By Walton Conway
We are having a winter! New snow has fallen upon old, and will be with us for some time…a phenomenon that hasn’t happened in recent years. Temps will remain below freezing for a week, or maybe longer, and are dipping into single digits each night. Aside from feeding animals and basic barn chores, these are good days to stay inside. They encourage contemplation.
Just last night, here in the middle of January, I cut up the last of the Wolf River apples to dry…from September’s harvest. It amazes me just how long it takes to work through a bushel these days, a couple of screens per session, finding time early of a morning when I’m not pressed to be somewhere at a certain time, or on the rare evening when I still have energy to stand at the counter and crank the apple peeler. This time of year it’s the wood stove that does the drying. Back in October I would have used the heat of the sun, setting screens of fresh apples out on my south-facing deck on clear, crisp fall days, before I had need of a fire.
But then this past October didn’t give me time to dry apples. The unforgettably beautiful fall days were filled with something even more memorable: hurricane cleanup! Helene hit us hard. For years I’ve listened to old timers talk about houses floating away in the 1940 flood, and now I’ve seen it…in a flood that by all standards seems to have surpassed what happened 85 years ago. We are now living through our hundred year flood and its aftermath.
I was cycling through the Shenandoah National Park on an 8-day bike tour when I took note of the weather report for back home in Boone, NC. Ray, the local weatherman, is not usually given to hyperbole, so I paused at his dire warnings of an impending tropical storm and flooding the likes of which we had not seen in our mountains in our lifetime. I sent the link to Carolina, the daughter taking care of the farm in my absence: start battening the hatches, I told her; get the horses in the barn and secure any lawn furniture. What more could one do?
By the time Helene hit, I had made it through light rain to Washington D.C. and was visiting with Mary Ellis, the daughter who had recently bought a new car and was therefore ready for me to pick up the car I had loaned her (my transport back home). There was nothing to do but wait out the storm.
I set out the next morning, unaware of what trouble I might encounter. Communication with home had been severed. Carolina did manage to get out a text, letting me know she and all critters had survived, fences were down, the driveway was washed out, there was no power, but the house was intact. When I got off the interstate, I began to see damage: trees down, debris strewn about the creeks. There was the realization that I was the only car on the road, then came the barricade–washout ahead. I rerouted through Damascus, but learned at a gas station that the roads out of Damascus were impassible. Was I going to make it home at all? A little research helped me figure out that the highway up from Wilkesboro was still open, one of the few ways left to get in and out of the High Country it seemed. I circled around and after a couple of extra driving hours, did, in fact, make it to Boone.
The final stretch of road from Boone to Todd was eye opening! There had been so much flooding down Howard’s Creek that house debris was piled high along the highway there. A truck trailer was bent around a tree, suspended over the creek bank. Construction materials were strewn about as if dumped from the sky. One house had been completely washed away, leaving an empty foundation. I would later learn that the only two storm deaths in Watauga County had occurred just up the creek in a landslide. The sight was sobering.
The road home was damaged, but still carrying traffic, unlike so many other creek-side roads in the region that were obliterated. By straddling the gully cut in our driveway I was able to reach the house. Home, with a capital H: it was still there…intact…in good shape even! Carolina had mopped up buckets of seepage down in the basement, but otherwise our high-standing house survived unscathed.
Walking around the farm on the beautiful days following the flood I began to survey the damage. Trees down everywhere, but none on houses, barns, vehicles, or horses! The massive leaning hickory by the chicken house had finally fallen, its roots no longer able to hold it up in the saturated earth. Somehow it missed the chicken house by inches, but it crossed Old Mountain Road (the Willet Nest driveway) and extended well into the horse pasture on the other side. As the root ball of that tree came up, the peacock nursery cages and donkey pasture fence went down. Good thing Penelope was in the barn with the horses!
That hickory was just the beginning. Huge oaks, poplars and maples had fallen across the Willet Nest driveway higher up…it would take me days of sawing to clear the way to our mountain top vacation rental…thank God we did not have stranded guests in the house at the time!!
The worst of the damage was to our farm road itself. The 4-foot culvert carrying Bee Balm Branch, the creek that runs alongside the road, had been buried under a massive pile of rock that had washed down the mountain. The rock shut off the culvert and shifted the raging creek up onto the road, which became the new creek bed, only not a good one. The water tracked the road for 100 feet or more, cutting parallel ruts–three feet deep in places–up and down the road, making it impossible to drive on. If it hadn’t been for a fallen tree that blocked the water’s path and shunted it back into the creek, it might have run a quarter mile down to Willet Miller Road’s macadam, carving and slicing and washing away road surface as it went. Yet another bullet dodged.
When your whole community is devastated, and your daily life, and all the plans you’d made for the weeks to come are turned upside down, it’s only natural to be shaken. When the bridges you cross on a daily basis are washed downstream…bridges that have been there forever…there is an awful moment of reckoning where one thinks, “Oh my goodness, what just happened?!?!” There is a surreal feeling of weightlessness, of falling from a high cliff over the ocean, and looking down, seeing the rocky shore below approaching quickly, but being unable to move. We are locked in a moment of suspension.
Gratitude replaces the disbelief as we begin to grasp what happened, and realize it could have been worse. If downed trees and washed out roads were the worst of our damage, then Hallelujah! Our house did not wash away, nor did we have three feet of mud in the basement, nor did we lose life nor limb. We’re going to be ok, and for that we can thank God and praise our lucky stars, then help our neighbors who got hit worse.
To be awash with heart-warming gratitude seems to be the silver lining we can find around most any tragedy. We are humbled by the outpouring of support and aid that reached our community quickly. We are warmed by the willingness of friends and strangers alike to help us in our time of need. Social barriers are broken; the political divide is crossed. In our worst hours we are uplifted.
To maintain a sense of gratitude as time goes on and we return to our daily lives can be trickier, but doing so has the power to impact the trajectory of one’s life. To be grateful, one must practice gratitude…that is…one must train the mind to see the good, and then to consciously decide we are going to let the good outweigh the bad. Gratitude is the antidote to depression. Gratitude is the magic powder that makes everything better. It helps us see that the glass is half full, not half empty. This perception brings us happiness, and can do so no matter how dire our circumstances. To heal from the tragedy of losing my wife to cancer, I consciously focus on happy memories and remind myself daily how lucky I was to have had good times with her. I am deeply grateful for the time we had together, and this fills my heart with a warm, fuzzy glow that keeps me afloat.
Action pulls one back to reality, and so we scramble to make things as right again as we can, to clean up, to try and establish order, to make things the way they were before the big rain.
It took me two days of digging with the trackhoe to find the mouth of that culvert and open it up so the creek could flow again in its proper course…and get off the road. It took three of us working two and half weeks to fill the ruts and repair the road. To do so we hauled down all the rocks from the Upper Orchard…rocks our forebears had cleared from the pasture and piled high…that we had been looking at for two decades wondering how and when and why we were ever going to move them out of the way and put them to good use. We topped those big rocks and filled crevices with countless tractor loads of creek stone that had piled up on top of the Rock Bridge down by the Pioneer Homestead. Finally we had gravel hauled in from the quarry…which we were fortunate to get from a dwindling supply…to ice the cake and make the road look like new. The deep ruts are now but a memory of what happened during Helene, and already hard to imagine without pictures to help.
I think not of the eleven days we spent without power, hauling up gravity-fed spring water from the Pioneer House, our rustic rental which has no electricity anyway. That seemed a minor inconvenience. My mind turns not to the numerous guests who had to cancel their October bookings due to the disaster and loss of power to our rentals – that was a bummer for them and for me. I like to think, rather, of the young, intrepid newly wed couple that, despite all, drove 30 hours down from Manitoba to spend their honeymoon isolated on the Pioneer Homestead, unaffected by the hurricane, living life the old way for a few days, without phones, computers, appliances, bells or whistles -- and loved every minute of it. How terribly ironic -- our only October guests in the year of 2024! This memory makes me smile.
Now, four months later, we are still clawing our way back to normalcy. Great progress has been made, but there are still disaster debris piles at the end of driveways, and bridges out, and repairs and renovations underway. It must all be taken in good measure. I welcome this winter rest, and am glad to give my chainsaws a little time off. The rental houses are fully operational, and the farm roads and major pathways are clear, thanks to the help of some guests who arrived with chainsaws of their own and a will to work! But the task ahead overwhelms me. Many of the horse and hiking trails are still covered up in fallen trees, which I suppose I’ll be sawing up for the rest of my life, I half-jokingly tell people. Nearly all of our many creek crossings need heavy work before a horse, much less a vehicle, is able to pass. There are chasms routed out by the flood where once there were flat fords. Mother Nature has her way of reminding us of her wild side, that our efforts to subdue and civilize her only scratch the surface. We are small; she is vast. It is a hard lesson to learn, but we need it…to be humbled from time to time. I will let this lesson soak into my dense brain slowly, as I move forward, task by task, all through 2025. God willing, we will get ‘er done.
Some good things are happening on the farm as a direct result of the hurricane. The idea of farming mushrooms had been simmering on a back burner in my mind for some years, but green hardwood logs are required, and I never felt overly inclined to go out and cut them. Helene laid them at my feet in abundance, and so we took some time out from cleanup to inoculate oak, hickory, poplar, and maple with the mushrooms that love those species: shitake, oyster, and lion’s mane. With any luck we’ll be harvesting from Helene’s windfall for years to come.
I wonder, also, if Helene is not nudging me into building that new barn and bunkhouse I’ve been dreaming of for so long…down at Kermit’s pasture…where I could start a horse boarding business (I don’t need any more horses of my own, do I???). So much beautiful, valuable timber fell in the storm that I have a mind to pull it off the mountain (Helene may kill me yet!) and saw it up into the lumber I would need for that project. Imagine with me the associations we would build in our minds as we walked in and out of that barn on a daily basis, feeding horses, knowing where all the wood came from, thinking about how a horrific hurricane gave rise to dreams and new directions. Now wouldn’t that be fun?!
