My Mountain Home

Asheville is my home. And I love nothing more than autumn in the mountains of western North Carolina.

This time of year, my wife and I are usually busy making plans. We devise Saturday game plans to hit both the downtown and UNC-Asheville farmers markets and get to our favorite spots on the Blue Ridge Parkway, places like Craggy Gardens and Graveyard Fields, with our kids. I look forward to live music at venues like The Orange Peel, The Grey Eagle and Salvage Station. (Asheville is one of the best music towns in America.) My wife and I recently made a deal with each other to start attending trivia nights at local breweries with our western North Carolina friends who’ve grown to be family. We even enjoy mapping out schedules so we can make our 13-year-old son’s tennis matches at Asheville Middle School and get our 15-year-old daughter to her new job so she can make money and fulfill her sneakerhead dreams.

I thought our autumn would be one thing in 2024. It’s turned into something else.

Tropical Storm Helene started in Asheville on Wednesday, Sept. 25, with no wicked pageantry: just days of gray and rain, but by Thursday night, Helene left its mark. That night my wife and I woke to sounds of trees snapping, but we knew we had to wait for sunlight to check on the tall pines behind our house. Friday morning didn’t bring much light, though. Helene’s winds tore over our roof in intermittent tantrums that sounded like a locomotive barreling over us. They’d last for moments but felt like eternity. Around midday, there was calm, and the rains stopped. Then the back end of the storm punched down on us a bit more.

Around 4 p.m. Friday, we felt it was OK to go outside and assess. Trees had fallen behind our house, and a transformer was down in our front yard from a utility pole that had snapped in half. In a regular storm, these would feel like calamities I would want to remedy immediately. In Helene, they were mild inconveniences, markers that we had averted disaster in the storm.

Surveying the damage that day was like working outward from the middle of a circle, and the farther out we moved, the more solemn and startling the realizations became. First it was our yard, and we felt fortunate. Then we traversed our neighborhood. It looked like a war zone. There were mammoth oak trees down in almost every yard, their roots unearthed and towering five feet off the ground. I counted at least six transformers that had been thrown to the ground; the power lines attached to them lay strewn across the roads like broken guitar strings.

As a kid, I played a lot of video games, but I hated games that involved mazes where I’d inevitably reach an obstacle, like a rock or wall, that prevented passage. I ordered Nintendo Power magazine for cheats and directions that told me how to get around in those games.

There were no cheats to get around our neighborhood.

We were eventually able to get out our driveway, moving farther out of our circle, after an altruistic passerby cut up the tree with his chainsaw. That’s when Helene’s true wrath hit home. In south Asheville, we saw an apartment complex with the side torn off, exposing a child’s bedroom. Trees were down everywhere. Mud had washed in with the waters and made the local grocery store’s parking lot look like a clay pond. By Monday, after several days without cellular service, social media images of our city started to reach us. Biltmore Village was flooded. The River Arts District, one of our favorite spots in the city, was under water.

As I write this, it’s been 10 days since Helene, a name that means “shining light,” brought so much darkness to my city and western North Carolina. Those first images of destruction sit with me, as do others I’ve seen in the past week. When my family and I moved to Asheville in August 2020, we pulled our car and U-Haul into the Walgreens at the corner of Swannanoa River Road and South Tunnel Road to get our bearings. There’s a photo online now of that same Walgreens. It’s a bombed-out scene with broken concrete, rubble and stagnant muddy water. That image won’t let go of me.

There are others, too. One of the first places we visited as a family after our move to WNC was Chimney Rock. We climbed the Outcroppings Trail to the top of Chimney Rock. It felt like we were walking to some sort of heaven. The top is a place of complete peace, where I felt like one with the clouds around me. Now, the images online show something altogether different — scenes of destruction with all the shops and the entire town below just gone.

My favorite spot to see a movie, the Grail Moviehouse, in the River Arts District, posted a heartbreaking metaphor from the film Pan’s Labyrinth on Facebook a few days ago with a message that the theater’s future is uncertain. My son and I had just seen the band American Aquarium perform at Salvage Station on the French Broad River, whose waters flooded the venue.

When I think of these memories, I try to imagine different words to capture how my family made out: Lucky. Fortunate. Blessed. But no word really encapsulates our providence compared to what so many others have endured over the last week and will continue to endure for some unimaginable time to come. I get to retreat to my memories of the area, and I get to keep them as happy places, rather than places touched by sorrow. But the workers and the business owners who’ve lost everything, the people who’ve lost loved ones in mudslides or drownings, homeowners whose houses floated away — they don’t get that luxury. Their worlds have been literally and figuratively torn apart.

I’ve also tried to think of different words to use in texts to friends who’ve checked in on me and my family. How can I relate what I have seen and what I hear about the surrounding communities? Obliterated. Decimated. Devastated. Choose any word. None do justice in describing what communities like Asheville, Black Mountain, Swannanoa, Old Fort, Boone and beyond are experiencing. The heartbreak is everywhere.

My family has paid special attention to a bucolic community south of us named Fairview. My coworker, Vickie Cumbee, lives there. She’s the art director for NC State magazine. Vickie is one of the thousands of people in western North Carolina who had to basically camp out at her home for the last week. She didn’t have electricity, water or cellular service, and she was trapped, unable to get over the waters around her house. The roads to her home were impassable, with parts that were washed away when a nearby creek turned into a rushing river. (No Nintendo cheats for her exodus either.) For the last 10 days, I could only talk to Vickie when she walked to a neighbor’s house for cell service. This is someone I usually text multiple times a day about work, music or books. Since the storm, I have hoped each text notification on my phone is from Vickie with an update. Each message she has been able to send me has been a gift.

The message I’d been waiting for came this past Sunday afternoon by way of a voicemail. “It’s 3:30,” Vickie said, “and I’m out.”

I’m thankful for every text or call from friends wanting to make sure we are safe. And I’m thankful my family is OK. Others are not. I’m thankful for every game of Yahtzee or cards I’ve played with my kids by the light of a camp lantern. I’m thankful for every ramen lunch we’ve cooked with bottled water heated on our grill outside. I’ve never been much of a blessing-counter, but I’ve thought more cosmically quantitative in the past week.

I’ve grown more appreciative of cacophony, too. The once bothersome buzz of a chainsaw means someone is helping to get a tree cleaned up and a road opened. The constant hum of airplanes and helicopters flying over Asheville means someone is getting medical attention or food and water. It’s a reminder that our armed forces have come to help. FEMA has come to help. The Red Cross has come to help. All of them are joining their local and state partners to help our neighbors.

I also have tapped into the comfort offered by serendipity. My family and I were walking when a neighbor four houses down from us walked out in her yard. She is an older woman who’d moved to the North Carolina mountains from Miami some 26 years ago. She had two trees on her home, and power lines tangled like spaghetti noodles all through her bushes and shrubs. We helped her walk around her house to assess the damage. It was a moment we all needed. We needed her to be there with us, and she needed the same. We processed what had just happened together. We tried to unpack all facets of Helene’s damage. When might the kids go back to school? When might power be restored for our neighborhood? And how did the storm measure in some historical sense? Talking with her seemed like everything. And we are now de facto family. This feeling of togetherness is present throughout the mountain communities. There is a sense of unity that seems inoculated from much of the divisiveness in today’s political headlines. At least for now.

This time last year I was attending sporting events at Asheville High School, parking in the lot up on the hill behind the school’s gym. Now that same parking lot is being used to disperse hot meals and supplies from an area church and community organization. It’s just one example of the community’s resiliency.

So yes, plans change. But the fabric of people in western North Carolina doesn’t. We go to work helping others. We take action. We come together. We make new plans.

Chris Saunders

Managing Editor, NC State magazine

You can donate to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund at nc.gov/donate.