The Deep End of Hope

On a new book about Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina.

Hi everyone!

I’ve decided to insert an interregnum — I mean, interruption — to our look at the Stuart monarchs of 17th-century England (and Wales, with Scotland and Ireland in the mix, too) to talk about a book that just came out: The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene: 40 Days and Nights of Survival and Transformation by Emma Churchman.

Welcome, as always, to new subscribers! Glad you’re here.

The Ground Zero of Gerton

Gerton, North Carolina is a town of 301 people in Henderson County, about 20 miles southeast of Asheville.

Emma Churchman and her husband Jeff have lived there for about four years now, on a ridge. To get to Gerton from downtown Asheville, you take I-240 East to the 74 East exit and stay on that highway for about 10 miles until it whittles down to a two-lane, squiggly mountain road. The road tops out right around the Gerton Fire Department and then dips south for another 14 or so miles through Bat Cave, Chimney Rock, and Lake Lure.

All of these towns were essentially wiped off the map by Helene. In fact, to get to the Gerton Fire Department, you go past a Road Closed barrier. I believe it’s still illegal to drive 74-E through Bat Cave and Chimney Rock unless you live there, because they’re still repairing the roads.

I didn’t even know Gerton existed until Emma, a Facebook friend, began posting updates of the absolute devastation. Those updates eventually reached a journalist at The Guardian, who interviewed Emma for a story. And that story prompted a publisher to reach out, and here we are about six weeks later with a book: The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene: 40 Days and Nights of Survival and Transformation.

This afternoon, I attended the book launch party at Gerton Fire Department. It’s not an exaggeration to say that about a third of the town showed up — it was a packed (fire)house.

Emma trained as a trauma chaplain and spend many years working in a Level-1 trauma hospital before starting her own business helping entrepreneurs reach their potential. But between her husband’s experience living through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and her knowledge of the way trauma informs our lives in the middle of personal disaster, she and Jeff both became some of the town’s essential people after the storm blew through.

Before today, I’d been to Gerton only once before for Election Day reporting to see how various sites in the hardest-hit areas of western North Carolina were faring.

One anecdote that I mention in the story still stands out to me. A woman named Gina explained that she moved to her home between Gerton and Bat Cave to live semi-off the grid. And she chose a neighborhood where everyone seemed to be that way; she had a general sense that people lived near her but didn’t really know where.

But when the storm hit, and the water from the culvert below her house lapped the foundation, Gina suddenly saw neighbors crawling out of the woodwork like ants. Most had chainsaws, and she got stuck in, too, as they all worked to buzz their way out. It was slow going until someone arrived with their small bulldozer and really got the fallen trees and debris moving. They then walked for a couple hours until they got to the back of a grocery store.

By the time I spoke to Gina on Election Day, she and her neighbors had all essentially scattered again after a few weeks of near-constant interaction. But she treasured that time of togetherness and built-up trust.

It’s that togetherness I saw in the Gerton Fire Department this afternoon, and in Emma’s book, which I read as soon as I got home.

It’s a powerful examination of what disaster looks and feels like right in the middle of it, since it’s comprised of small entries that she made on a daily basis during the first 40 days of the storm.

I’ve written so much about the storm from my perspective, which is still that of an outsider. For the thirteen days we lacked power and water, I wasn’t in the heart of a devastated community.

Emma was, though, and still is. And I’d like to turn this post over to some of her words from the book, so that you might have a better understanding of what it’s really been like here.

The book is divided into four keys stages of disaster: Rescue, Recovery, Reconstruction, and Evolution.

So, without further ado, here are some excerpts.

Rescue (Days 1-10)

From Day 1:

When the rain finally stops completely shortly before noon, Jeff and I venture outside to assess damage. We have one big tree down on our back slope. Big chunks of the earth are in the rock swale water catchment system we had installed two years ago to divert water away from our one-level house. The water remains diverted. Our house is dry. The house is untouched, and our vehicles are mostly undamaged.

Big branches are down on our half-moon driveway and front yard. Every time I take a step, I lean over to pick up yet another big branch. It takes an hour to remove all of the branches from our short driveway. A giant tree blocks the road between our driveway and our next-door neighbors’ driveway. There’s a probably two-hundred-year-old oak tree fallen over in the road, and the branches are taller than we are. It’s impossible to get out of our driveway.

We can hear our neighbor Kate already outside with her chainsaw, working diligently to cut up that tree. We call out over the fallen tree to her.

From Kate we learn that her husband, Erik, a firefighter and one of two rescue technicians for Gerton, left in his truck at 7:00 a.m. to make his way three miles down to the fire station, anticipating a busy day of helping people move trees.

While Jeff and Kate continue to work on chopping up and moving that one fallen tree, which takes hours, I begin to assess damage in our eighty-five-acre HOA. Our HOA has eight houses: three full-time households and five part-time. Lots of trees are down on our shared road. No house sustained damage, but the road culverts are gone, and there are deep gashes in the road where water has run through it. THere are three large mudslides covering the road. The two-mile road is impassable by anything but foot traffic. I check on our eighty-year-old neighbors, who seem in relatively good spirits. They have several trees down in their driveway and a giant chestnut tree leaning ominously over their house.

But while we are checking on our neighborhood and chopping up trees, the power goes out. So does cell service. Kate can’t get ahold of Erik. None of us can get ahold of anyone in the outside world. Both of our homes have whole house generators, so those kick on, offering us some semblance of normalcy when we go back inside.

We were due for a propane refill to fuel the generator before the hurricane. In fact, our delivery had been scheduled for three days after the hurricane, since we were down to 40 percent in our 500-gallon tank. We figure we’ll be fine and that power will be restored in a few days, as it always is. We don’t yet know that all roads leading to our home have been destroyed, and that even if we needed it, a propane truck would be unable to make a delivery.

Erik finally arrives home around 5:00 p.m., by foot, wearing someone else’s clothes. That’s when we realized that things were much worse than we ever could have imagined.¹

From Day 9:

Today was hard. The adrenaline rush of the hurricane is slowing down, and our residents are finally starting to respond emotionally to the disaster that struck us. When I was at the fire station for our daily community meeting, several people came up to me in tears, not knowing how to process their new reality.

I hugged Sara² hard in the middle of the main road, surrounded by police cars, ATVs, residents, and dozens of volunteers. She hit a wall when her family ran out of propane for their generator this morning, and she cannot stop crying. Jeff brought her over to me as soon as he saw her. He isn’t fond of women crying hysterically. I think it makes him nervous.

I consoled Matt, whose family isn’t comprehending the state of the devastation and is telling him to just get over it. He is operating without water or power, and his road was destroyed. He’s doing a phenomenal job of coping, but still berates himself for being so upset.

Shirley, a small, thin woman with a booming voice, arrived at the station hysterical. She feels unsafe with so many strangers using her property to get over the mountain. I sit on the pavement next to her, listening and holding space. She is still processing a rape from five years ago. The strangers are another form of violation to her.

[….]

My chronic Lyme Disease flares up when I am under stress or when I do too much physically. It shows up as all over inflammation, which makes every part of my body hurt. I also experience brain fog and headaches, which make me cranky and hard to be around.

This past week has been nonstop stress. We are continually operating in the unknown with things changing minute-by-minute. I’ve been pushing my body to its limits, on the go for twelves to fourteen hours a day. There is so much to do to keep our household operational with limited generator power. Every day, I’m checking on neighbors or their houses and hiking down to the fire station to serve as trauma chaplain. I’m still struggling to sleep through the night.

My hips hurt. My calves ache. My back is sore. My legs are covered in bruises from bushwhacking and hauling supplies around. I’m frustrated with my body and my mind. Can’t they both see that I need them to keep up because there is so much to do every day?³

Recovery: Days 11-22

From Day 17:

Today we got power.

Up until today, we spent seventeen days managing our propane consumption and running our whole house generator for only one or two hours each morning or three hours in the evening.

We timed everything from showers to cooking, to pooping, to laundry, and to communication with the outside world to fit within those five precious hours.

It was hard to constantly track, organize, and keep our home operational. There wasn’t the luxury of just coming home and resting. Even late at night, sitting in the dark, there was always more to be done.

Seventeen days with a total of five minutes of phone calls with the outside world for me because service is still so spotty on my phone.

It was hard to not be able to talk to the people closest to me. But part of me also didn’t want to speak with them. I didn’t want to hear their concern and their worry about me. There has been no time or space for worry. I can’t make room for that right now, and I sure can’t explain what I’ve — what we all have — been through.

Seventeen days of getting to know so many more of my neighbors. Sitting with them on their porches, at the fire station, perched on fallen trees, and talking, listening to their hurricane stories, and learning what happened to their homes and their hearts when Helene hit.

[….]

Seventeen days, and I still don’t really know how to talk about what happened to us, other than to say it feels like what I imagine a war zone would be like.

I am still so tired. We are all so tired. It is weirdly comforting to know that all pretense is gone. We are casualties in, and comrades of, our common ground, which is exhaustion.

It is exhausting to spend all day getting basic needs met.

It is exhausting to never know what each day will bring.

It is exhausting to try to explain to anyone who is not living in devastation the toll it takes.⁴

Reconstruction (Days 23-32)

From Day 28:

I am becoming immune to the details of the devastation surrounding me. They have become brown noise in the recesses of my mind. This is how I cope with living inside of them day in and day out.

Driving home from Asheville, I pass by piles of giant trees, trunks, and limbs, piled up haphazardly in yards or along the road, still littered with downed power lines. There is mud everywhere. It keeps sporadically raining here — not enough to cause more mudslides but enough to keep a sheen of dirt on everything. We are surrounded by shades of brown.

I drive by a house that no longer has a roof and another one missing a side. Destruction and absence stand beside one another. I notice myself shying away from looking inside these homes at destroyed belongings. This is my way of protecting my neighbors’ privacy and honoring their loss.

[….]

If I pay too close attention, the debris might consume me, too.

Instead, I focus on what is new. Fresh gravel covering a muddy temporary road. Giant rocks filling in the gaps between the road and the driveways. A mailman, delivering mail on that new road.

I don’t know how my life will end, just like I don’t know what my world will look like a year or five years from now.

I hope it will look like our community still coming together and doing what we need to do, in order to support each other. I hope our hearts and homes will be rebuilt.

I hope that when I drive through our community, I will no longer feel the need to protect myself from the devastation, because I will be surrounded by fiercely protected life.⁵

Evolution (Days 33-40)

From Day 36:

The first couple of days after Hurricane Helene hit, it was silent on our mountain. The helicopters hadn’t arrived yet. No one had cell service.

Jeff and I sat out in the field next to our house, watching and listening for the smallest indications of life, not yet fully comprehending the devastation below us in the Gorge.

In those forty-eight hours, we made a choice about who we were going to become during this apocalypse.

We decided to become people who made a difference. My role became trauma chaplain. Jeff’s role became supply coordinator and chief communicator to the outside world for our community.

[….]

We are each fully capable of becoming superhuman.

Being superhuman means witnessing immense amounts of suffering, and not taking it on as yours. It means helping others to navigate through it. In the wake of this natural disaster, this is a beacon and an opportunity for all of us to consider our purpose and our work in this world, moving forward.

I hope you choose the path of becoming superhuman.

I encourage you to read Emma’s book. I’ve been reporting on this storm since it happened — three, four months ago now — and I still learned a lot. And as Emma said at the book reading today, “We no longer have the luxury of time when it comes to processing trauma.”

Disasters of all kinds are happening faster than ever. Thanks to technology, we’re exposed to them more quickly than ever, no matter where on earth they’re happening. In the forty days after the storm that Emma’s book covers, Hurricane Milton devastated parts of Florida and flooding killed over 200 people in Valencia, Spain.

Plus, part of the proceeds from the book will go to help Gerton as it continues to recover.

Hurricane Helene: Opportunities to Help

Love Asheville From Afar. This one-stop shop features Asheville businesses that desperately need money to survive the slow winter season. From coffee and food to art of all shapes, to simple donations, you can get a range of thoughtful gifts for just about anyone in your life.

Asheville Goods. Another site where you can buy themed boxes featuring a bunch of local shops — or customize your own!

Help Catye Gowan Feed People with Dietary Needs! This chef has been out there on her own since the storm began cooking food designed for people with severe dietary issues like Celiac and dietary preferences like veganism. She’s a force for good, and every dollar helps!

BeLoved Asheville. These folks are the best in the world — the ultimate model of mutual aid and greeting the world with love. Check out what they’ve been doing, and donate, here.

The Deep End of Hope in the Wake of Hurricane Helene: 40 Days and Nights of Survival and Transformation. A Ground Zero view of the storm’s devastation — and a community’s resilience — from a trauma chaplain who lived it.

L.A. Wildfires: Opportunities to Help

World Central Kitchen. They were unbelievable for us here after Helene. I don’t know the grassroots organizations running in LA right now — LA readers, feel free to share so I can include them! — but I can vouch for the amazing-ness of World Central Kitchen. A hot meal means everything in such difficult moments. I’ll add more links as I hear about places doing great work.

Support Karen and Ingin’s Recovery from the Eaton Fire. I was asked to share this GoFundMe for a journalist of color. If you can, check it out and give.

From the Vault: “Après Le Dark”

One of my early posts on the exhaustion of Helene that I experienced, and an opportunity to compare my relatively benign experience with that of Emma’s above.

Après Le Dark

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: Red Velvet (레드벨벳), “Bulldozer”

I wanted an upbeat, positive song for this week, and I love this more recent album track from Red Velvet. The title, “Bulldozer,” is apt given how important these machines were and still are here in western North Carolina.

Love y’all,
Sara

1. The Deep End of Hope, 11-12.

2. Not me!

3. Idem, 61-2, 64.

4. Idem, 105-07.

5. Idem, 162-64.