Flood waters displaced a small barn and dropped it in front of the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, North Carolina (all photographs by Jessica Martell and Zackary Vernon)
After the Deluge: Appalachia’s “Climate Haven” Myth Unravels
Transplants, retirees, and second-homers thought western North Carolina would be a refuge from the ravages of climate change. Hurricane Helene thought otherwise.
When Hurricane Helene roared across Appalachia on September 27, it pummeled a region that academics and journalists in recent years had labeled a “climate change haven.”
In Boone, North Carolina, where we teach at Appalachian State University, it sometimes seems like every other car has a Florida license plate. In response, popular local bumper stickers read, “Boone Sucks. Tell Your Friends,” or, more pointedly, “Go Back to Florida.” Despite persistently harmful stereotypes and widespread cultural marginalization, Appalachia has become an increasingly desirable place to live. This shift has been motivated, at least in part, by new narratives about climate change.
“Appalachia’s importance in the coming decades may be based on another of the region’s valuable resources—habitable land—and its ability to serve as a refuge to those displaced by climate change,” West Virginia native Nick Brumfield wrote back in 2021. Three years later, the continuing flood of transplants, retirees, and second-homers in Boone illustrates how many agree with this premise.
However, after Hurricane Helene, we are left in disbelief that a refuge from climate change exists here or anywhere. This is our experience of the storm.
Thursday, September 26
We go to sleep a bit nervous but, in hindsight, foolishly confident. This is just a storm, we think. In the decade we’ve been married, we’ve weathered a dozen this bad. The chickens are shut in their coop, the windows closed, fresh shavings piled up to keep them dry. We have flashlights, batteries, candles. We have food and a few bottles of water. We do not fill the bathtubs.
No evacuations were ordered before Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. A Buncombe County communication officer describes the storm as “like being hit by Niagara Falls for five hours straight.”
Friday, September 27
We wake in the morning to a dark house. Without power, we heat water to lukewarm over a Sterno and make pour-over coffee so weak it’s the color of tea. We are both professors, and we spend much of our lives online. It is both liberating and disorienting to be so still, so utterly suspended in the present.
Helene is barreling its way up the sternum of the country. The wind lashes. Leaves, shredded to bits, plaster themselves against our windows in crazy patterns. The creek a mile away sounds like a train.
Our dog, Turnip, won’t eat. She paces the house, aware of the weather, how extraordinary the wind.
Trees fall in all directions across our driveway, crisscrossing it like a wooden version of the laser beam security system you see in films. They also fall from our property onto the rural highway next to it. We’re overcome with guilt that it’s our fault, our trees’ fault, that the road is now impassable. And we’re angry about everything—the growing piles of leaves, sticks, and debris, the fallen trunks too many and too wide to manage, the weeks of cleanup ahead. This anger will persist until we eventually get out and realize how lucky we are and how ruinous the damage is all around us.
Trees snap and fall in the surrounding forests, on ridges above and below. We think about death, our own deaths, more than once.
Midmorning, the sound of a chainsaw comes from the road, very close to our house. We dress for the downpour and go out to see a man trying to cut his way through three massive hardwoods that have fallen from our property, blocking the way. He has parked his huge red truck, fully fitted out. We help him heft limbs and logs from the road as fast as he can cut them. Trees snap and fall in the surrounding forests, on ridges above and below. We think about death, our own deaths, more than once.
Eventually, he can slip through the fallen trees and continue driving down the mountain. We never learn his name.
All day, we try to manage the drains in our driveway. They are constantly overwhelmed by water. We remove leaves each hour on the hour. We forget once, and the garage is breached, the space quickly filling. We fight back with comically inadequate brooms.
By the afternoon, our road is a river, brown muddy water rushing so fast and deep, the rapids carry full trees down. The culvert at the bottom of our driveway is clogged with rocks and sand and branches, and a lake forms around our mailbox. Wading into the knee-deep flood, we worry about water-borne diseases and chemical spills. We dodge sharp detritus—nails, car parts, sheet metal—rushing by at speed and try to recall when we last got tetanus shots.
The storm subsides by evening, but trees continue to fall. We hear their crashes, feel the thuds in our teeth.
The Associated Press reports that Hurricane Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of water east of the Mississippi River. If that amount was concentrated just on North Carolina, it would cover the entire state with three and a half feet.
Saturday, September 28
There are no birds or birdsong.
Our chickens silently venture outside the coop. Their steps are timid, exploratory. They are testing themselves once again on terra firma.
We have no power, no internet access, and no cell service. We are totally cut off, an island of two.
We have a fridge and three freezers. Attempting to protect ourselves from future disasters, we expanded our cold storage during the COVID-19 pandemic. All of them are still cold, but the clock has begun to tick. Every minute means loss is coming closer.
We search through junk drawers and forgotten boxes in the backs of closets for anything useful in this new life. We find an old camping stove and coffee pot. This will become a lifeline, a reason to get up in the dark mornings.
We clear enough trees by afternoon to get out of the driveway. Now, we discover the scope of the devastation—the houses and barns reduced to rubble, the roads washed away. Every single power line is down; the poles that held them are smashed to pieces. We drive as gingerly as we can, around massive trees, piles of dirt and rock, over and under the lines. We hold our breath superstitiously, hoping it will save us from electrocution. We are silent, except for an occasional Fuck, which neither of us realizes we’ve said or heard.
The little unincorporated township of Valle Crucis where we live has been swallowed by the Watauga River. Halloween pumpkins are suspended twenty feet up in the trees, like lanterns illuminating the high watermark. The local corn maze is half smothered by mud. The park where we walk daily with Turnip has become the river’s dumping ground. Three teardrop trailers and a red barn have been displaced, carried downstream to rest at the entrance of the park with random pieces of other people’s homes, other people’s lives.
FEMA estimates that only four percent of American homeowners have flood insurance. Many people in western North Carolina cannot claim insurance for water or mudslide damages because of coverage “carve-outs” that date back to the 1940s, when private companies decided they couldn’t properly predict floods.
Sunday, September 29
Turnip is bored and anxious, on constant alert. She clearly feels that her world, our world, is askew.
We try, with our rudimentary skills, to rebuild our driveway. Our road, now dry, has become an endless procession of line workers and the National Guard, uniformed and helmeted, in their enormous tan vehicles. We wave as we uncover drains and culverts, removing several tons of sand and stone and slopping it into the newly eroded gullies. We’re already thinking about the next storm.
We dodge swarming yellow jackets as we work. Their underground nests have been demolished by the flooding. They never sting but worry us to distraction. They don’t seem angry, just confused.
We build an impromptu outhouse and use it as we run out of the rainwater we collected to flush the toilets.
The simplicity of our lives feels anachronistic. Simplify, simplify, advised Thoreau. We’ve done that, just not voluntarily.
A periodic text breaks through our unreliable cell service. Friends describe what happened using words like “biblical,” “apocalyptic,” and “war zone.”
A periodic text breaks through our unreliable cell service. Friends describe what happened using words like “biblical,” “apocalyptic,” and “war zone.” Asheville, Marshall, Hot Springs, Chimney Rock, Swannanoa: whole towns drowned in muddy water. We can’t look at the pictures they send us; we can’t look away.
People outside the region begin to hear how catastrophic the toll is for western North Carolina. National outlets start to show how dire our lives have become.
Monday, September 30
Our friend Mark texts. He and his family are leaving town. They heard exchanges of gunfire in the woods behind their house. After some debate, we decide to stay, locking our gate for the first time in seven years.
We eat the last unspoiled food from our freezers, desperate to get to our most prized dishes and ingredients. At the bottom, we find bags of vegetables from our past gardens. The work that went into preserving them suddenly hits us. Amending the soil, setting up irrigation, sourcing uncommon seeds, tending, weeding, harvesting, chopping, freezing.
Using firewood, we grill the ungrillable, frozen waffle fries and broccoli tater tots.
Our friend Miles tells us about a Victorian house on the Watauga River. It survived the infamous 1940 flood, and the former inhabitants marked the high water point on the wall. Helene’s floodwaters rose six inches above it.
We hear that helicopters have dropped body bags into isolated hollers. They wait, circle back, and airlift out the dead.
Our heads fill up with words. We don’t know what to do with them.
All over western North Carolina, grassroots support systems activate. With a flourish of regional character, mule teams bring supplies and assistance to impassable areas.
Tuesday, October 1
These days we sleep like logs, exhausted from hard labor, or else fitfully, dreaming of water and mudslides.
The flood crests are strewn with the bodies of dead animals, and the turkey vultures have begun to gyre above our valley.
But the little birds—the chickadees, juncos, and finches—have returned too. They flutter first in the bushes as if relearning to fly. Then they take to the sky, early heralds of a landscape coming back to life.
We make it into Boone, playing power line roulette. We buy supplies both for ourselves and to give to F.A.R.M. Cafe, a nonprofit restaurant downtown that has become a hub for donations and the armies of volunteers arriving each day. Our offerings add to a mountain of water and nonperishable food so large it threatens to block the entrance to the cafe.
With friends we’ve been fretting over, we share hugs and local scuttlebutt, feeling a sense of community again, outside of ourselves. Everyone tries not to cry.
As furious as the storm, think pieces retracting the “climate change haven” narrative start rolling out in national and international publications.
Wednesday, October 2
As we’re drinking our coffee, we hear a knock at the door. Our island has been invaded. The knock is loud and rough. We fear intruders, marauders. But when we open the door, it’s our neighbor Jeff from the other side of the valley. He says he’s here to help clear our driveway. We didn’t ask for this, and the generosity nearly knocks us off our feet. Our driveway is passable but still covered with trees, including several that we drive under quickly in the hopes they stay up.
We survey the trees and then get to work, cutting and hauling until the driveway is as safe as we can make it.
Jeff is a professional fishing guide. He says he’s excited about a great reset for the trout, a period for nature to restore itself. He hopes tourists stay away for a while to take the pressure off, giving the wild trout a chance to renew their populations.
Thousands of people in our region remain without power or safe drinking water. The Blue Ridge Parkway, America’s most-visited national park, is so severely damaged in North Carolina it has closed. The death toll exceeds 230 and may continue to rise.
Thursday, October 3
Still without power and water, we spend the day in Boone. We ponder a sign for the American Red Cross Disaster Shelter that concludes, “Sign Courtesy of Piedmont Natural Gas.”
The return to Appalachian State’s campus, which is deserted but has power, wifi, and running water, produces mixed feelings. Students send frantic emails asking for extensions on assignments we’ve already forgotten existed.
Our friends Dwight and Kyle offer us showers and laundry. At their house, we drink drinks that are actually cold. We order Indian takeout. We remember what life used to be like.
We return tonight to our house. Through the darkness, a tiny glimmer: a blinking colon on the stove. The power has returned for the first time in a week. We reset the stove’s clock, grateful it is ticking again, at least for now.
The mistake of labeling Appalachia as a climate haven is the latest chapter of a long history, wherein Americans project exploitative fantasies onto the region without paying much attention to the realities of the place and the people who live here. Appalachia can’t be a haven for anyone, newcomers or otherwise, if there is no care ethic, no sustainable infrastructure, no forward-thinking leadership, no deep respect for its complexities.
October 4-14
The catastrophes that used to happen in hundred- or even 1,000-year intervals are now happening every five to ten, creating a new timescale, accelerating beyond belief. Although the disaster clock may be speeding up, in the weeks to come those who live in this region face a long, slow recovery full of exhausting and traumatic circumstances. The clean-up process is striking in its unevenness. As the strewn landscape gets tidied up, elsewhere mountains of trash line the streets: mattresses, furniture, flooring, muddy rugs, moldy drywall pulled out into the daylight. The rivers remain clogged with battered cars and remnants of bridges. The National Guard is ever present, their Chinooks roaring through the blue sky.
Recovery efforts are creating new tensions and exacerbating old ones. Boone’s vibrant weekend Farmers’ Market has been displaced by FEMA trailers, to the dismay of local producers, who rely on autumnal income to make it through winter’s dormancy. Yet those without housing must also be settled in before winter. Affordable housing for locals was already scarce before Helene. Now opportunistic investors circle the area like turkey vultures, making lowball offers to survivors still reeling from their losses—houses that with a fresh coat of paint and some Instagram magic will inevitably transform into tomorrow’s Airbnbs. A few precious weeks of leaf-peeping remain, and debates over whether to fully reopen the area are fraught. Boone’s economy relies heavily on seasonal tourism. But with secondary roads still gaping and debris piled around every hidden curve, those tourists will also tax the fragile infrastructure. Hotels have filled with workers who have come to assist with repairs, and anxieties intensify about which visitors should receive priority.
Republicans and Democrats volunteered alongside one another to clean up flood-ravaged neighborhoods. Atheists and evangelicals alike cooked at F.A.R.M. Cafe to provide meals for the line workers, the bridge builders, the haulers of trash, the rescuers of pets.
The word “community” is still on everyone’s mind. We talk to friends and strangers, and they all mention how the community pulled together—the hours and days we spent helping one another—delivering food and water, chainsawing trees, rebuilding washed-out driveways. We talk about momentum, our ongoing desire to serve, to show up for those around us whose living conditions will continue to be dire.
For a beautiful moment after the storm, political, religious, and class divides felt suspended. Power outages reduced the relentless alarmism of media, and we remained blissfully unaware of conspiracy theories about lithium or the southern border. Republicans and Democrats volunteered alongside one another to clean up flood-ravaged neighborhoods. Atheists and evangelicals alike cooked at F.A.R.M. Cafe to provide meals for the line workers, the bridge builders, the haulers of trash, the rescuers of pets.
The question now is whether the community spirit will continue once the power is back on and the internet reconnected, when we return to work full-time, when winter comes and drives us all indoors. You can already see the disaster fatigue, donation fatigue, and volunteering fatigue registering on the weary faces around us. People are tired, and it’s understandable that generosity will flag. We also worry that communities can’t continue to be resilient as natural disasters increasingly become the norm rather than the spectacular. With pits in our stomachs, we watched lines of traffic leave town, moving on to the next disaster zone after Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on October 10.
Four years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic, despite all the tragedy, felt like it might have a silver lining. We dreamed that American precarities, after being so dangerously exposed, would be replaced by fairer and more sustainable systems. Such lofty dreams, however, were largely abandoned, and the status quo reestablished itself.
Helene has left another opportunity in its wake. We could once more take heart and imagine a better tomorrow for Appalachia, for the South, and for the nation. We hope to vote, to volunteer, to keep our community in mind, in short to fight like hell to make sure we seize the opportunity this time. But whether this latest round of windblown horrors leads to some sort of reset, like it might for our wild trout, is yet to be seen.
About the author
Dr. Jessica Martell is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She is the author and co-editor of two books about literature, food, and environmental change in the early twentieth century. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in many scholarly collections and journals, including Modernist Cultures and Gastronomica.
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Zackary Vernonhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/zackary-vernon/
Reading this from Washington, DC, where it seems impossible anything like this can ever happen here. And yet… This reflection is as sobering as it is eloquent. I am grateful to the authors for having the courage to translate this traumatic experience into narrative.