One Month After the Hurricane in Asheville, North Carolina
There is a man swinging a pick mattock against the floor of a Presbyterian church. Normally, as a backcountry trail crew, we used this tool to maintain trails in Wilderness areas—federally protected land where there are no roads. Now, NCDOT advised that every road in western North Carolina should be considered closed, and instead of restoring a vision of wilderness in the mountains, we’re gutting it out of town.
But Asheville is gone, it was said early on. Marshall is gone. Hot Springs, gone. When the region lost power, it seemed that everyone had vanished. They did not. One month after the floods of Helene, the most dizzying thing is not what’s gone, but what remains. The things that remain are in the wrong place.
There is a Ford F-250 packed with eight adults headed into downtown Marshall, where the French Broad River rose 27 feet in two days…