We live just west of Boone in the Sugar Grove community on a steep gravel drive, and there is a culvert near the bottom that is given to clogging. My wife and I woke particularly early Friday morning and rode down in the dark to check it. I had been digging it out every few hours for the past two days, and just as I had feared, it was clogged with debris from the rain that had been falling slowly but steadily. Luckily, we caught it minutes before it overfilled and flooded the road. We drove back home in time to make coffee just before the power went out, feeling pretty good about ourselves. We shouldn’t have been so sanguine.
The rain started in earnest around nine, and then the wind. The trees began to swish, and then crack, the white pines losing their upper boughs, an apple tree coming down across our driveway. But all in all, it didn’t seem that bad when we emerged around one to walk down to the main highway, the day suddenly calm and radiant. Though the culvert had remained open, it had proven not to be enough, and the water had overrun the road, washing it out.
We kept walking, gradually realizing that what felt like a small private inconvenience was actually a communal disaster. Much of the flooding in Western North Carolina, at least the small corner to which I am privy, has been catastrophic. We live just above the Watauga River, and walking down to the Highway 321 bridge, my children and I were stopped in our tracks.
The river, drought-stricken and boney just days ago, had spread over the entire valley and was now rushing over the highway bridge. Pinned against it was a shipping container we knew to belong to neighbors, and trees that cracked, folded, and disappeared beneath the span. Watching the debris, it was easy enough to make out what belonged to friends: someone’s front porch, the sign for a local landscaping business, a bright white propane tank that moved with incredible speed before it was sucked under. The air was full of yellow jackets, which seemed incongruous with an otherwise lovely late fall afternoon. But like so many of the folks standing on the highway, they had nowhere else to go.
Driving toward Boone this morning was much the same. Trees and powerlines and rockslides. Houses inundated with mud as the water begins to recede. Fields of trash and cars washed from driveways. The slide off a children’s swing set caught in the upper limbs of a tree otherwise stripped bare, a little checkmark of bright blue in a landscape washed to a monochromatic gray.
But resilience is already evident. Linemen are out. The county is clearing fallen trees from the road. We’ve cut the apple tree blocking our drive. My wife and children and I were clearing debris off the highway in front of our road when our dog came barreling down and disappeared behind a house. We began to call for him and a few minutes later found him being petted by a neighbor.
We were walking him back across the road when a man came running up to us.
“Is everyone OK?” he asked. “I heard yelling.”
“It was just our dog,” I told him. “We found him. He’s fine.”
“Thank God,” he said. He’s fine. We’re all going to be fine.
Here’s how to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene
