this is probably part 1 of a few posts to try and remember this experience. remembering is the point.

meta being the ability to see multiple points, sometimes at once, along a specific horizon or axis.

local being the inability to do that and just see where you're at and evaluate what you can do. often, there is no looking backwards along this dimension. only now or forwards.

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there's this great sequence at the beginning of Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" that goes...

"Be afraid

And you will have a window in your head."

i've learned a lot about my neighbors in the last 48 hours of life as impacted by hurricane helene. 

helene, in western north carolina, is being called a 1,000 year flood. it's aggressively affected our little town of black mountain, north carolina, not to mention most of wnc and eastern tennessee.

this post will be an attempt to recall as much of that life as is worth doing.

thursday, 9/26

i traveled back from birmingham, alabama from a work trip, starting around 2:30pm eastern. i'd heard we were getting a lot of rain from hurricane helene, but it didn't register much. being in the mountains of western north carolina, a hurricane hundreds of miles south, I guess, sounded like more steady rain and perhaps high winds. 

the more i talked to sadie on the way home, the more concerning it was. at this point, i can't remember what all came together to point at our underestimation of this storm, but that was becoming obvious. 

to this point, our concern had just been whether it was safe to drive home through the mountains. 

around 5pm on thursday, we started to wonder whether sadie (pregnant, 3rd trimester) and the kids should go and stay with some friends. one in town, one out of town a few minutes. we decided against that. most of our conversation still surrounded whether i should just stay at my friend drew's house in asheville that night and drive to black mountain that morning. thankfully, drew was willing to drive me to black mountain. 

we got there around 9:30pm if memory serves. 

there was already a lot of rain just from this storm, but there'd also been a decent amount the week before that caused the creek behind our house and the surrounding rivers to be higher than normal. 

sadie and i watched tv that night, talked about the work trip, and i ate some chicken noodle soup. 

we also talked about what we needed to do/plan for the next day when the hurricane was going to hit properly. from what i can recall, this meant mostly talking about when the storm was supposed to pass and just hoping the creek didn't run over in the backyard since we'd never seen that and didn't know what it would mean. 

-this is what the creek looked like at 5:39pm on thursday.-

friday, 9/27: 6:15am - 11:30am

i woke up around 6:20am. there was no power in the house. the whole street was dark. 

i started pilling about the house just wandering what to do and bumming out that i couldn't make coffee. i checked the town facebook group and things looked pretty serious. this the first time i remember feeling a bit scared. the police department was making various announcements about road closures, evacuating if you're in the flood plane of the swannanoa river (we were not), and other frightening things.

there are 2 exits from where we live and one had been closed the night before. the other was mile or so stretch of road that's not in great condition. it seemed like the second exit should also be considered impassable. 

i felt out of control. there's something about water getting "out" of it's usual pathways that's really unnerving, and i felt like we were in that. the day before, i had read that they were calling this a 100 year flood and it seemed like that was on. 

some time around 6:30am, i went outside to check on the creek. water was pooling in the backyard now and was about an inch high on the back steps to the house. never seen this before. nothing even close. 

when we moved in, my neighbor had told me about a time in another storm where i had come over the banks and his sense of wonder about that was memorable. 

around 6:45am, i saw a bright flashlight approaching our driveway. i thought this might be the police or fire department going around telling people to evacuate. again, dose of reality here. it felt like we were too late to do anything about or situation other than discover 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best options. didn't like that feeling. 

i scrambled to look for my shoes and raincoat to go out and meet them. 

it turned out to be my neighbor, christian. he had come over to tell me that the 2 exists were both closed and the highest ground we could now get to was a camp and conference center up the road. 

as we stood there, essentially shouting at one another in order to hear over the rain, everything he said came through with absolutely clarity. so when he told me next that he'd heard through an official at his work that the north fork dam might be about to collapse, it instantly caught me up to exactly where we were at in this whole process: we had to get out and find somewhere higher. 

i went back inside to tell sadie. we agreed that a dam collapsing made it seem like we had to go a.s.a.p. we decided to call a friend from church. he's older, and in these situations, it feels more useful to call older people. 

he felt like the concerns of the dam breaking were premature. reasonably, he noted that if this were the case it would've been on the major alerts going out. over the next hour, i made calls to several other friends to see where we could get to. on the street up to the camp and conference center, one friend had a vacant house. we called, no answer.

it must have been 7:45am or so now. we decided to start packing in case we did need to leave. we put clothes for us and the kids in a laundry basket. we packed our laptops, got our "important things folder" with the important stuff, and got ready to leave. 

i went outside to move the van up the driveway. water was now high enough that my feet were submerged. a few more inches and the van would've been taking on water. when i got back into the house, we talked through it a bit more and it just became obvious we needed to go. 

as sadie got the kids up and got them some breakfast, i went ran up to the road we'd heard was the last open to higher ground. it was clear to the entrance, but no idea what the conditions were like on the way up. when i got back to the house, we decided we had to leave. 

the water was too intense on the back side of the house, so we walked out of the front of the house to take things to the van. this too was submerged. no way to get to the car without completely submerging our feet and getting muddy. that's not a big deal, it's just an attempt to remember how quickly everything was happening.

this -- how quickly water can rise -- is a meta cognition that was missing. we were completely sucked into the local experience of what was happening. so much so that we couldn't have known we were leaving about as late as we safely could. 

with the kids, dog, and basic stuff in the car, i went back to get sadie and lock the house.

we pulled out of the driveway around 8:15am. we decided to go to a fire station near our house first and did, but it was closed. across the street was the road to the camp and conference center, but we decided against going up there. it just felt too unknown. 

plus, by this time our neighbor had offered to let us into his vacant house directly across the street from ours. 

having left our house, even though it was the right thing to do, i felt like we were absolutely exposed.

the kids were in the back seat and i can only imagine what was going through their minds. shepherd said he wanted to go home. he seemed scared. i guess home at the point just meant, "i want to be somewhere secure." but again, who knows what was going through his mind. i'm 31. he's 4. there's no chance our filter of this last hour was the same.

i pulled the car into john clements' auto shop and just scrambled my brain for what we should do. our final options were either going to our neighbor's house or going to a stranger's house right next to the auto shop. they'd posted on the local facebook group that they'd open their house for anyone still looking to get out. 

sadie said we just needed to go to our neighbor's house. i pulled the van out of the shop, very aware of staying on pavement so we didn't get the van stuck in mud, and went to our neighbor's. 

he'd explained where the spare key was, but i knew i wouldn't be able to retain that essential information when he told me the first time. too much going on. my brain was short-circuiting i think. 

i pulled into the driveway and got my phone out to call him again. water had gotten into my phone so it was both difficult to use the screen to do anything and hear out of the speaker. i ran back to the car, asked sadie to dry it off, and dialed shayne. 

we got the kids into the house. they were back to being fascinated by everything now. the house is being worked on, so it had tools everywhere. shepherd likes tools. 

i went back out to the van to bring our essentials in and then backed it onto the street in the "getaway" position. 

we immediately felt safe in this house. but, at the same time, we were still very close to the now-river that was 25 yards away, consuming our house. it felt like it'd have to rise a lot more to get over to us and cause this whole cycle to repeat itself. 

but then again, when i walked outside at 6:15am that morning and there was an inch of water, i never imagined the surge would nearly get to the windows on our house. so, it could happen. 

everything i was wearing was soaked. i'd decided to wear my trail running shoes (red hoka zinals) -- just to be able to move quickly if needed. the kids and sadie were relatively dry, but we got them together in blankets and tried to get warm.

the house has a big window in the living room looking directly over at our house. so we had a perfect view of the progression (regression) happening over at our house. 

30 minutes after being there -- getting the kids a snack, checking out the rooms, finding some toys -- things were looking scary over there. 

-couldn't have driven out of this. thanks be to God we got out when we did.-

the next 3 hours were some of the longest i think i've experienced in my life. it very well may be that in some instances, time can slow down and stretch in a way that the soul feels differently than the body does. 

i watched the shed and car in our backyard wash away. 

i watched and assumed that the house would too. 

i was trying to be aware of sadie and the pregnancy and not cause more stress than needed by narrating the whole thing.

i was still being a dad, trying to get the kids to treat one another well and not yell or steal things. same thing i would've been doing at the farmer's market on a saturday morning in black mountain. 

i was on the ground in one of the rooms with greta making a pillow fort out of a blanket and shayne's old volkswagen van seats. 

i was getting any news i could on what the rivers and dams around us were doing and what that meant for our safety -- or lack of it -- over the next few hours. 

the rain, we thought, was originally supposed to let up around 2 or 3pm that afternoon. 

thankfully, it let around 11am. 

i went out to the street to talk to dane. he's a neighbor two houses down from us, creekside. we'd been texting all that morning to keep each other posted about the decisions we were making to leave or stay. i felt in it with him.

christian, 6:45am neighbor who warned of the dam breaking, had left earlier that morning at some point. seeing him gone spooked me pretty good. 

during this whole sequence, from leaving at 8:15am until the rain stopped around 11am, i just felt like i'd really screwed up. i felt like we had no good options and that i'd missed the opportunity to have good options during this whole thing.

i missed the opportunity to have any meta-awareness about how to move here. i was now way deep into acting locally.

and i felt like i'd failed my family here.

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neighbors

shayne has now told me that he was shoveling water out of his basement the morning of the storm when he thought about the creek behind our house (his mom used to live there) and offered to let us into his house across the street. 

this emphasizes the small-decisions-produce-outsized-returns phenomenon. actually, not really even that. it more emphasizes that most of our thinking and decisions don't take much of our brain compute like they seem like they would on the other side of whatever action comes from that thinking and those decisions. 

i.e., shayne thought, i wonder if they're taking on water over there? he texted me. 

that text became our life-line. maybe even literally. 

my relationship to, and with, my neighbor's that morning is a bit incomprehensible to me. it is both quite simple and the most the extraordinary thing i've ever experienced. simple because i needed help and they helped. extraordinary because we experienced each other's humanity, all at once, and found out that it is good.

for two years, i'd know them through their proximity and small conversations. 

we have never shared a meal together, ridden in the same car, known what music we like to listen to, or known each other's parents. 

and that made no difference when it came down to it. 

i think that this is not surprising. how many times has this story been told after natural disasters or any kind of chaos? maybe down there, inside of us, when it matters, we are good to one another. 

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