It’s hard to deny the past month has been pretty daggone dark.

As in outer space dark. Like a coal mine dark.

Our uninvited mountain guest, Helene, blew into town, wrought destruction, claimed dozens of lives and destroyed so many treasured homes and buildings that our region is forever changed. 

We now live in a pre-Helene/post-Helene world.

I’ve found myself obsessively doom scrolling on social media, waiting for the next mind-blowing flooding video to pop up. I’m exhausted by it, and yes, depressed.

I can’t tell you how many people have shared that they’ve just broken down and had a huge cry.

It’s not a matter of if you’re going to break, but when. I barely held on last Tuesday when Jesse Craig, an incredibly gracious young man, took two of my Asheville Watchdog colleagues and me through the remains of a landslide-battered holler called Craigtown, where 11 members of his family died. 

The once peaceful area looks like planes from hell went on a two-mile bombing run down the mountain. Craig, 35, acknowledged that all the surviving family members, including him, have their moments when it all hits again.

“There’s something that hits at the most unexpected time — it’s something so small and it just is the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Craig said. “And you have a moment, and then you try to get up and pick yourself up and talk to your family and, you know, figure out what’s next.”

He couldn’t have been kinder, or more complimentary of our community, western North Carolina and numerous other states that have sent so many helpers.

“It has been overwhelming, and I cannot say enough about the people of western North Carolina coming together,” Craig said. “It needs to be studied, because from day one people were out here, and everybody’s been affected by this somehow. And even the people that were out here helping us get roads (cleared) and clear things and run machines, they were out here on their own time.”

People have donated food, supplies and their time, and yes, it’s overwhelming to Craig.

Resilience and grace

“I mean, it’s unbelievable — the spirit — and that’s why I say there’s beauty in this,” Craig said, pausing to carefully choose his words. “There’s been a uniting of people. What’s the word I’m looking for…despite race, religion, creed, color, political views, everybody has came together as one to help their neighbors.”

“And, you know, that’s as it should be,” Craig continued, standing among the desolation. “That’s what the silver lining in this is for me —  to see how that’s happened.”

That is a remarkable attitude. It’s resilience and grace personified.

One thing that continues to strike me about this catastrophe is the cognitive dissonance of it all. The day we spoke with Craig was one of those postcard-gorgeous late October days — crisp blue sky, leaves ablaze on the hillsides, the temperature hovering in the 70s. Just perfection.

But you could turn around and see a swath of devastation that’s hard to fathom. You knew many people died here, among this ruin and beauty.

I struggle to understand how God could let this happen.

The Craigs are all strong in their faith, Jesse said, and he actually sees God’s hand at work in those who survived, in the support that’s flowed into the holler.

“You know, I don’t have an answer for why things like this happen,” Craig said. “But as far as my faith is concerned, as Christians, we don’t understand. His will is not our will, and it’s not meant to be that way.”

Craig says this was God’s plan from the dawn of time.

“Why? We don’t know, but it’s going to be used for the better good,” Craig said. “And there’s a plan in it, and there’s beauty in it somewhere. Our minds can’t conceive it sometimes, but I do know that there is a greater good that will come out of this.”

Yeah, that got me.

‘The darkest valley in the pit of hell

Later in the week, I talked to an old friend, Kent Wolff, a mortgage broker who grew up in this area. Full disclosure, he handled two refinancings for my wife, Grace, and me.

Over the phone I could tell he was hurting from all he’s seen and experienced over the past month — the friends in Swannanoa who were trapped in their attic while they narrowly avoided drowning, the destruction of his beloved Lake Lure, the loss of so many lives.

“It felt like we walked through the darkest valley in the pit of hell,” Wolff said.

Wolff didn’t want to talk about the bad stuff anymore — he couldn’t really. He just wanted to tell me about an organization he and others are involved in called “WARM Project,” under the umbrella of a national organization called Plain Compassion Crisis Response.

As of Friday, they’d raised $284,439 toward a goal of $325,000 to help an estimated 1,000 “vulnerable households in the greater Mitchell County area and beyond with a source of heat.” Wolff lives in Buncombe but was moved by Mitchell and Yancey counties’ plight and has spent a lot of time there since the storm. 

Working with local churches to find those in need, WARM Project gathers the supplies needed to keep families warm through the coming winter. That includes propane heaters and tanks, new electric infrared heaters and new gas generators.

“I have never felt such a sense of purpose,” Wolff told me. “I have seen so many just Herculean efforts from so many people. Having seen so much of this sense of doom, seeing so many wonderful efforts from so many people, I think that’s something…we’re all looking for that.”

Yes, we are.

“There’s a million people doing great things,” Wolff said.

He also had some good advice on how to keep the conversations heading in a more positive direction when you encounter people who very likely have been through trauma.

“Stop asking how people are,” he said, noting that many, many people are hurting. “Don’t say, ‘How are you doing?’ Say, ‘I hope you are better today than you were yesterday.’” 

A ‘school’ rises amid the devastation 

One of the coworkers I traveled with to Craigtown is our photographer, Starr Sariego. She’s been politely nagging me for two weeks – Starr is a delightful human and would never actually nag someone, I’m quite sure – to do a story on parents in her neighborhood, Kenilworth, who started up a school of sorts for young children after the storm hit and closed down all the schools.

On Thursday, we talked with one of her neighbors, Erin Hallagan Clare, who with a group of other parents, founded “Little Twisters.” Yes, it’s a nodding reference to the horrific weather we all endured.

Oh, and it wasn’t a certified, licensed school or anything like that.

“I’d like to use quotation marks around the word ‘school,’” Clare said with a laugh.

She explained that Kenilworth is close to Mission Hospital, and there are a lot of first responders in the neighborhood. A bit of parental panic spread as they didn’t know when public school was starting back. (It starts back today in Asheville.)

Clare’s business in West Asheville, Story Parlor, a narrative art space, was closed indefinitely, so she had time on her hands.

“I’m not good at being idle, especially amidst trauma, where there’s the possibility of steeping into deep depression,” Clare said.

She has a master’s degree in creative facilitation — with adults.

“Never worked with kids, but I know all the neighborhood kids really well, and so we kind of just threw together a potential schedule,” Clare said.

The parents decided to use the backdrop of the storm — the flooding, the power outages — as a sort of curriculum, a way to explore with the little ones what happened in “a safe and accessible and understandable” way appropriate for their cognitive level, Clare said.

So for the past month, three days a week, parents have dropped off as many as 18 kids at a donated room at Kenilworth Presbyterian Church to learn and play.

Each day has had a theme: 

A parent who’s a water conservationist talked about reusable bottles and how it’s OK that they’re using disposable bottles right now because the water is out and they have to stay safe. A firefighter came in and talked about his job fighting fire, showing some of the equipment used every day.

An employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration brought kid-friendly meteorology packets on clouds and storm formation and talked about how Helene was probably a 500-year event.

“And we made little rainbows and umbrellas and sunshines out of plates,” Clare said.

A yoga teacher did a lesson on mindfulness and how to cope with trauma, geared toward very young kids. The youngest child in the school is 2 1/2, the oldest kids in second grade, although they had a few third-graders contribute as “helpers.”

On Wednesday, a parent who works at Asheville Community Theater came in to do some theater games, because they were prepping for the final day of “school” — a Halloween parade through Kenilworth Oct. 25 where the kids would drop off pumpkins “that say really cheesy things like, ‘You’re Kenilworth it!” Things like that for the neighbors, to just boost morale,” Clare said.

Replacement trees at a Halloween parade

The parents also worked to secure a bunch of young trees. Kenilworth, an older neighborhood full of mature trees, took a serious beatdown from Helene’s winds, with hundreds of trees blown over or snapped. The idea was that any house they passed on their Halloween parade that had an uprooted tree would get a free replacement.

“And all of these things have been donated or thought of by parents in the community,” Clare said. 

Clare, who with her husband Matt has two boys, Rye, 5, and Owen, 3, who goes by “Owey,” says she’s known all these kids most of their lives. But usually they’d see one another at chaotic neighborhood parties.

“So getting to know them in this more intimate setting has been really lovely,” Clare said.

She won’t lie, though — coming to the church classroom where there was power and the internet has been pretty sweet.

“I was joking with parents. I was like, ‘I’m just in it for the free power,’” Clare said with a laugh. “But it’s really been, for somebody who’s not worked with kids, I’ve just fallen in love with them.”

Clare doesn’t sugarcoat the stress everyone has been under the past few weeks. Kenilworth got the lights back on the weekend before last.

“I’ve become a believer in melatonin throughout all this for the first time in my life,” Clare said. “We had a big tree come down on our house, and I still feel it and hear it.”

Two big white pines fell on their house, damaging the roof and the ceiling in a guest room. Her son’s best friend from preschool has a father who’s in construction, and he fixed the roof, but a lot of work remains. 

Still, Clare is counting her blessings, and the impromptu school is a big part of that.

“I feel like I live in a Disney movie living in this neighborhood,” Clare said. “Honestly, it’s pretty surreal just how absolutely incredible everyone is and how they come together and in whatever major or minor crisis happens.”

The parents are some of Clare’s best friends, and the past month has made her realize Asheville is home now. Clare has moved a lot, and she and Matt moved here from Austin, Texas, five years ago.

“I’ve been a transplant my whole life,” Clare said. “I feel like there’s always this feeling of being the outsider, especially in towns that are so deeply closely knit, like Asheville. This event has made me feel like a true, true Ashevillian, if that’s the right term. I will not be leaving.”

Who would want to leave a community with so many good hearts?

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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