work for all, but it does work well-enough for most.
That social trust becomes strained when those systems break down and when there’s an experience of scarcity. When push comes to shove, will others take only what they need and make sure you have enough? Or will they take more than they need, leaving you with nothing? Will it be literal pushing and shoving or just figurative?
I’m grateful to say that the events of the last ten days have shown that, when it comes to Asheville and other communities in western North Carolina, for the most part trust has held.
Yes, there’s been a strong response from the stewards of systems to bring them back into order: an army of linemen and tree clearing teams have been restoring power disrupted by fallen power lines; FEMA, the National Guard, and state agencies have swarmed in water, gas, food, and cash assistance; law enforcement and first responders have blitzed search & rescue operations to find those trapped or missing.
But more importantly, comprehensive networks of mutual aid have sprung up to ensure what resources we have are shared so that everybody has what they need to get through this. Local non-profits like BeLoved Asheville, Firestorm Cooperative, and Homeward Bound are attending to immediate food, water, and shelter needs. Disaster response organizations like Grassroots Aid Partnership who respond to natural disasters around the Southeast are actually based in Asheville, imagining the mountains more impervious to hurricanes (lol), and they have been on the ground since day one. And the emotional first-aid provided by SeekHealing’s space-holding has been a vital outlet for everybody traumatized by loss, survivor’s guilt, and insecurity.
And at the same time, the cracks in the edifice of social trust are visible.
Conspiracy theories abound, positing everything from accusations that the flooding was intentionally created, to fabricated tales of road piracy, to complete falsehoods about the level of aid being provided.
With the 1st of the month last Tuesday, many landlords are still insistent on rent payments being full and on-time, despite many homes being unlivable and tenants struggling to pay for basic needs. Employers are laying off staff to repair their businesses, and wage workers are left scrambling for unemployment. Stores are limiting entry and retaining armed guards to prevent looting. The city has imposed a curfew.
People with the highest level of need for government aid are the slowest to get that support because fraud-prevention measures mean such appeals for help require somebody to come on-site to inspect.
And all of this comes in the run up the perhaps the most pivotal election in our nation’s history, where many of our leaders are more interested in using this natural disaster for political advantage than to care for their constitutents’ very real needs.
The echoes to the height of the COVID pandemic are startling. We can only be in it together if all of our basic needs are secure. But we saw hyperbolic disparities in levels of security people experienced, and it fueled community distrust visible in everything from runs on toilet paper to conspiracy theories & crank remedies to refusal to wear masks in public places.
At any scale of living, from hunter-gatherer tribe to major metropolitan area, the only way we as humans are going to make it through this time in our existence is together. Experiences of scarcity in compassion and security pit us against one another. Our neighbor becomes our competition instead of our community partner.
Asheville, western North Carolina, and all of Appalachia ravaged by Helene will get through this. I previously had generally described the Blue Ridge mountains as uniquely resilient to the weirding weather and natural disasters of climate change, but the veil of that innocence is shattered. Climate change has always been something I’ve only glimpsed at through somebody else’s cell phone footage, but this time it was my hand holding the camera recording the devastation. Something tells me climate change will put that recording cell phone in each of our hands at some point, and that it’s just a matter of time.
One person in my community remarked we should rename our city “Phoenixville”, as we rise from the Ashes.
I wonder what lessons we’ll learn from this experience, if any. I know the ones I hope they’ll be.
I hope we’ll rethink our relationship with our tourism industry. Presently, most of the taxes directly from tourism are recycled by the county’s Tourism Development Authority to market and generate more tourism, and as a result the housing, income security, health, and transit needs of locals have gone more unmet than they could be. I hope we’ll recognize how the crisis brings into plain view the consequences of wealth and opportunity disparities, how unsustainable it is to be the North Carolina city with the highest cost of living but the lowest median wages. I hope this will affect our relationship to the river and watershed, and that it will deepen our respect for the symbiosis we share with it.
I don’t see that we really learned a lot from our journey together through COVID. That leaves me disheartened about our chances of learning from this one.
But for now, the only thing to do is to help each other out while we wait for the systems to restore, so we might finally have a chance to restore ourselves.
And to finally take a hot shower.