Wreckage, Revisited

October 10, 2024

I want to tell you that after being in Winston-Salem and returning to Asheville, I was shocked all over again by the ravages of Hurricane Helene.

After Helene—no electricity, no phone, no water—and me in the middle of raging C. diff, I high-tailed it to Winston-Salem as soon as the roads opened. I needed medical care and the basic services required by a person with relentless diarrhea.

While I was in Winston, I stocked up on supplies to bring back. I helped facilitate housing in the Piedmont for Western North Carolina families and pets. And I carried guilt everywhere—because I had electricity and water.

During the seven days after Helene that I was still in Asheville, I wept every day. The image of trees through houses and on cars never stopped moving me. Even the six blocks from our neighborhood to the I-240 on-ramp broke me—every single time, even when I made that trip several times a day.

Winston proved to be unnervingly normal: shopping, doctor’s appointments, 12-step meetings. Everywhere I went, I talked about “the storm”—how to help, where to send donations. Checking in at a doctor’s office meant rallying the reception desk to donate to Beloved Asheville, World Central Kitchen, or ROAR in Marshall.

On October 7, I turned 65. I brushed off birthday wishes and redirected the conversation—back to Helene, back to need, back to the land and the people and the animals. I kept thinking I should go home. But how could I possibly be helpful? There was still no cell service, no internet, no electricity, no water. Roads were closed. Gas stations were empty. Businesses couldn’t process credit cards. Everyone was paralyzed—including me, if I went back.

Today, sitting in the Ingles parking lot sobbing, part of me marvels that the vastness of this destruction still feels so alarming—when it should be familiar by now. Coming into town, I made stops to drop supplies from east to west, and every creek and cove looked like a wasteland. Tiny streams held the busted-up debris of mobile homes. Cars and vans and trucks and RVs lay belly-up in water and along riverbanks. And the train cars—fucking train cars—littering roadways hundreds of feet away from the river.

And the trees. Tens of thousands of trees on mountainsides scattered like tinker toys. Trees across roads. Trees tortured and twisted in every park and neighborhood. My insides feel tortured and twisted, too.

Driving through Helene’s wreckage, I felt something familiar: the warped, helpless feeling of our years inside the lamentably defective U.S. healthcare system. Maybe my body reacting to this disaster revived how tortured and twisted I felt as a patient—and as a caregiver.

Not once in fifteen years did I get seven days away to be normal. I just kept walking and working and driving through the wreckage—weeping and despairing—never able to step out long enough to get a new perspective.

I started out thinking this post would be about what it might have been like to leave healthcare hell for a week, then return and see it with new eyes. Now I know it wouldn’t have changed anything.

My only choice now—and my only choice in those years—was the same: put one foot in front of the other and do the next right thing.

Simple to say. Hard to live.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. 

— Heraclitus