Somewhere over the rainbow

Surviving Hurricane Helene

Photo by Ryan Karcher

It was dark. Darker than I had ever seen outside our home. Power and cell service had already been out for days and the stars looked like diamonds, clear and cut sharp in the sky.

I didn’t know it yet, but our small holler was part of an outage that stretched across an entire region.

I didn’t know it yet, but we were in the midst of surviving a natural disaster that was literally shaking our mountains down to the ground.

I didn’t know it yet, but our entire town was being buried in a 1,000 year flood.

There was a lot I didn’t know, not yet. But in those days of darkness, somehow, I think, my daughter did, because there was one song she asked for over and over again…

By candlelight, in her rocking chair, while we wondered how her grandparents were, if our friends were safe, what was going on outside our holler— as the rains fell and landslides wiped out communities and tornados tore down entire mountainsides of trees just beyond the safe haven of our ridge—my daughter asked again and again “Can you sing Somewhere over the Rainbow?”

And so, on those dark nights of worry and rain, I sang, and sang and sang.

It's been a while since I’ve posted here. A long time, it feels, since I’ve been able to string more than just a few words together. In the time between my last post and this one our family, and everyone I know in this region, has lived through a life-altering event. We survived Hurricane Helene.

In late September a hurricane, traveling over 400 miles inland, hit our mountains in a completely unexpected tidal wave, triggering a series of devastating, earth-shattering events. Neighbors, and their houses, swept away. Sacred groves in the mountains torn down like matchsticks. Entire towns, including our own town of Marshall, destroyed.

My beloved apothecary, a sanctuary set on an island in the middle of the river, flooded eight feet up to its windows. The last decade of my life, and work, discarded and left among a foot of toxic mud.

The floodwaters were so unimaginably intense, the ground in many places has been stripped down to bedrock. They are calling this, not just a weather event, but a geological event. One we will literally be able to see in the stones, the bones of our Earth, for millennia to come.

It’s felt, in a way, like witnessing the end of a world. Especially in those days without power or cell service, when every grocery story was empty, all but one highway out of the region was broken, and there was no gas or water. Still, there are communities without power. Still, that are places unreachable except on foot. Still, there are piles of flood debris everywhere. The mud turning to dust that is toxic to breathe in.

On the days when my brain isn’t working right, when I struggle to make breakfast or remember to run my daughter a bath, I remind myself that we all lived through the ending of a world.

And in the midst of it all…I parented.

I’m still trying to figure out how to match these two puzzle pieces together in my mind. That our world was shattered, and while it all broke into pieces, I held my daughter’s world together. Or tried to, at least.

We were lucky. We didn’t have a tree come down on our house. She didn’t witness a landslide take out our road. Or worse— the nightmare—the waters take those she loved. Children here, more than I can currently hold in my fragile mind, have witnessed this all.

I try to shield her and yet, still, she knows.

Me in my studio apothecary

I hike into our destroyed down to see my apothecary for myself and get stuck in hip-high toxic mud. I crawl out of the quicksand on my hands and knees, hyperventilating and wondering if I will be able to make it back home to my daughter. I try to hide this event from her, even as I’m processing the trauma of it for weeks. Spontaneously shaking and crying and unable to touch mud, even the simple garden kind. She asks me one day out of the blue, “Mama, you aren’t going back to your studio again, right? You aren’t going back?”

We have a stack of things we try to save from the apothecary in the driveway. FEMA tells us to wear Tyvek suits and full respirators anytime we’re handling something that’s been in the flood. One day when taking off her shoes after being in the garden, my daughter exclaims, “Mama, we can’t touch the mud. Don’t touch the mud!”

I’ve said the words “gone” and “lost” so many times she’s become sensitized to them. Like when I talk to a friend and acknowledge “yes, that place is gone” or tell the organizer of a local distribution hub “yes, they lost everything.” The words, like an aching tooth, have become so tender we’ve had to start using other ones.

In a moment of needing peace, desperation, space, we put on Bluey and she ends up sobbing. It’s an episode where Bingo let’s go of her stuffed animal in a nebulous. With tears streaming down her face my daughter gasps, “it’s LOST!”

I normally try very hard not to be on my phone around her. But when cell service comes back on after five days, and I can finally find out what happened to our mountains, what happened to our town, our friends, our loved ones, I’m glued to the phone. I cannot put it down. I’m flooded with information and images. Things I can’t unsee, but I absolutely need to know.

She asks me what I’m looking at, and I tell her I’m texting people we love to tell them we love them.

We get into the car to try to find my parents a couple towns over. We pass by tree after tree down on power lines to get to their apartment. When we arrive, they aren’t there, so we sit and wait. When they walk in twenty minutes later and see us there, whole and untouched, we cry.

They come to live with us for several weeks. We still don’t have power, and without power the well pump doesn’t work, but we have a nearby spring and a camp stove to cook on. In the original night of the world falling down, we come to live with one another again. We share childcare duties, making meals together, taking turns crying on the porch. It’s shattering and beautiful and right in a way I cannot name, except to gesture toward the embers in the woodstove and sit beside it.

There’s a deluge of texts from friends. They all say the same thing. “Are you ok? Do you have food? Do you have water?” We’re all making sure those we love are alive.

As the beauty of fall begins, we try to keep some semblance of normalcy. A play date with the neighbor’s kid. Three meals a day. Books at night. Our local playground is gone, its entire structure pulled into the river and carried downstream. But we play in the creek outside our house and I find myself slipping in and out of my body. I’m here with my daughter one moment, splashing in the water, and in the next I’m seeing how things could have been so powerfully different. If the winds had brought the hurricane slightly more to the west, this creek would have turned into a river. How the gardens would be gone, the road likely nonexistent. How I probably wouldn’t be able to touch or look at this beloved water for a long, long time.

I talk to a friend who is living in one of the hardest hit areas of the mountains and ask her if she’s been to visit the river yet. The river that was her refuge, her sanctuary. The same river that washed away her friend’s houses, took away their community center and broke the bridge that leads to town. And she says “no, not yet.” She likens it to how she felt about touching her vagina after birth. “It took me six months,” she recalls “until I was ready to see the way that landscape had changed. It feels the same with the river.” The birth portal has been torn open.

It's been nearly two months and sometimes my two-year old daughter will still say, out of nowhere, “remember the flood?” It’s been two months and yet we are all still deeply in the thick of it. Literally still digging out mud in buildings, finding homes for people who lost theirs, remaking entire roads.

After the storm, I’m so ecstatically grateful just to be alive, to have my child be alive, all my normal overwhelm with parenting evaporates for a time. I’m both more present and more fractured. Less present and more whole. None of it makes sense. I hold her close and she asks me to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow again.

We have sung that tune so many times since she was born, and yet it wasn’t until those dark nights that I remembered the actual context of this song…

Dorothy singing as the sky over her home darkens. Singing, as the storm draws closer. Singing, as the tornado comes to tear apart the world she has known. Singing, in the moments before she’s transported into another world.

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.

Photo of our town, Marshall NC

A friend tells me over the phone, “hearing about how things are in Appalachia right now, it feels like you’re reporting back from a possible future.” I get goosebumps when she speaks, the kind of goosebumps that mean truth.

The towns where we live in the mountains were once listed as a “climate haven,” and now many of those same towns are gone. It feels very much like we got a glimpse of how the ending will be. When the catarophe comes, when the cell towers finally go down, when the only water is what runs down the hillsides.

We got a glimpse of how this birth we all know is coming will be, and have lived to report back. Here is what I know:

At the end of the world we will be holding our children tight.

At the end of the world we will be creating stories to help our children understand the ending of the world.

At the end of the world we’ll creating a new world for our children.

At the end of the world a new world will begin.

As so much around us ended these past months, absolutely nothing stopped. My child still grew, she evolved, changing every day. She started talking in her sleep for the first time. Something about apples…

She held my face in her hands and said “Mama, sing the song again.”

Somewhere over the rainbow, we will learn how to fly.

Now that I have lived through the end of the world, I have seen just how much survives.

Somewhere over the rainbow, a new future, a new world exists for our children. A world we can’t conceive of, one that likely scares us if we dwell too long on how exactly it will come into being. But a world that holds healing still. A world that holds hope.

A world that our children, in the deepest parts of themselves, arrived knowing they were meant to midwife into being.

And so, as parents standing at the end, our job isn’t to hold onto what is ready to be swept away, this world we’ve been handed.

Our job is to ferry our children to the bridge. Not over the water—they will have to cross that way on their own— but just far enough so that they can sing as they walk into the new world awaiting them.