Lo and behold, it has been 9 months since I last wrote anything for my blog, to no one’s surprise, I am sure.
2024 was a blur with many good things (In January alone, I got engaged and released a new poetry book), but the end of the year was… stressful. In the span of one month, I caught a horrendous and scary bout of COVID, we became part of Hurricane Helene’s destructive path up the Carolinas, my car was hit by a deer, and work became busier than ever during an already busy year resulting in further burnout for me. Then November came along, and with it, seasonal depression as Daylight Saving Time ended and the elections results came in (reader: I was dismayed, to say the least, by said results). My fiancé and I are also planning a wedding and honeymoon, which has been a lot of fun, but comes with some level of stress since I can’t help but be a Type A kind of planner in both my work and personal life.
Anyway, the biggest curveball was obviously the hurricane at the end of September. We were under a tropical storm warning, but we’ve been through that before with little to no effect. Overnight, however, the storm shifted just east enough to bring us into the worst part of its path – close to the eastern part of its eyewall. It apparently ripped through my small town as a category 2 hurricane, which I found out when checking the weather once woken in the middle of the night by the intense wind gusts slamming into our home. We were already without power, which wasn’t a surprise in the moment, though we would go without it for another 13 days. My fiancé and I stood out on our porch (very briefly) to see what we could, and in those few seconds, we could hear the sounds of our 90-foot loblolly pines breaking and crashing to the ground. That sound continued throughout the night, a sound I didn’t expect to bring such heartache with it. Around 4am, it began to sound as though a train was going by, which I thought nothing of at first since there is a train nearby enough that we can occasionally hear it. But then I realized that it wasn’t a train at all. It was too close, too loud. This is what they mean by what a tornado sounds like, it dawned on me. The next day, we discovered the tornado’s path went down the dirt road leading up to our house.
My fiancé’s colleague is also a part-time firefighter who had attempted to go into work the next morning only to find that there were no streets clear enough to pass to get to town. He let us know that the entire county was without power and was considered a disaster zone with a shelter in place order, including for all first responders. I had been able to communicate with just a couple people as we made sure we were safe before my entire county lost cell service. Everything went dark. You expect to hear sirens in the aftermath of something like this, but there was nothing. It is already quiet where I live, but this was different. With no means of communication, and with roads flooded or blocked, all we could do was walk. Witness. Grieve.
We hadn’t heard about the destruction in western North Carolina, including the location of our family home in the Linville Gorge. That news would come days later when cell service was spotty enough to get occasional news, calls, and texts. We were incredibly lucky that both homes were not damaged, although we spent the immediate days after clearing the property around my fiancé’s office, tarping the roof that had been damaged by a tree that fell through it, and working to safely clear roads of downed trees and power lines so that we could pass through in search of supplies and to check on others. I had never personally seen this kind of destruction before and it left me in a state of shock. When I did have cell service, I could not stop checking for news. I cried as I saw footage of beloved mountain towns sink underwater and realized just how bad this storm had been (note: though Asheville is likely the most well-known city mentioned in the news, the destruction spread across the entirety of Western North Carolina, which is the size of a small state all on its own). Too many lives were lost. Homes were completely swept away. Local businesses were leveled. Hiking trails were devastated by flooding, landslides, and downed trees. All we had known became forever changed in 24 hours. It was incomprehensible. But I also witnessed the outpouring of resources, aid, and community from both near and far. It gave me hope when the overwhelming feeling of helplessness continued to crash down over and over again with every bit of news that came out in the aftermath. No act of kindness or support was too small. Honestly, it never is.
I recently sat down to jot down some of my thoughts and convey the images that had stuck in my mind in the aftermath now that things have calmed in the immediate sense, though there is a very long road ahead for many. This turned into a poem that I would like to include here as well as this link to the NC Gov’s website for Hurricane Helene Emergency Management, which contains resources for individual and/or business aid. If you know of any specific donation sites or centers, if you own or know of a local business in need of support, or if you know of any other kind of resources that would be helpful to share, please include that information in the comments below.
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