La Belle Helene

Here’s my Hurricane Helene story…

Following the meeting last week, I was scheduled to fly up to Asheville on Friday to visit my dad.

The storm had passed over Atlanta with a bunch of rain but no real damage. It then veered east and then back west, and Asheville became inland ground zero. But not yet…

My flight seemed likely to be cancelled, but info was scarce. I decided to wait a day, rent a car and drive up Saturday morning.

I found an article in the Asheville Citizen-Times saying that the rivers had flooded and a curfew was in place, but that downtown looked “almost like business as usual.”

Good enough for me. I made a reservation with Enterprise Rent-a-Car at ATL.

When I got there, they were all sold out of cars… same-day reservations don’t have any meaning, as I now know. I found one of the last cars available from Avis, an all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 5. 3x more than I had intended to spend. And yes, I was about to drive an electric car into a zone where thousands — literally thousands — of trees had wiped out electricity service. It was almost business as usual, after all. As an aside, that’s a lovely car to drive.

It’s now about 16 hours past the crest of the French Broad River in Asheville, a couple feet higher than the flood of 1916, when there were only about a tenth as many people. I’m starting to see a few trees down as I pass through South Carolina. I’ve heard only a single text from my dad… bring some big water bottles when you come. I wrote off the relative silence to spotty cell service, picked up a couple big water bottles at Walmart, and drove on.

I saw some food trucks doing a big business. Traffic lights not working. Almost business as usual, I told myself. The Interstate was eerily empty, but all the fallen trees had already been cut back off the road.

I thought I’d better charge the car up to full power just in case. There’s a charging station just down that road, according to Google Maps. Not the last power line I’d see on the road, but I didn’t know that yet. Hmmm, I thought. Almost business as usual, I repeated to myself. There’s power in downtown Asheville, I told myself.

No radio stations were broadcasting.

Unbeknownst to me, all the roads into Asheville except the one I was on were closed. I had no real problems driving in… contributing to my blissful (or only slightly apprehensive) ignorance.

That’s dad’s building, his apartment is bottom right. Behind us, further down the hill, the buildings were flooded up into the second floor. That landslip looks bad, but poses no immediate danger to his building. Dad and Judith are fine, and also still learning about just how bad things are nearby.

From the deck, after a night of camping indoors… no water no power… you wouldn’t know that dozens of people died in that river valley and others close by, that hundreds of buildings washed away, that billions of dollars dissolved overnight.

And so begins the recovery, even while helicopters and sirens reminded us that search and rescue was underway.

That’s my dad, meeting some neighbors for the first time on Saturday evening, as happens in times of trouble. Just like Covid, somebody remarked. The guy who owned the pickup (he’s not in the picture) had a tattoo of a scary skull eating a snake… and an almost professorial bearing… and positively oozed leadership… Green Beret for sure. We all shared hot dogs and whatever else had to be cooked before going bad.

The only place we could get cell service was at the top of the hill near this derelict hotel. Be careful not to step on a needle or a pile of shit.

Downtown Sunday, it most assuredly wasn’t anything like fucking business as usual. Some places did have power, and more were coming on line every hour, but the water system is still wrecked, and nobody even knows how badly yet due to all the mud and debris. That’s people queuing for a working ATM. That ain’t normal.

But… Asheville is a cool place full of cool people. Here’s dad chatting with the guy from the Moogseum, they’re acquaintances from the Maker Space they both hang out at. Later, we got free cake and chai from Old Europe cafe.

The next day, a free cup of hot coffee and an astonishingly good biscuit served by the smiling young men at Flour bakery and cafe reduced me to tears. We ran into some of dad’s friends from the Unitarian church, and ate our biscuits, and told stories of trees down and box trucks bobbing down the river, but also talked about other stuff. Those friends had gotten engaged in Albuquerque, not too many years before I arrived there. They had some pesto that was now involuntarily thawed … come over for lunch! There was even a functioning EV charger in a public parking garage.

Four days later… Almost business as usual.

I’ve been away from home almost two weeks. Work beckons insistently: in less than two weeks I’ll be teaching a workshop in Manila. It’s my first assignment on a newly signed contract and I don’t want to screw it up.

Things in Asheville seem to be on a good trajectory. There was a bit of looting, but not much and not ongoing. Although it’s not without some guilt and worry, I said goodbye.

As I drove away Monday, I passed tankers full of water heading into town. Mobile cell towers were being installed. The National Guard was around. Life will settle down, and eventually be back to normal. Dad and Judith will have to scrounge for water over the next few weeks… drinking water is maybe easier to find than washing and flushing water.

Two hours south, I topped up at a super fast charger outside a Walmart. Down there, it actually is business as usual.

I checked into an airport hotel overlooking the runway… a little noisy but way cool. I enjoyed the concierge lounge, I took a looong shower. I flushed the toilet simply by pushing a little button.

In another 18 hours or so, I’ll be back on the other side of the world. I’ll feel like I can call myself a hurricane survivor the same way I lay claim to being an immigrant, or even a military veteran. Technically true in all cases, but not anything I’d run for office on. The tourist version of hurricane life.

My brushes with all those difficult things serve mostly as reminders that for lots of people, living without water and power, or the constant fear of deportation, or rockets overhead and bullets right here, is business as usual. Dear lord who I don’t believe in, thank you.