Yes, I’m Ok After Hurricane Helene Hit North Carolina. But Not Really.
If I could only choose one word to describe how I’m feeling after Hurricane Helene, a force of nature that went from a category one to a category four in a mere 24 hours, it would be: lucky.
Maybe if you know me personally you’re relieved to hear the world “lucky”. After the winds whipped through and tore down healthy, green beautiful monsters of trees whose strong, thick roots I could never imagine pulling away from the soil to topple before their time, I’m relieved to feel that way too.
Although these trees crashed down on the land surrounding our home, split our woodshed in half and turned our rugged mountain driveway into a wooded graveyard, nothing touched our house. I am well. My partner is well. Our animal companion, Bilbo Baggins, is well.
I’m Not As Safe As You Think, And Neither Are You
Now maybe you’re tempted to stop reading because you know that we’re safe. But are we really?
Through my limited internet connection that I somehow, despite thousands and thousands and thousands of my neighbors not have access too still, saw a quote on Instagram from Perthshire Mags that said “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.“
This is absolutely the case for me and countless others who dwell in, and love, Appalachia. You see, since making home here around seven years ago, I’ve felt safe in the lush woods of the mountains. While others see the “wild”1 animals that burrow and roam these shared slopes as a threat, I see them as the Indigenous ones and am glad to know that are any of them left.
While others see the “wilderness” as a dangerous, untamed space where bad things happen, I can’t express with the limited nature of the English language how much I need it for my mental health, and thus my survival. (We are animals, and seeing/being in green spaces that have even somewhat of a healthy eco-system is crucial to our mental health and overall well-being. Healthy ecosystems are equivalent to a healthy home.)
Aside from the mental benefits of living in the mountains in a somewhat “healthy” ecosystem, (or rather, one of the healthiest left — I’m sure if I was here even 60 years ago I would not be calling what we’re left with after development and the spread of “civilization” healthy in any way) I feel a sense of safety here because of the abundance of natural resources. Living off-grid means we get water from the mountain, wood from the forest, and food from the soil. We have water, heat, food, and shelter without having to ask anyone for it or fearing it will be cut off from us if disaster strikes or the power goes out.
Over the years I’ve expressed this sense of safety and remarked that I’m so glad we live here, close to Asheville, out of the reach of climate change. Since the climate emergency is something that I research, think about, and even write about for my paid job, I study the images and read the words describing the devastation to people all over the world as we super-charge what were once “natural” disasters most days of the week. My heart is heavy for everyone who looses their homes, their passions, their family members, their journals, their family photographs, their communities, and even their lives.
But there’s only been so much I can do from my safe perch in the Appalachian mountains.
Or at least that’s what I thought until I was the one watching the trees bend in half outside or home, until I was the one filming the disaster on my home turf.
North Carolina, My Beautiful And Toxic Home
2018 was the first time that I found myself in that position in North Carolina. A dedicated, young and brave activist who was naive about the deadly impact that even Category 1 hurricanes have, I purposely drove myself and my comrades into the heart of the storm, which was some 277 miles away from our home base. Our goal was clear: aid and rescue as many nonhuman animals as possible (since they’re one of the last things on people’s minds) while helping humans along the way. And we did just that, but horror and absolute devastation can’t even begin to explain what I felt about what we witnessed.
Duplin County is saturated with pig, chicken, and turkey factory farms, where thousands upon thousands of animals are crammed into abusive conditions that keep them in pain, fear, and on the edge of death before they’re slaughtered pre-maturely for human consumption. Doing animal rescue there meant seeing this ugly industry from the inside out; because floods were coming and “farmers” knew animals would die, they locked and sealed their giant CAFO buildings tight so that the animals inside had nowhere to go, no way to escape the rising waters. Instead they would drown and their bodies would be counted for insurance money.
The animals who did manage to escape and flee were left swimming through toxic waters (poisoned by the pollution of the factories that exploit them) without drinking water or food. And I was happy for them. Even though my exposed skin burned where water made contact with it as I waded into murky and foul-smelling waters to try and coax them out, I knew that this was their only shot at freedom. While we rescued some animals and lost others, I learned first-hand the consequences of hurricanes.
Wind, Water, And Wood: A Two Sided, Muddy Coin
Wind, water, and wood: these are three things that I usually relate to with reverence, awe, joy, and necessity. But this week I mainly related by fear.
While a breeze of wind can refresh one’s body and spirt on a hot day, it can also thrash a forest and plunge trees through your roof. While drops of water are to be admired on petals or soaked in when flowing in a cold mountain river, multiplied they can suck you under and leave you lifeless. While wood aids in our writing, reading, wiping, and is essential to our everyday lives, you don’t know the strength or the force of a tree until it is toppled onto something invaluable to you.
These elements change and take on new meaning in a hurricane. Combined together at high speeds and unrelenting pressures, there’s no escaping the mixer of destruction. That’s what I realized in hurricane Helene. If Florence exposed me to how human cruelties inflicted on our beyond-human kin exacerbate a once-natural-now-human-supercharged disaster, Helene introduced me to the notion that I am not one of the “safe” ones. There are no safe ones.
“Helene introduced me to the notion that I am not one of the ‘safe’ ones. There are no safe ones.”
This is not to take away from systemic racism and classism: poor people, marginalized people, people of color, nonhuman animals, and people fighting to get out from under the relentless weight of colonization get hit worst. They have less resources to prepare with when disaster strikes, and less aid funneled their way to begin repair. Less media attention. I would venture to say less “thoughts and prayers,” even.
While I write about the devastation here in Appalachia, I can’t help but think about the seemingly never-ending violence and death in the Congo, Palestine, the Amazon, and countless other places. There’s only so much grief a human heart can hold and I haven’t even begun to grasp the depth of it, but on somedays I think I might explode.
Helene Doesn’t Care About 300 Or 2,134
Still, I am faced with this realization that even in Asheville, some 300 miles from the nearest coastline with an elevation of 2,134 feet can and will be wiped out by hurricanes. Our death toll continues to climb as people dig through the mud, fish through the water for bodies, and realize that their loved ones have gone missing.
Our neighborhood patriarch, who is now over 80 years old and has lived here his entire life, tells me he’s never seen anything like this as he rides around on his 4×4 checking in on neighbors to see if they’re okay. What the old-timers once called a “100 year flood” is now every few years.
I wonder if they believe in human-assisted global warming.
As he checks in on our community, I know that the surrounding mountain communities are doing the same. Checking on each other, sharing rescues, sharing stories, spreading news of what has happened to neighbors via mouth, and doing what they can to get by. I know this as a fact because not only is it happening here as I write this, but I heard this sentiment repeated over and over again as we waited in line with dozens of other people to enter the grocery store. There, we had our pick of whatever is left over before waiting in line with hundreds of other cars to stock up on gas for generators, chain saws, and vehicles.
The Generators Of The Night
The vibrant quiet of the forest night was cut last night by generators never turned off, and each morning I wake up to the sound of distant chainsaws doing the work of clearing the way forward.
After checking in with our neighbors and stocking up on supplies we do the same: rev up the chainsaws and get to work on clearing the driveway. As I push, shove, and toss entire trees or tree limbs to the side, I wonder how many times I’ll be repeating this process in my lifetime. Despite the fear that I felt when we fled the forest at daybreak during the peak of the storm just a few days ago — due to the threat we could sense as we listened to trees crash around us — I like the look of this wild landscape. I like the feeling of doing something useful and that matters with my hands. I secretly enjoy that I’m not bound to my phone, expected to reply to texts, calls, and Instagram DMs. Is it wrong to feel somewhat of a neutrality and relief when so much loss is ongoing around you?
I guess that’s the privilege of being lucky, the privilege of having resources and systems in place to help you be okay if you’re still alive.
By now you’ve heard about so many feelings that have stirred and settled inside of me during the hurricane: fear, awe, luck, helplessness, neutrality, and relief. But now I feel anger.
I’m Not Just Mad At You, Helene
Anger at those who continue to spread the myth that human-boosted climate change is imaginary; that it’s something the hippies made up for attention and something to do. For years I held up signs outside of the Smithfield slaughterhouse — the largest one in the world at the time — begging people in Duplin county (and beyond) to wake up to the fact that commodifying and farming animals was not only cruel and unnecessary, but that hurting our nonhuman kin in this way would come back to hurt us in the end via hurricane, flood, or mudslide. They mostly flipped me the bird or yelled at me to “get a job” as they drove by. If their job includes confining and abusing animals needlessly, while supercharging events like Helene in the process, isn’t it my job to say something?
Not too long after the protests I traveled back to the same location to wade through toxic water to check on them. Not long after that did some of those people send money or drive my way to wade through muddy water to check on my people.
The point is: we’re all in this together.
But who is to blame? Is it the farmers who confine thousands of animals in CAFOS and leech their toxic waste into the earth? Is it the legislators who do nothing but give out passes and prizes to those who are causing toxic algae blooms and destroying our waterways? Is it the CEOs of Exxon who don’t give a shit about human or nonhuman life? Is it only white people? Is it the men who cemented our horrific fucking government into place? Is it me who is typing this now on a (albeit, used) MacBook that was created at the expense of someone else’s life in a seemingly far away country?
It’s too much to unpack as I sit and write on a generator-powered computer and think about the rest of the trees that will need cleared later today, or the income I lost on the days where I couldn’t work. These shallow, immediate thoughts as well as the larger looming ones sit inside me. I feel guilty for thinking about money when people have lost their entire homes. Being human has become so complicated.
Donate And Think And Pray And Hope And
But there is one thing I am sure of: there’s only so much I can do. While you can donate and think and pray and hope and wish and volunteer and cry and check in and give and lend a hand, you can also change how you live in everyday life. You can adopt a completely plant-based diet, something that Harvard researcher Joseph Poore sites as one of the most impactful ways individuals can slow climate change. It eases the burden on the natural world when you stop supporting animal agriculture, an industry that kills between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals a day worldwide and is one of the leading causes of climate change, water pollution, deforestation, air pollution, soil degradation, and species extinction.
You can invest, at whatever level and pace is accessible to you, in cleaner sources of energy by embracing off-grid solutions and natural buildings.
You can work to reduce your reliance on food that was maintained by underpaid, undocumented workers and then shipped from one side of the United States to the other by shopping at your local farmer’s market, starting a garden, or even growing familiar herbs on your widow sill. You can repair your clothes and swap with friends instead of going out and buying new.
And while we hear again and again that the pressure to change and live more sustainable shouldn’t be placed on individuals, individuals make up the businesses who make up the companies who make up the industries who make up the laws who make up the government.
It’s true: some people don’t have immediate access to these changes (or maybe already live like this due to necessity). But there are countless others who can make these changes. And while we hear again and again that the pressure to change and live more sustainable shouldn’t be placed solely on individuals, individuals make up the businesses who make up the companies who make up the industries who make up the laws who make up the government. We can protest, we can lobby, and we can even try to change the systems from the inside out, but after a decade of doing all of these things I haven’t seen much change. I can’t control the system.
But I can be autonomous (to some extent) in what I do everyday, the stories I tell, in the mutual aid I engage in, and how I shape my community. I can work for more self-sufficiency and keep putting pressure on the system so that it eventually crumbles. In the meantime, we need not wait for anyone’s permission to start building something better with what we’ve got and who we know.
If you ever find yourself in a hurricane while the winds whip household appliances around you and entire homes float past you on the street, you realize there is only so much one can do. And yet there is so much one can do, if we’re only willing to be brave enough to do it.
- I highlight the word “wild” because it is starting to sound funny to me that we use it as a term to describe other animals who have thankfully evaded domestication — a sad standard of a way of being that is forcibly spread via colonization — and set ourselves apart from them. Wild is something I yearn to be. Something I am working on becoming. Or more accurately, something I am getting back to. ↩︎
