A generation defining event

Sitting in front of the nation with cameras rolling and microphones tuned and asked, “Can you give us a sense of what it is like there?”  You stay on message, not untruly, you speak of the resilience of community, hope in recovery, the goodness of people coming together.  But in the 5 minutes you are allotted how can you give people a sense of what it is like to return to your heart’s home, the most ancient seat in the mountains of the world, to find it forever altered. 

            Black Mountain may be a town of 8,500 people, but so many more would say, “It has always been home to me.”  As the center to a number of conference centers and camps the area has always had a profound spiritual impact on those who have spent their summers in the shadow of the Black Mountain Range.  “A thin place,” as our Scottish minister once said.  Where the separation between heaven and earth is so thin the two are nearly indiscernible.

            For us, it was the place that divined our meeting.  It is where we were married, bought a home, gave birth to our first child, return to year after year to come back to ourselves.  Perhaps something rare this day in age, something to be envied, to have known a place as infant, child, and man, passed along from generation to generation.  Perhaps a rare thing to be connected so intimately with a spiritual home.

            But for so many friends, that is exactly what Black Mountain is, being the center for Montreat, and Ridgecrest, and Christmont, and Blue Ridge Assembly, and Cragmont, and Rockmont, and Merrimac/Timberlake, a spiritual home that has formed our being.  Though circumstances may not permit us to live there, we are like exiles who carry their home in their heart and look for their return.

            And so, we exiles watched as a collective from afar with only the pictures of those familiar places overcome by brown rolling waters receiving unreliable reports of the damage, unable to then understand the devastation, and completely helpless against the trauma of it.

            As I packed the boys off to school, watching them cross the drive with their backpacks bouncing atop skinny little legs a text from our renters, “A BIG OAK HAS FALLEN ON THE HOUSE, WATER POURING IN ON ELECTRICAL PANEL.”  Then nothing.  Communication was shut off.  The lights were out, the roads failed, and the mountains went back to as it may have been 100 years ago, but now with 100 times the people and hundreds of lost lives by the day and rising.

            Those of us that watched from our secure homes and work experienced the various stages of grief.  The denial, the bargaining, the disbelief, the overwhelm.  But not anger, not for us.  The anger instead was replaced with a sense of urgency.  Urgency to be there, to see, to process, to work through the emotion, and to begin the recovery.  A sense of urgency to fight the damn storm, to return what was to what is, or in the least to the new norm.

            There was no question about going.  Go we must.  A late text from a neighbor, “The neighborhood could use water, chainsaws, and ice,” then again nothing as day one closed in total darkness to the mountain. 

Then Saturday morning and it was clear, a truck full of bottled water and ice wasn’t going to be enough.  We needed a U-Haul, and we needed to fill it.  The intermittent messages “We need you…help…water, diapers, cooking propane, formula…” It wasn’t a question, but a calling, it wasn’t debatable.  It was inevitable.

            Networks make good levers to lift heavy loads, and that place has the advantage of having a built-in network.  With a few calls relief efforts were underway here in Virginia, and the communities from across the country began to send in contributions.

            U-Haul discounted the rental, money from donors known and not known began to fill accounts and on Sunday, in 4 hours of heavy lifting the truck was loaded, potentially beyond capacity, full of water, food items, propane, diapers, and wet wipes.

            Something odd then, after having loaded the truck we were committed to attend a fundraiser for a good cause, and with tickets purchased well in advance we hurriedly dressed in slacks and white collared shirts and flowing summer dresses on a beautiful golden Tidewater evening to dine on fresh oysters, tenderloin, and roasted farm fresh vegetables, wine and fine whiskey cocktails toasted as a black tie jazz band serenaded the unaffected.

            Yet, our hearts 400 miles away in the ruin of our hometown where our neighbors stood in food lines and looked to supply trucks for their next drink of water, some walking 10 miles along washed-out roads, climbing over downed trees and power lines in hope of making it to the town square so they could communicate to the world beyond that they were indeed alive.

            Two communities in juxtaposition, a microcosm of the world at large where news of the day was displaced war refugees where instead of hurricane force winds man-made missiles displaced whole peoples in utter devastation in which no insurance policy would cover the leveling of a home, and no disaster assistance was to be air dropped in overnight, and in which there was no telling when the metaphorical storm would pass and recovery might begin.

            And so, exhausted and overwhelmed, we returned home from the galla, to put our children to bed, and now hearing reports of the darker aspect of the chaos where a few took will in what they felt they were owed, breaking into homes and businesses, holding the hospital at gunpoint, fear and desperation setting in, and the tellers not immune themselves from the trauma, themselves worn thin.  How reliable were their tellings?  Another story in which a tractor trailer full of water upturned and the community began to distribute the needed supplies, but the local corporate grocer called out the town’s police, asking them to turn away from search and rescue of victims to protect ruined property.  “No,” the police said returning to the saving of lives as the community Robin Hooded the water to distribute to those in need.

            “You need to know what you are getting into,” she said as the lights were drawn, but as exhausted as we were, there was no sleep to be had while our town worked together through the darkness to provide for one another’s needs, to survive the day, looking to the next to bring some relief, and our sense of urgency overcame our exhaustion.  We couldn’t sleep that night, not knowing who was and was not accounted for.