I was at my usual Monday appointment at The Sauna House last night, and the friend I always go with turned to me at one point and asked, “What were you doing a year ago today?”
He asked because—and if you’re here in Asheville, it’s because this has been extremely unavoidable—this past weekend was the first anniversary of Hurricane Helene.
A year ago last Monday, I was stuck back “home” in Pennsylvania, where I was stranded for, at the time, an indefinite period of time until ways in and out of Asheville had reopened. I was also running around trying to secure a birth certificate from the Pennsylvania Department of Records because I was set to begin a brand new job a year ago today. I needed a second form of ID as part of the employment verification process. My original birth certificate was in my Asheville desk, which, at this time a year ago, I wasn’t sure was completely dry or not (there were rumors that the bottom units of my apartment complex—I live in a bottom unit, FYI—had experienced some water damage, which thankfully turned out to be unsubstantiated). I received a call from a friend while waiting for my birth certificate to be printed. He was the last person in my roster I hadn’t yet heard from. He was fine, obviously, but had a scary evacuation from his now flood-damaged home through rushing water. It truly is a strange phenomenon to hear the kind of story you normally hear from, like, someone on the news in Arkansas or Missouri or some far-flung flyover state coming directly from someone you once shared an office with.
I made it back to Asheville the following weekend, and it was…something. I think what I’ll always remember is the quiet. It started somewhere around the Old Fort exit. Cell reception completely died. So did, for some reason, my car’s Bluetooth (I still don’t know if that was some systemic infrastructural side effect, or purely a coincidence). Either way, it was eerie.
I got rerouted off the highway in Black Mountain and had to drive through Swannanoa, where I got my first in-person look at the damage: houses missing sides with their contents strewn about the lawns, pickup trucks in trees, and trees through the sides of auto repair shops. Again, the kinds of things you typically see on the screen of your phone, but sitting there right in front of you. And even though Asheville was inundated with water, and this damage was from flooding, it had grown hot by the time I arrived back one week after the storm, and everything had dried. Dried mud leads to lots of dust. There was dust everywhere and on everything. The dust, along with the quiet—and even though Swannanoa was flush with mutual aid and recovery activity, there was still an unnatural lull to it all—more than reminded me of post-9/11 footage. I was being hyperbolic for literary sake, but that’s what I thought at the moment. That the dazed, dust-covered residents and helpers in Swannanoa recalled the dazed and dust-covered New Yorkers emerging from the bodegas, Sbarras, or Kinkos they had taken shelter in and wandering out into a forever changed lower Manhattan.
I swung by the River Arts District before making my way to my apartment. Seeing Swannanoa was sad and tragic, and all the other adjectives you use to describe witnessing real, awful tragedy, but I’d never more than driven through Swannanoa. River Arts is probably my favorite neighborhood in Asheville. It’s where I go to eat, drink, shop, socialize, and work remotely. Last year, I walked the greenway two to three times a week for exercise. And it was devastated. Second Gear, the second-hand outdoor outfitters, was a pile of rubble. I’d just grabbed a new flannel about a week and a half earlier. There was a shopping cart hanging from a telephone pole. I couldn’t see Hi-Wire Brewing—I’d had a beer there two weeks prior—due to the mountains of rubble in the lot next door to it. I was thrilled to see that my beloved Ultra Coffee Bar seemed to have escaped the damage. Unlike Swannanoa or the rest of Asheville, though, River Arts wasn’t quiet. The opposite. It was bustling.
I’m going to try and report this next memory as non-judgementally as I can, and try to remember that I too skirted around a road-closed blockade to take in the sights of the devastated River Arts District, but the majority of folks in River Arts that Saturday—the majority of the bustle—seemed to be folks collecting…content. People were walking around taking photos. More than one person was talking directly to what I can only assume was their phone’s video camera. Someone hung out the passenger side window of the van in front of me, recording their drive. And I need to be cognizant that by relaying what I saw there that day—by turning it into a blog for you readers to consume—that I, too, was on a mission to collect some content. But some of it—like the two different people I saw standing in piles of rubble looking into the distance as they were photographed from behind—just rubbed me a bit of the wrong way. I don’t think that you need to speak in hushed tones just because something awful happened. But River Arts just felt alive in a way that historically, it maybe wouldn’t on any other Saturday.
The quiet returned as I drove through town and approached my apartment complex. Minutes would go by—and I know minutes aren’t like hours, but we’re talking about a drive through a normally tourist-laden downtown and then along a very busy state route—where I saw no other motorist nor pedestrian. And it was weird. I was the only car driving up Route 74 to my complex. I’ve been the only car there before when, like, I go to the gym at 5:00 AM, but at 2:00 PM on a sunny Saturday afternoon? It’s unheard of. It’s unnatural. Sound came rushing back as I passed by Ingles, which had been turned into a National Guard distribution center and came with all the requisite flurry that comes with that, but then as soon as I passed it, the quiet returned. I didn’t see another car or person as I drove through my complex to my apartment, and in fact, the parking lots were super empty. As I walked into my apartment, the quiet was cut with several military-grade choppers passing overhead. It was, in a hyphenated word, post-apocalyptic.
I’ve covered this before, but I was unable to stay in Asheville during the week for the worst parts of that post-hurricane period. I work remotely, and as mentioned, had just started a new job (after being unemployed post layoff for most of the previous summer), and thus needed working wifi. I came back on weekends, but didn’t settle back into my apartment permanently until water was restored—not potable, but I was able to shower—and I was able to get online.
Maybe it was just my experience—comparably, my life wasn’t that negatively impacted by the storm—and maybe because two of my five years here in Asheville were during the depths of Covid, and thus not normal per se, but one of the most surprising things was how quickly things seemingly went back to normal. I’d wake up, go to the gym, work all day, then go on a hike or go out with friends, and sure, the hikes I was able to access were limited, and sometimes going out for drinks meant eschewing places we always went or having a craft beer in the shadow of a destroyed building, but well, as the saying goes…life went on.
Though I wasn’t necessarily personally affected the way many people were, I think about Helene quite a bit. I think about it because I still live here, and you do still see the scars on the landscape and in the city’s infrastructure. I think about it because places that were damaged and I love have been reopening (I spent time walking around the newly opened Marquee this weekend and had dinner on Sunday night at Zillicoah), and because you keep hearing reports of businesses closing, often due to the loss of tourism over the past year. I think about it when I walk around local shops and see books written about people’s Helene experiences and ornaments or artwork commemorating the flood, and always wonder whether or not profiting off the memory and the trauma is opportunistic in a gross way, a savvy way, or is a way to process the trauma. I think about when I run across different people and am reminded how they acted in the wake of the storm, or where effected by it in various ways.
That’s something I wish people would discuss more. The ways people reacted. Because while there is no right way to react to tragedy in the same vein as there being no right way to grieve, you can learn a lot about people—both good, bad, and somewhat ambivalently—by how they processed the strange goings on we have all lived in during the past year.
Many people frequently discuss Helene. I wouldn’t put myself squarely in that camp, but as someone who finds people fascinating, as I just said, I think about it a bit. Others want to put it firmly in the rearview, almost getting annoyed when folks bring it up. The friend I was at Sauna House with is usually in the latter camp. He doesn’t love reflecting on Helene, but he likes looking forward. However, I think none of us who call—or called—Asheville home are completely immune from being reminded (or triggered) of what happened here a year ago.
Funnily enough, a year ago, and without getting into the ins and outs and whys of a friendship that isn’t so much complicated as it is simply very human, said friend and I weren’t on the outs per se, but were taking a bit of a breather from each other. We both had pretty hard years in 2024, and I’ll just own that I didn’t handle things as well as I’d liked and probably lashed out at people that didn’t fully deserve it. It’s in the past now, and we’re good, but it is funny that a year ago, we hadn’t talked in about a month, and I don’t want to give Helene credit for repairing the rift, but we both found ourselves reaching out to each other in the aftermath to make sure the other was ok, which actually might be one of the more sensical things to happen after a tragedy; you can be angry or upset with your friends, but still, they’re the ones you want most to be ok.
I bring this up, because I’ve been semi-critical of the world’s ability to just…move on. On one hand, I get it. It’s a survival instinct, and like personally, I kind of forget the Covid existed unless someone specifically brings it up, which demonstrates that me personally, is not immune to moving right along. In fact, the amount of horrible things one (and by one, I definitely mean myself) can read or learn about that are happening in the world—mass shootings every other night, the flagrant degradation of American democracy, a world in which people are capable of heinous and casual (and casually heinous) cruelty towards one another—yet just continue keeping on is troubling. We just rant about it on Instagram, then like, turn our phones off for two hours to sweat out toxins that aren’t real and purchase $8.00 oat-milk chai lattes to help us “recuperate” from said sweating. But Helene wasn’t something I read or heard about. It was something I experienced and still experience. And it’s not been as much an education realizing how fast people outside of Asheville forgot about it, but just, hit a little more personally, I guess.
Conversely, what else can we do? The world is a cruel and unforgiving place. Large swaths of people are cruel and damaged and I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. Nature is fucking scary, and as much as we could cry out “climate change” (which for the record, I do believe is very, very real) or make Helene’s fury politically charged, sometimes nature just goes crazy and there’s nothing you could do but just hold on and ride it out.
Things have changed incredibly in Asheville since the storm. And much of it actually remains very par-for-the-course. My life has changed incredibly in the past couple of years, and some of that is storm related, and some is not at all. Some of the changes are visible. Some you need to be me to know.
Sitting on the porch of the Sauna House on a Monday night one year after Helene, you’d never really known that a once-in-a-lifetime storm was here last year rendering the city eerily quiet and permanently scarred. And if you saw my friend and I there together, you’d also think that’s very normal. Monday night sweats are a tradition we’ve been doing more or less regularly for a couple of years now. You’d have no ideas of any ups or downs or struggles or wins, just that two privileged Ashevillians were spending arguably too much money to forget any hardships or stressors in the name of wellness and would be returning home afterwards on lively streets in a city that at times feels like a parody, but at one point, in the not-so-distant-past, felt like maybe the joke was over. I’m ok with that very complicated, very human trajectory.
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