This is the second thousand-year flood I have skirted. The first was two years ago when I was trapped for a few hours at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, KY, at the Appalachian Writers Workshop. I didn’t leave my safe place high on the hill in Preece to go down and help with everyone else – my health wouldn’t allow it, I told myself. I’ve wondered a thousand times since then if my psychological sense of survival would not allow me to make my way down that hill on foot and trudge back up it with an inhaler in hand, rather than just claiming outright that my asthma and less than stellar health wouldn’t allow me to do what everyone else was doing. A thousand times, I have called myself a coward because I think maybe I couldn’t have handled what awaited at the bottom of that hill. I tried to make up for it later, pay penance, if you will, by taking load after load of supplies I gathered, and money I collected to help that community that meant so much to me. I knew then that my relationship with Hindman would never be the same. I would still love it – I would always love it. But part of me would always feel like I had turned my back on her in those first few hours of need. And I wasn’t sure she would forgive me, that I could ever forgive myself.
And here we are now, the unimaginable has happened again. Another thousand-year flood. Mother Nature can’t count. It has only been two years. But this time, it’s closer to home. In our own side yard, a pear tree came crashing down around 7:30 a.m. this morning. A little while later, a large branch out of one of the pines in the stand across the back yard followed suit. But we didn’t lose electricity, cell signal, or internet. We were fortunate. We didn’t take on water in our home. Our home is still standing. No one lost their lives in our neighborhood. Just tree damage, for the most part. An inconvenience. We were lucky, indeed.
The larger region was not so lucky. Towns I’ve traveled in and through to get to other beloved places. Towns I actually came of age in and around. Parts of Damascus (which I fondly called, “Damn-Ask-Us” in college, because my best friend in our Sorority lived there and it made her giggle), were all but wiped away. Tammy Robinson Smith, the president of our Lost State Writers Guild, owned a trailer park and car lot in Damascus with her husband Mike. She sent photos of the devastation. All but one trailer from the trailer park was washed away; the car lot – who knows where those vehicles have been scattered.
I know from helping in some small way and through watching over the past two years in Eastern Kentucky, the hard part is yet to come. Cleanup. Recovery. Rebuilding. The thing that struck me most as an outsider coming in was the mud. Mud has a specific look. A texture when you work your way through it. And a smell that permeates every fiber of your being. Forever. That’s what these communities will have to make their way through if they hope to rebuild in any way. And even then, some would say, the odds are stacked against several of the, the devastation is so overwhelming. I believe in strength from within; I believe in #AppalachianStrong. I believe in starting again and trying to make things better than they are now, maybe even better than they once were. But in economically-depressed areas, there has to be assistance from the outside, too. Still, nothing will ever be like it was before. Ever.
As a friend of mine said about Asheville, where they have lived for several years, “I worry about how the region will be rebuilt and for whom.” Will the average folks who were already being squeezed out to make room for the McMansions on the mountainsides be squeezed out completely during the area’s reconstruction phase? After all, whose money is going to be behind most of the repairs of things not covered by state and federal monies? There’s a lot to do; there’s a lot to ponder as we’re seeing to getting it done. Here’s hoping those little dots on the road maps come back to life, too.
Recent Comments