Matching Tracksuits

The second day after the devastation of Helene was for me a day of cleaning again. Yesterday I’d started making piles of brush throughout the backyard. Today, I moved it all to the street. I left a couple of piles because they were primarily old wood (as opposed to the mostly-green wood I took out to the street) because I thought we might be able to make an ognisko from it all — or several, in point of fact.

But the most important event of the day was that we were finally able to get in touch with Ciocia M and her daughter C (essentially K’s sister and L’s cousin) in Asheville, a town which had received about the worst of the flooding here in the southeast. Two rivers run though Asheville, and they of course both flooaded. The Swannanoa River swelled to 27 feet above its normal level, wiping out the road that leads to M’s home.

We’d been trying to get in touch with M since yesterday, but we’d had no luck. We finally got to talk to her today, and our message was clear: if you can get out safely (which, from our research, seemed entirely do-able), get down here now. So M and C packed up some of the food in their fridge, put the cat in the cat carrier, and headed down.

Shortly after she arrived, A, another of K’s Polish sisters, arrived.

“Can we get you anything?” K asked.

“Tea,” A said, without hesitation. Her family has been without power since Friday, and a Polish woman who’s lived without hot tea for that long has one thing on her mind. But K, being Polish herself, had other things on her mind: “Of course, you’re staying for dinner, right?”

Soon, A’s husband P called. “Come for dinner!” we said, not making it a request or an option but rather a requirement. A demand, even.

P arrived and it was soon like all the Christmases and Easters our three families have spent together. P and I had a couple of beers and some laughs; the ladies had white wine and some laughs — hopefully everyone felt better when it was all said and done.

It’s a strange feeling having a mini-party in the midst of all this misery and devastation. The images coming out of the area where I grew up, for example, show the far-reaching effects of super-charged Helene. People have lost their homes, and some have lost their lives. But we have to be grateful for what we have, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge us for some relaxing laughs that set everyone’s spirits a bit at ease.

After P and A left, we took Ciocia M to the living room and taught her to play golf on the Switch. And thus we ended our first night together.

The question — the concern — haunting M’s thoughts is simple: how long will they have to stay with us? They’re welcome to stay as long as necessary, but that’s not really the issue. How long will conditions keep them out of their home?

Asheville is bad: Greenville is heavily damaged, but Asheville is simply wrecked. “It’s like the apocalypse,” M said. Water lines are broken; power lines are down everywhere; the winds blew down countless trees; rivers have deposited tons of mud on all the streets; flood waters have swept away buildings and cars then totaled buildings they left behind. It will take months to get everything back to some semblance of normal.

And for C? Her senior year is now thrown into doubt. How will they possibly be able to go to school? How will they make up the lost time?

These are of course questions no one can answer. All the steps ahead of everyone working on the recovery effort: before power can be restored, the damaged lines and poles must be accessible. This means the fallen trees have to go. But can the crews get to all the trees given the bog that Asheville has turned into? So many pieces to coordinate. And this is happening in communities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

The commentators are right: this is our Katrina,

It was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm. We’ve heard that before. Ivan was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm, and by the time it reached us, it was some light wind and a bit of rain. So we were probably all a bit skeptical about what would happen when Helene rolled through.

As with Ivan, we canceled school (rather, it was an “e-learning day,” which means little work in a practical sense). I thought it would be a relatively easy day with few stresses.

And then Helene rolled through: winds up to 70 miles per hour. Eight inches of rain in our city. It was, in short, a disaster. There are trees down by the thousands throughout the city.

The adventure began last night: I stayed up to make sure the rain was not getting too heavy and flooding our basement. I kept checking our sump pump in the crawl space, and every time I looked, it was dry.

“Maybe we’ll make it,” I thought.

This morning K got up early for work and when she saw the basement was still dry, she did some yoga, ate some breakfast, and checked the basement one last time. That’s when she came to wake me up. Surely she envisioned the normal routine: shop vacs going like mad in a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to keep ahead of the flood. That’s surely what she was thinking as she came to wake me up.

And then the power went out.

We spent most of this morning, as a result, trying to get water out of our basement with towels, buckets, and brooms. We worked for hours and seemed to get nowhere. The water in the backyard continued to rise, reaching its highest level ever: a good bit over our trampoline. Still we fought. Eventually, the rain slowed and then stopped, the water went down in the backyard, but we still had water coming into the basement. Around eleven this morning that finally stopped, too.

We went out for a ride to see if anything was open and to see how the town looked. Not good.

Especially Conestee Dam. Conestee is our favorite local park, but it has a dark side: the dam that makes the lake (though now it’s more a swamp with the sediment that has gathered there over the decades) holds back untold tons of toxic waste that textile mills upstream dumped into the Ready River a century ago.

The century-old dam’s structural integrity has been a topic of much discussion locally and in the state capital, and the powers that be have finally taken the first steps to solving the problem. But when I saw what was happening there today, I feared it might be too late.

In the early evening, we saw power company trucks working on our street, and within a few minutes, we had power again. But it’s spotty: the houses on the street that intersects ours are still without power. In the neighborhoods around us, some streets have power and others do not.

Other areas have gotten it worse, though. Asheville, where we used to live and where Cocia M and her daughters live (although the oldest now lives in Charlotte during the school year) got pounded: