By the beginning of October, I’d fallen into a mini-depression for what were, in retrospect, understandable reasons. I work as a firefighter, and we had a traumatic call the details of which would be neither helpful nor tasteful to talk about here. That call, in itself, was reason enough to question the deeper meaning behind the persistent dream of life … which, for the record, is exactly what I was doing when Hurricane Helene pummeled Western North Carolina in late September. My wife, Caitlin, and I lived just west of Asheville, in Haywood County, from 2018-2023, and for those five years it truly felt like home. It’s where we established ourselves as Real Adults in the Real World, instead of 20-somethings merely “adulting,” as us millennials called it before we grew up. It’s also where we raised our son, Conley, for the first two years of his life. To see the images of devastation on national news outlets, day-after-day, was brutal and surreal.
So I did what any good 21st-century human does in a time of crisis: I doom scrolled. Lord, did I doom scroll. I was sucked into an endless procession of heartbreaking images on Facebook, posted by friends who were experiencing the chaos first-hand, of washed out roads, of towns caked in mud or flattened altogether, of houses and cars floating down a fat brown river that had ruthlessly and historically overrun its banks. I was disheartened by the conspiracy theorists that claimed, among other things, that the government was controlling the weather from Alaska because it wanted to mine lithium in the region, but inspired by all of the real human good that was taking place, including the good ol’ boys (or hillbillies, as some people call them) using backhoes to fix roads because no one knew how long it would take the government, with so much on its plate, to get the job done. I saw, in the immediate aftermath, how virtually every road in the region was closed, how power and water were non-existent, how it seemed like the whole region had been hurled back into the Stone Age by sheer force of nature. Troops of mules were delivering supplies to isolated rural areas, for goodness sake.
After I’d seen all there was to see on Facebook at that particular moment, I switched to Google, where I obsessively searched for the rising death toll in Buncombe County (where Asheville is located) and experienced a perverse dopamine hit each time that number rose. I scoured the major news outlets, specifically The New York Times, which ran a story about a guy from the small town of Marshall who reportedly clung to a tree for seven hours with the bottom half of his body submerged in rushing water while friends and family members looked on helplessly. Eventually exhaustion overtook him and he was swept downriver. Experiencing all of this trauma second-hand had an undeniably negative impact on my psyche, especially in the wake of that bad call, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to stay informed, sure, but on a deeper level I wanted to vicariously suffer alongside everyone down there, which is an embarrassingly egotistical impulse, considering I should have been grateful that I was safe at home with my family. I wrote about the heartbreaking things I was seeing and reading because that was the best way to process them, and while this initially made me more depressed, it slowly began to help. But it was often hard to find the right words, and I ended up repeating the same tired adjectives over and over again, some of which I’ve already used in this piece: devastating, unfathomable, horrific, terrible, terrifying, historic, gut-wrenching, incomprehensible, awful, apocalyptic, tragic, all accurate enough, sure, yet somehow inept at burrowing to the marrow of what was actually happening. In times of unimaginable pain, words are often poor substitutes for the actual experience of a thing. Yet myself, and many others, continued to write, and thank God for that, because one of the silver linings of this tragedy has been the inspiring journalism that has bloomed both locally and nationally. Consider this quote, taken from a piece published by Melanie McGee Bianchi, fiction author and editor of Asheville Made, in the Oxford American:
Last winter…I wrote a story about eight-and-ninth generation a capella vocal performers. In that story, I mentioned the placidity of the French Broad River during last year’s dry summer and fall, but also its capacity for particularly nasty turns of mood, proven by the then-watershed event of the Great Flood of 1916 and other, more modern deluges, the second-worse being in 2004.
Well, Helene washed away 1916 like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had it harnessed to his to-do list. Last week someone on public radio called Helene Southern Appalachia’s 500-year flood. This week that catastrophe got upgraded to a 1,000-year flood.
That’s medieval, if not quite Stone Age. But there’s still plenty of time to hope for an even loftier title.
Some of the best local writing about Helene was published, unsurprisingly, in the consistently great Smoky Mountain News. One column, written by Chris Cox, talks about how painful it was to watch the beauty of autumn, a season that usually brings thousands of leaf-peeping tourists to WNC, move in so swiftly amidst such extensive ruin:
Drive down any road – the ones you still can drive down – in Western North Carolina, and you see giant trees blown over every quarter mile or so while their neighbors remain standing. Why this tree, and not that one? This is exactly how it feels regarding our friends and neighbors. The suffering feels so random, so unfair, and the future feels so uncertain, so remote.
The grieving, the anger, the anxiety, all too real and pervasive. And yet the people come, not to see the beauty but to be the beauty. That is just as real.
And those autumn leaves and brilliant blue mountain skies. They are coming, too, so beautiful and astonishing that it hurts. It has never hurt more.
I’m writing this in late October, peak fall, and those autumn leaves and brilliant blue mountain skies have come to the Shenandoah Valley, too. I’m in a much better headspace than I was a month ago. The dual tragedies still linger, and probably always will, but they are no longer all-consuming. I’m able to go about my day and feel generally OK, which leaves me with a nagging sense of guilt, considering many folks in Western North Carolina are still far from OK. But I can’t doom scroll any longer. I can only do what I can from afar, which is painfully little, and try to move on. This may make me a crummy person, I’m not really sure, but the lovely autumn in Staunton has helped me see a path forward, as have the small joys and all-encompassing responsibilities of being the parent of a spirited toddler. It’s hard to remain depressed when you’re surrounded by vibrant red and gold mountains, and it’s hard to wallow when there’s a three-year-old in the house clamoring to wear his Buzz Lightyear costume every hour of the day. He forced us to take him to the grocery store dressed in full space ranger regalia a full week before Halloween night. He loves that thing so much.
The absurdity of parenthood has helped smooth down the rough edges. Plus I had an experience a few weeks ago that felt like an existential reset, a simple moment that allowed the stress of lingering events to melt away, reminding me that there’s more to existence than doom and gloom, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. It was the Saturday before Halloween. We spent the afternoon in downtown Staunton, Conley decked out in his Lightyear costume, collecting candy from smiling shop owners who were honored to meet the real Buzz Lightyear. Getting involved in the community felt refreshing, good, right, and as the sun ducked behind the tall historic buildings on West Beverley, I had the urge to take the family to Reservoir Hill Park, a flat plot of land at the top of N. Jefferson Street that offers panoramic views of the city. It has a short trail, which may or may not be city-sanctioned (dear city officials: if it’s not, please don’t fine me), that leads through a peeled-back fence into Thornrose Cemetery, one of the best spots in Staunton to catch a sunset. It was six o’clock and the air was turning brisk so we loaded Buzz into his car seat and headed up there.
By the time we reached the peak of Thornrose, the sun had dipped below the distant Blue Ridge Mountains, casting an orange lava-lamp glow along the ridgeline and illuminating the underbellies of low-hanging clouds. We’d missed the main event, but the colors were still marvelous. It was the golden hour, as it were, and I put my arm around Caitlin, who was dressed in a Toy Story claw machine alien onesie, while Buzz ran his tiny fingers through a patch of dirt and claimed he was “making a track” for imaginary cars. The dark green expanse of grass stretched before us, interrupted by looming pine trees and regimented headstones. It was odd to feel even a modicum of peace in a place so tightly packed with death, and while I was still reeling about the awful things that had taken place, the sadness felt muted, temporarily set aside to make room for the simple joy of being alive in a world that can be snatched from us at any moment. One of the graves directly in front of us, between our bodies and the glowing ridgeline, seemed to offer sage advice: “Life is but a lick of the spoon.” Sure, I thought, that makes sense, but in what way?
In addition to the three articles I linked in the body of this piece, I also wanted to include a few more examples of the stellar journalism that has been published in and about Western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Here is some further reading:
- Time Magazine: “Hurricane Helene’s Devastation Through One Photographer’s Eyes”
- The New York Times: “For Hours, He Clung to a Try and Cried for Help. But No One Came”
- Smoky Mountain News: “In the Middle of Unimaginable Tragedy”
- Smoky Mountain News: “Putting in the Work: Responders of All Stripes Converge on Haywood County After Helene”
- The Mountaineer: “Resilience in the Face of Devastation: Stories from Hurricane Helene in Haywood”
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag.
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