On Memorial Day weekend, I visited my sister and her husband in Hooper’s Creek, N.C., which is just south of Asheville. While driving around the area, including parts of South Asheville, I found plenty of the scars and still-gaping wounds inflicted by Hurricane Helene last September.
In several places along I-26 and other major highways, there were enormous hills made up of limbs and tree trunks. Along Hendersonville Road were numerous abandoned buildings in ruins. Someone had covered over the smashed windows and missing doors of one of these with plywood, with every panel spray-painted “Keep Out!” Biltmore Village, a popular shopping and dining destination just outside the famous Biltmore Estate, which was also slammed by wind and water, is up and running again, though a few of the buildings still look as if they’d undergone a bombardment.
And while the highways are cleared now of the trees left by the storm, many of the woodlands I passed – from a strip of trees along parts of Mills Gap Road to the thick forest around my sister’s house – were thick with the trunks and branches of fallen trees.
Yet there were also many signs that the region was on the way to recovery from the “perfect storm” that left scores dead and destroyed towns like Chimney Rock and Bat Cave.
At the foot of the hill below my sister’s house is Henn’s Plant Farm, a large commercial nursery. The creek that runs through this establishment, the massive rainfall, and the water running from the hills swept away the nursery’s acres of good soil and left in its place silt in which nothing but weeds can flourish. Yet every day of my visit, there they were, employees and owners, repairing the damage by dint of hard labor while also selling plants grown in the healthy soil they’d had delivered.
During my stay, I also heard several stories from my sister Becky and her husband Tom that underscore the meaning of neighborliness. Once the storm passed, for instance, the owners of the nursery – they live just up the hill – broke out their chainsaws and cut away the fallen trees from the gravel roads leading to Tom and Becky’s home and others in this mountain hollow.
Other neighbors exchanged food. On the Wednesday before the storm, for instance, Becky had purchased a boatload of vegetables to make three enormous salads for a volunteer appreciation banquet at Bullington Gardens in nearby Hendersonville, N.C. With the worsening weather, the organizers canceled the banquet. On Friday, with the power down and no alternate means of refrigeration, and the roads blocked, Becky bagged carrots, celery, lettuce, and other vegetables, delivering them on foot to the neighbors. Though no one knew it at the time, shortages in the grocery stores meant that these were the last fresh vegetables they would see for 10 days or more.
Meanwhile, friends and family members from around the state and the country kicked in with supplies. Becky and Tom’s son, for example, filled his car with cans of gasoline, food and cash – with the power still gone in so many areas, credit cards were useless – and delivered it to Hooper’s Creek. My own son, who only recently moved from these mountains to the coast, organized a rental truckload of supplies and had them delivered to a church in Black Mountain.
Thousands of other volunteers and tens of thousands of donors also gave time, money and goods to these relief and rebuilding efforts. One example of this noble endeavor is the hundreds of Amish men and women, all volunteers, who have streamed south into the mountains and helped repair or rebuild homes and businesses in the last eight months. Even today, when Helene rarely makes the news anymore, the Amish have continued bringing carpentry and building know-how to places like Chimney Rock.
The storm left a wound to the psyche of those who reside and make their living in this part of Appalachia. The rest of the nation has moved on, but people like my sister, my brother-in-law, and others I’ve spoken with still talk of the storm and the hardships and devastation as if these occurred only yesterday. Yet they also witnessed or heard of the acts of human kindness that abounded in Helene’s aftermath.
In Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” we find these words: “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”
In post-Helene Western North Carolina, all those candles blazed together into a bonfire of goodness and hope.
Jeff Minick is a father of four and grandfather to many. A former history, literature, and Latin teacher, Jeff now writes prolifically for The Epoch Times, American Essence Magazine, and several other publications.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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