Barbara Roether
[A the foot of our road at noon, September 27th]
Notes from the Flood:
On September 20-21st Wet Cement press was celebrating our 5th Birthday at the first annual Punchbucket Literary Festival in Asheville. Editors and writers flew in from California, Hawaii, and Utah. We drank at brew-pubs along the French Broad River. Tony Wallin-Sato and Chengru He, launched their new books at the festival.
The weather was warm and downtown Asheville was packed with throngs of musicians, poets & outdoor artists markets; the atmosphere was celebratory! We didn’t know it was the last weekend before everything would change. You never know when “before” is, you only know after. I wanted to share some notes about “after the flood.” I’m very aware as I write this that many of my neighbors are still dealing with enormous loss; destruction is widespread across many communities. Two Asheville non-profit organizations that I can urge you to support are listed at the end of these notes.
Impermanence is the nature of things. Buddhists keep telling us this and we know it in ourselves; even if we prefer to pretend otherwise, nothing stays.
On the 26th we knew the storm was coming and that it would be fierce, it was already raining, but not that hard. I drove up to the hill to the library, a gloomy building that sits across from the graveyard, and took out some books about local forests, for a class I’m teaching. There was no one else in the library. Then I took our dog for a walk as I do most days, along the park that follows the Pigeon River through Canton, NC, near where I live. This past summer, the two of us swam in the river often. I came to know the uneven stones on the bottom, the persistent current in its clear green embrace, cleansing after a hot day. Today the river was high already, turgid and running fast, it was easy to see that if it kept raining the river could flood into the park as it is prone to do. I noticed the black walnuts fallen on the path, their dark stain. The empty football stadium waiting for Friday night’s game. The yards in front of the houses near the river were scattered with children’s toys and bicycles. I drove home via Rt. 215 and up the high ridge where we live.
In the middle of the night, the winds came. In my dreamy state their howling seemed like a visitation from angry spirits, zephyrs and jinns, spinning near then, far, roaring then momentarily calm. We were startled wide awake when the 100-year old oak in the front yard, fell onto the wires, shorting the transformers out with a deafening explosion, a shower of sparks, and booming light that lit the windows up like daylight. We peeked through the front door, saw the tree across the road. Then we lay awake in bed, listening to the storm and rain. I prayed to the other two ancient oaks behind the house not to fall on us. I’d always felt they were the guardians of this house, beneficent beings of patience and wisdom. My instinct was right, those trees didn’t fall. Eventually, the wind calmed. The light rose.
By 9am on Friday the 27th, there was already an ad hoc crew of local guys with chain saws, cutting up the mammoth tree out front. They pulled the enormous sections of oak trunk off the road with chains attached to their pickup trucks. They had a lane of open after a few hours. The locals here are generally rugged; and my neighbor (also a native) told me they were eager to open the lane since the only other way out, downhill toward the river was flooded. After the storm there was no cell service, no internet, no power. We only knew what we had seen. I wanted to see more.
I walked around the bend then down the road toward the river but I didn’t get far. The vast rushing lake that I saw from the crest of the hill stopped me in my tracks. The landscape had been transformed. Where usually there was a broad intersection of several highways, and bridges, and a row of businesses, there was a vast brown torrent of water filling the valley from side to side. In the rushing current semi-tractor trailors floated like toys, shipping containers, tool sheds, the bright red cab of a truck, and a car moved by in fits and starts. Trees moved along waving their branches as if to be saved. Churning, the water would propel a branch into the air, only to swallow it again a second later. Across the great brown maelstrom of water and debris a hungry growling and rumble rose into the air.
The water roared, racing forward. I felt suddenly a deep primordial fear, that I was glimpsing something that was usually hidden, something that couldn’t normally, or shouldn’t be seen. I was suddenly a lone hominid on some ancient savannah with scant means of understanding the phenomena in front of me. It was like witnessing the vast time/space scale of the powers of earth formation; time travelling at whip-lash warp speed through the formation of topography, the geological forces of earth making, earth destroying. The place this had been, was obliterated, spun through the maw of the enormous planetary machinery of transformation. The cool green river that had greeted me at the end of the day, was this now.
There is a strange sense of psychic defeat in the face of this, this kaleidoscopic impermanence. The flood revealed the radical metamorphosis that is the underlying nature of things, at all times. This is what is out there. In case you had forgotten. In case you were pretending otherwise. Stasis is one aspect of matter but it is far from the most common. Precipitation, condensation, gravity, wave action, centrifugal swirls, and electricity: we live in a world supercharged with movement.
Watching the great dragon of the river rise out of its container, and race headlong into all available space had in it also a sense of something triumphant and free. Is it the glory of excess, immediately preceding creation or destruction? I was reminded of these lines from the Rig Veda. “For who knows or who can say, from where we came or how creation happened?”
By Sunday, just two days after the deluge, the flood waters of the Pigeon River had largely subsided. The floor of the lakebed was drying already. The bridge and roads, though badly damaged, had reemerged. I walked along what had been the riverside park. The re-arrangement of materials that a flood carries out is a kind of collage art piece. A surrealistic arrangement of items chosen by chance operations. Juxtapositions that jar the senses, puzzle, amaze. Amidst the pile of rubble near the bridge we noticed a number of green bell peppers. Not just one or two, but hundreds. Why green peppers. Why this and not that. Had the peppers been in one of those trucks, in someones field? Their bright green skin (often unbroken and intact) was visible everywhere. One of the things that floods do is rearrange matter. Loosen what stood in one place and bring it to another.
[the river rose over 25 feet]
There was the stump and root system of one tree held in the branches of another tree 15 feet overhead. There are a surprising number of blankets and rugs, things twisted and draped in the style of Christo. A detail that interested me was the amount of material that had been, it seems by the force of the water, packed into any crevice or crack, that might allow it. It was like a fabric made of debris. Where there had been fencing especially, it looked as if the water had “woven” (water as weaver?) this material, sticks, leaves, grasss, into whatever it passed through. As if the extant world was a sieve, that might catch parts of the new world brought by the incoming deluge. There was something in it that seemed intentional. Something in it that reminds me of poetry, the way words catch at our ideas as they pass, or is it the other way around, ideas catching on words. Maybe this is the lining of how the world is made, how what happens is always shaped by what was there before. A hurricane in a hardwood forest is a strange thing. Wind moves all that it touches, which then becomes part of the wind. The weight of the trees gives the wind that weight. Air moves wood, wood moves mountains, mountains move us. We are small beings.
[In front of the houses across the street from the river, are piles of belonging, the houses with doors gaping open, the former residents trudging in boots with armloads of more to throw away. Is there something we can bring you we ask, one couple, because it feels bad to even take a picture. But they shake their heads, “We’re alright. What are you gonna do?”
The flood has brought destruction closer to my consciousness. I’ve been thinking more of the people in Gaza, and Lebanon, especially the children, what it means to live in the midst of destruction. How being witness to destruction is mentally destructive, it hammers the infrastructures of our being; the part that hopes and builds. Impermanence is the nature of things, but destruction is ever only useful if creation follows.
If you would like to help the recovery in Asheville there are two organizations I can recommend:
1) The Story Parlor: This center for narrative arts has been a vital nexus of the literary community in the region, and is run by a family with two small children. You can support the arts and this family’s livelihood by donating to. https://storyparloravl.com/donate
2) Rainbow Community School: While Asheville public schools remain closed “indefinitely” Rainbow is opening (even without running water) in order to help children and families return to learning and rebuilding. A 40 year old Asheville institution Rainbow has a Promise Fund to support storm-impacted families. https://rainbowcommunityschool.org/annual-campaign-giving/
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