Move slow and mend things

because we don't have any better option. A brain-dump dispatch from the end of Day 9.

Saturday, October 5, 4pm

It’s the end of the ninth day without water or power at our home in Asheville. The windows are open; I can hear a katydid’s high pitched chirp and the neighbor’s generator and and a helicopter flying overhead. On the other end of the sofa, Rosie is re-reading Mockingjay, the book lit by the window, while Jack and Owen play poker at the kitchen table. They finished the Virginia Woolf puzzle this morning. We have put batteries in the vintage boombox, but most of our CDs skip.

The moonflowers I planted in late spring have climbed all over the fence and just started blooming last week.

I’ve told a few people in recent months that I didn’t know what I would write about next, because both of my books were prompted by very specific heartbreaks, and I was hoping to write something that wasn’t born that way.

I still can’t really grasp the reality of what we’re living through. I want to church this morning to charge devices and make phone calls. We have power and wifi at church at the moment, but still no water. For several hours, I called and texted and emailed, starting with the sixty-five women on my women’s Bible study list.

I still can’t really grasp the reality of what we’re living through. So many people I called today told of fallen trees that missed their homes by inches. That missed their kids’ bedrooms by inches. Others are out of work and can’t make rent. A whole district filled with art and life is just gone. One woman was standing in her home when it cracked in half from mud underneath it. One woman sounded happy: she’s heard from more people calling to check on her this week than in the last decade. Another woman has been without power or cell service all week, with trees blocking her road, and still hasn’t yet seen the news of what happened outside her neighborhood. She doesn’t know.

Driving home, every traffic light save maybe one was out, all the way from downtown into east Asheville. The only open places downtown are places offering aid: free food and water and charging stations and portable showers.

I can take the highway to get home, but south tunnel road — the way I usually go every morning, taking Rosie to high school before I settle in at the office, is still inaccessible. Rosie and I have a tradition, especially in September and October, of exclaiming every time we turn on to this road, because at 7:55 am in these months, the light and fog over the mountains are brilliant and different every day. It’s always a show.

The kids are still out of school indefinitely. Some parents have started enrolling their kids in other school districts. Some are banding together to organize homeschooling coops (also near-impossible without water). I can’t stop thinking about the kids in unstable home situations who have already had their education disrupted by covid.

I stopped at Whole Foods to see if I could get sausages to cook on the gas grill on the back porch tonight, but they’d lost power again and were closed. We will cook pasta in chicken stock on the camping stove, and add canned chicken and Alfredo sauce, and eat honey crisp apples for dessert. We are not lacking anything, really. The wall of my dining room is lined with boxes of granola bars and nuts and crackers and dried fruit.

*

At a Creation Care Alliance conference in January 2023, Avery showed a map that illustrated likely climate migration routes. Coming from two different directions, they converged in Asheville, a climate haven.

Warm air can hold more moisture than cool air. (Read some preliminary science about Helene.)

One town just north of me recorded 31 inches of rain.

With or without climate change, there aren’t safe places on earth. I know this. I know this is what it means to live in a damaged world.

We talked at that conference about what it would look like for churches to be hubs of resilience in a damaged world. I think about that, and about what it means to choose repair over damage, love over convenience.

When the storm ended on Friday, and a downed tree blocked the entrance to our neighborhood, neighbors with chainsaws gathered and worked until it was clear. Our neighbor across the street brings us a bag of ice every day. On Chestnut, I passed “charging stations” that people with power had created in front of their homes for their neighbors to use. Farther up in the mountains, mules are delivering insulin and people are sharing the garden produce they canned just last month. When a friend left the hospital yesterday morning, a local business was there hanging out fresh biscuit sandwiches and coffee. “The people who are invested in Asheville will stay and rebuild,” he told me. “The people who just saw Asheville as an investment will leave.”

Meanwhile, FEMA is on the ground and helping enormously. They brought in a flock of trucks to the hospital and drilled a well. Now the hospital has water and increased capacity. I’ve watched the national guard clear roads and helicopter in supplies. If you’re seeing people on social media or the news saying FEMA isn’t doing anything, please tell them to stop. (On the other hand, this does seem like a great moment to put pressure on the cell phone companies and private energy companies to invest their profits in infrastructure rather than just dividends. (Am I using that money language correctly?))

It feels like both are necessary for timely resilience: the neighbors and their mutual aid, as well as the mighty federal resources.

But so many of the ways we survive this also seem to exacerbate the problems that exacerbated the storm. The gas guzzling generators at individual homes, the billions of plastic water bottles and granola bar wrappers and cheap beef cooked on gas grills and pasted between bleached flour buns. All our habits of unsustainable convenience contribute to a warming earth, a decreasing biological diversity, a weaker ecosystem, and can we ever change them? I suppose, on a large scale, we won’t until catastrophe forces our hand, and even then I imagine we’ll find ourselves in two classes.

*

Scott told me this morning that a decade ago, the Navy realized that their sailors were only using GPS. They’d stopped learning how to navigate by the stars. And this, they knew, was a problem.

I wonder what it means to re-learn ancient languages. Who wouldn’t want to be able to navigate by the stars?

Tomorrow at church, we’ll gather to pray and listen to ancient words and experience the grace of God magnified in our lives. We’ll open our basics closet and hand out everything we can to those in need. Next week, we may be able to open our kitchens. And most of us, even if we left for a day or a week, will come back and together make something new, and see things made new.

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Three things:

• Please read Amanda Held Opelt’s dispatch from Boone, and follow her on IG. Blue Ridge Public Radio on instagram is also a good source of local news.

• My diversions, when I can manage to download something, have been:

  • North Woods on audio

  • Iona Iverson’s Rule for Commuting on Libby

  • On tv: Nobody Wants This (amazing chemistry between the leads, but I don’t love the ending), the Columbo reboot, and English Teacher (after the cafeteria scene in the pilot, Jack and I were hooked)

  • Music: Woodland by Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Manning Fireworks by local boy MJ Lenderman

• And the best thing I made before all this happened: a baked kale salad with griddled goat cheese

Thanks for your prayers.