Guest Essay: Helene – No where to run to …

First-hand account of Helene escape one of many local stories

BY BARBARA HUGHES

Editor’s Note: Local gallery owner Barbara Hughes was one of the ‘lucky’ ones who came through Helene as it moved through Appalachia. She wrote this essay just after the storm; it is one of dozens of firsthand stories of locals who were up in N.C., and had to find a way to escape. While there is much local hurricane news here, we thought it might be a reminder that many are still suffering from Helene. In mountain regions, 230 died, 102 in North Carolina. 26 are still missing, according to reports.

It had been raining for several days before Helene was even a thought for us, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, where my late husband and I built a small cabin in 2004 in order to escape the humid summer heat of Florida. 

My partner, Peter, and I returned from our three-and-a-half-month RV journey to see our immediate family out on the West coast in late September, and it almost immediately began raining off and on. The weather pattern of the Blue Ridge has shifted, in my mind, to a wetter pattern than in previous years: the past two years just seem wetter and this summer we weren’t there, so we didn’t know what had gone on. We were told it had been fairly dry, but then the week we returned we had rain, sometimes heavy. Peter eked out a day to clean the road gunk off the RV and he got it in shipshape condition. Wisely, he pulled the two new batteries we’d had to install and brought them to the cabin. 

We’d planned to leave for Florida on Wednesday, October 25th so we could help a client with her art. We had everything in place to do that: cars and trailer all loaded and then we noticed Helene forming in the Gulf of Mexico. We hit pause. Peter and I discussed our options, and I didn’t feel like driving straight into a hurricane, however small or large, especially while we’re pulling a loaded trailer. Peter and I had some scary moments out West this summer, while driving through hard winds and heavy rains. I wasn’t up for it, and neither was he. We contacted our friend and decided to ride out the storm up here, where it would be safer than heading South. Or so we thought.

On Wednesday we drove over to Banner Elk, for groceries. I didn’t get gas, because we’d seen it much cheaper (50 cents a gallon cheaper!) in Tennessee and I wanted to try to get over to Tennessee, which is about 23 miles away. We bought all the ingredients for a soup we love, so I began cooking, hoping the soup would warm our bones as Helene passed. I also made some baked beans and fixed a salad. Rain started, but it had been raining off and on for days, so we didn’t give it a second thought.

Wednesday evening I noticed a map showing possible rainfall and in our location. It looked ominous. Why in the world would they be projecting that we’d get 12 inches of rain? I’d never heard of such a thing up here. I showed it to Peter. We just stared at one another, unwilling to speak the obvious: with all the creeks, streams, rivers, tributaries, lakes, and waterfalls around here this might not end well. I’d seen it before, in 2004, the year we built the cabin. Charley roared up here, creating havoc and washing out roads and sides of mountains. Surely, this wouldn’t be a repeat. We went to bed, hopeful it would bypass us.

On Thursday and Friday we awoke to screaming winds and horizontal rain: windows plastered with recently ripped “off-the-limb” leaves, as well as a deeply darkened sky. Helene’s widely thrown bands were already thundering through the mountains. Trees were quickly being denuded and leaves piled on our cars and houses like snow. 

We had showered on Wednesday, in anticipation of losing power. We made sure we were ready, just like we do in Florida. Almost as soon as I finished brushing my teeth, the alarm beeped, and I knew the electricity went out. That means no toilet flushes, no washing us, our food or our dishes, no lights, no news, no heat. It’s October, and although the weather wasn’t extremely cold, we’re up at 4,000 feet so we have chilly nights. We hunkered down. Since our range is gas, we felt we’d be just fine. As we discovered, with these new weather patterns, there is nowhere safe.

Remember the two RV batteries Peter brought home? He was able to rig together the batteries to an inverter so it could convert the 12 volts to an outlet, similar to a house outlet, and we could charge our cell phones. What a relief. We were able to get some updates and assure family and friends we were okay. That was golden.

By Friday, we knew we were in trouble up here, as photos were posted online and some folks even posted live streams. Boone waters were on the rise, and as we found out later, Boone flooded at historic levels. We watched as our local bank disappeared under rising muddied waters. Walmart soon after. I was in shock. 

I never knew trees could bow so deeply without breaking. We would later see that many of them sustained themselves by that bending. We hurriedly checked Facebook streams of news. It did not look good.

Also, by Friday, Helene was dropping so much rain that the waterways couldn’t keep up. The ground was saturated before she arrived. We saw live streams some of our artist friends were posting on FB from Western North Carolina and it was dismal. Water pooled at low places on highways, dirt roads and newly laid macadam. It seeped under the pavement and when it had nowhere to release, it simply pushed up the blacktop, so the roads buckled and broke apart. Then, it seemed to casually toss them wherever there was space. Piles of roads sections lay scattered, pitched about as if they were nothing. Bridges failed and many of them crossed those tiny streams with a road leading up to a home or homes. The winds and rain wreaked havoc never before seen so far up in the Blue Ridge. Trees thundered earthward and ancient root systems were undone, leaving many trees with exposed roots leaning over, or onto roadways. Electrical wires came down everywhere and looked like a tangled mess of spaghetti dripping off trees and broken limbs. Huge culverts were somehow pried away from the earth where they were buried, and thrown a hundred feet away. More than once we saw those clay and aluminum culverts completely smashed by the force of the water gushing through, over and eventually around them. Then, notices began popping up on local Facebook sites, urgently looking for people who hadn’t been heard from, or whose families couldn’t reach them and were frantically trying to do whatever they could to find help. The posted photos got worse, with even more far-reaching dire circumstances. More than one of our friends had not been heard from and we just prayed and spread the messages.

We kept receiving alerts on our cell phones every couple of minutes, which told us to stay inside and under no circumstances to leave our home. These messages will need to be reviewed, because we spoke with people who stayed and lost their homes, barely making it out alive. 

By Friday, when Helene was projected to arrive here, we’d already been hammered for days. We lit candles and tried not to focus on it, playing Canasta and other games. By Saturday, friends who have a big truck ventured out to see if they could locate some water and ice. They also needed gas. Nothing was open and Newland, NC, was flooded. Its beautiful little stream had ravaged the town in the low-lying areas. They drove for six hours to reach Elizabethton, which is normally a thirty-minute drive. Restaurants sat demolished by the force of water and wind. Gas stations with their ripped-up blacktop so bad that you couldn’t get in if you wanted. 

I cursed myself for not keeping at least one of my great-grandma’s hurricane lamps. I’d never thought about the name of those lamps, and it seemed almost funny when a friend brought us one. I’d gifted them all to a niece and was grateful to get one with a small amount of kerosene. That lamp lit our living room, and I vow to always have them now.

The refrigerator warmed way too quickly and we had to figure out how to avoid losing all the food. Luckily our neighbors were able to bring us several bags of ice, which we banked in the freezer and in coolers. That saved most of our food. As I stood at the kitchen window, I realized the trees along the ancient deer trail at the backside of the cabin were all but completely denuded. It looked like full-on winter out to the East. Saturday and Sunday we just hunkered down. 

All roads in and around Western North Carolina were officially closed.

We played a lot of cards. Mostly we were just in shock. Our friends had ventured out and brought us news of our own torn-up road at the mountain’s base and dire circumstances all around. We decided to go out on Tuesday, but we were extremely cautious. The sides of many roads had been ripped away and we weren’t sure how safe or stable the remainder of the roads were, even far away from the orange cones the DOT had placed. I was driving and it was a hairy trip down to Newland, where we’d heard there was gasoline. There was none and we checked five stations. We returned home.

By Wednesday, now almost a week without electricity or water, we were well into the “I just want a shower” phase, but our hope was higher because the rain abated. We drove almost halfway to Boone, to the place we store our RV, which is bordered by a stream or small river. I was not looking forward to the trip, because I know how the rivers flow when we get hard rain, and the RV may or may not be there or could have been flooded. 

Remarkably, our RV survived. The relief was palpable. We drove to the store and bought supplies for those neighbors who’d helped us. Now, mountaintops were left almost completely bald.

This storm is by no means over for the residents of many states, but for the folks who have lived for generations up here in the far Western Blue Ridge, in towns named Newland, Crossnore, Linville Falls, Banner Elk, Elk Park, Bakersville, Burnsville, Asheville, Minneapolis, Cranberry, and on the sides and tops of mountains and in the dips and valleys of this beautifully and heavily wooded area this storm made it clear that now, in this time and space, there is genuinely nowhere safe. 

From the author:

I wanted to give a firsthand account of what we’ve just lived through. Many others have lived through similar and some far worse experiences. Thank you for reading this.

Please support our local charities:

• American Red Cross
• Feeding Avery Families
• Diaper Bank of N.C. or go online and donate directly to the many churches dotting the area.