A shared Experience

A fog had settled into the valley in muted silence as the first graying light defined the town, Silent save the hiss of a propane stove as the water boiled , then pouring it into the press as the smell of coffee rising up amid the fresh cut white oak, 2 cycle fuel and bar oil.

Pouring a cup and sitting on the step as the light filtered in through the settled mist looking up the road to trees criss crossed like a bastion across the road, pines boles strewn across two cars with widows shattered and roofs crumpled, and the leaning power pole and low hanging lines amid the vacant houses with their darkened windows as a black bear with its nose high in the air followed some scent and looked dolefully about with a confused amble as it eased down the road, they too displaced, and we two in kinship as that barrier between wild and ‘civilized’ was brought down in a shared experience, then turning she sauntered back up the hill in no particular hurry.

When the sun rose over the continental divide and began to burn off the fog, the quiet of the morning was broken, first by the rip of a chainsaw, then two and more, then the clouds gave way to the blue sky and the streets began to fill with pedestrians, cyclists, then ATV’s and response vehicles, and soon it was a mass of utility trucks assessing and running new lines and setting new power poles, dump trucks making their way up to Montreat with loads of rip rap and fill dirt, excavators and even a helicopter on trailers towed through the narrow streets while over head the skies too filled with military aircraft brining supplies and personnel in from the piedmont, and friends on tractors and and 4 wheelers, a merry band of citizens running recon through town with radios triaging roads to be cleared so that power companies could access them.

And with the vehicles came a cast of characters from across the eastern sea board and the country as line crews from New Brunswick assessed the broken pole on our corner, and a contracted tree company from Louisiana with a rather large cajun who stepped out to look up our road asking if we could clear the downed oaks he’d been hired to cut himself. “There’s a bear up there, I can see him right beyond those branches,” I said.

“You got a chainsaw, don’t be scared of no bear.”

A large diesel idled in the driveway with a surly and young insurance assessor, impersonal and unhelpful and unimpressed with the scope of damage, save the size of the tree. “Never seen a tree that big.”

“Where you from?”

“Texas.”

“I guess not everything is bigger in Texas.”

An awkward hour later with truck still idling burning precious fuel he headed off for some other job, some other loss.

Then there was Matt who came trotting up the road with cut off sleeves, a doo-rag, and canvas jeans, a short and scrappy type who subsided off of steak and eggs with the occasional fruit snack that metabolized into pure and focused energy, and faced with a tree in a house and a sun that wasn’t going to shine all day, by god he was going to do some work.

“When you’re wife called her Dad and told him what happened I was in the truck. I could hear the distress in her voice. I couldn’t sit back and do nothing. I’m going to get this tree out of your house.”

And with two more cousins up from Birmingham, having survived the trip in, we had our crew, and looking from the road it seemed as though there was no house behind that horizontal canopy. And looking at that tangle of branches where does one even begin? If you sit too long and think on it, if you see the tree in its entirety it is overwhelming. No, you pick a place and you go to work. The process being unveiled to you as you cut your way in, hacking first at the outside limbs that bear no weight, and work your way in branch by branch, then log by log hauling away that white oak that shaded your yard and dropped its acorns in the fall so that the bears would come down from the woods and graze and your toddler son learning his first words would stand on the couch and look out the window at them wide eyed and turn and say “Baby bear,” in his tiny voice, his little finger against the glass, and then say “Momma bear. Momma bear,” before swelling his body up and dropping his voice in a low growl, “Big daddy bear” and point again excitedly out the window.

And there too was the rope swing where we pushed the neighborhood kids and rocked the baby, where we took the easter photo weeks before giving birth to our first, and now the log bench lie on the ground broken and the rope entangled in the mass of branches and limbs, and through the process of cutting away at that 120 year old tree I am mourning.

From the roof I can see that oak’s sibling that laid down across the neighbors garage, where he and his friends would stay up into the late hours telling stories and laughing, and listening to music and I would sit on the back porch on the warm summer evenings and watch the colony of fireflies that lived in its canopy as the cicadas droned on their serenade into the night, now gone.

“Man,” he tells me, “God just did not want me to have that garage.”

And so it was, the trees a part of that community, now casualties as well, lying like fallen monuments, the landscape altered for our lifetime.

That was what the fourth day removed from the storm felt like. A total shift. Humans flexing their industry, and just as the branches of our tree were cleared and the house gradually came into being again, so too were power poles replaced, trees lifted off of cars, roads reinforced and cleared, people who had been barricaded in were cut out, some immobile making contact for the first since the storm had passed.

Strangers both connected to the town and without any connection arrived on that fourth day to come to the aid of people in need. It did not matter these definitions we have constructed, both political and social that divide us so. And while the amenities we have become so accustomed to were down, the water, the power, and the cell service spotty, it was the loss of communication that revealed to us our relationship to our screens, so much so that it causes one to wonder at it. Because given a few days fasting from the algorithms that have been constructed to pit us against one another, given only a few days removed from such noise then those constructs soon fade and given a common obstacle to overcome then we come together again to work towards some good end with neighbors and with strangers regardless.

Yet, in the afternoon a strong signal beamed up the valley and everyone’s pockets began to vibrate and chime. 65 missed messages, as the sound of chainsaws began to fade into a quiet and passersby on the streets stopped and everyone looked down again at those devices, thumbs working furiously until 20 minutes late the signal faded and one by one the sound of sawing resonated again.

“Hey,” said Sam. “I’ve been instructed to tell everyone with a chainsaw to not get hurt. The medical services are overwhelmed and if you get hurt your on your own.”

He looked over just as Matt stood on the base of the trunk with his saw ripping through the 3’ diameter bole of the tree.

“Holy, shit, what’s that guy doing?”

“I think he is trying to get the tree to roll off the house.”

“We have a name for that. We call it the Hospital cut. He needs a rope purchase to help pull it.”

“I think you better rig it quick. He’s not going to wait.”

And just in time, with a purchase run from the tree to the dogwood and banjo string tight with a block and tackle the saw cut through and the stump settled in, catapulting Matt back unharmed as the tree rolled taking the front of the house out with it.

“Where in the hell did you get this guy from?”

“Alabama.”

“I’ve seen a lot of sketchy shit, but that guy…”

He said he would do it, and so it was as the day began to come to its end and light showers fell in places in the valley and to the east of the sun that was setting low towards Pisgah there was a rainbow as people gathered on the corner, making their way back from downtown and trucks began making their way out and the streets returning to quiet again.

A white car pulled up and a scraggy unbathed youth jumped out and looked at the house and looked at us. “You Bill?”

“No.”

“This is Beech St. You own this?”

“I do.”

He looks down at a piece of paper in his hand.

“Some one from California on Facebook wants to know if a guy named Bill at this address is ok.”

“Our tenant is named Bill. He’s ok. Evacuated this morning with his wife.”

He made a note, said thanks, and before he drove off I told him that he was doing a good thing.

“It’s what I can do. Check on people and let others know who is alive and who is not.”

And then he was gone.