After Helene

by Anthony Rodriguez
Valley Hope Pastor

I live in Swannanoa. You can Google it, if you’d like. Unfortunately, at this point, you may have heard of it. A lot has happened in a few weeks. I sat down to write some of it out so I could really try to remember these days. It’s very long. I don’t care.

Our church is trying to do good work in our community and we will continue to do our best for as long as we can. People have been super generous to us, for which we are grateful. If you want to join that generosity, donate above.

I was planning to go to a committee meeting at presbytery (the regional collection of churches in our denomination) on Friday morning. The meeting was close enough that I would be able to wake up early, get on my way, and make it in time for our committee to get down to business.

I heard the power go off before the sun rose and I thought, “Maybe I should wait until I can see what everything looks like.”

The previous couple of days dumped a quantity of water that went from annoying to depressing to concerning. The measurements at Asheville airport before Helene arrived were almost comically large. There was truly something almost funny at the size of the numbers, a kind of strange rooting interest to see how high these completely absurd numbers would get. But that was always soon chased by a quietly horrifying thought: “The hurricane isn’t here yet.”

Many of us were only dimly aware of the darkness on the horizon. My wife, never one to be accused of being a news junkie, said to me on Thursday, after a couple days of mild illness and general laying about, “So the worst is over right?” At that point, I already had a pit in my stomach and I said out loud the words that were drumming louder: “The hurricane isn’t here yet.”

When I laid back down and tried to sleep, I heard the wind pick up and lie down and pick up and lie down. It didn’t sound too terribly loud in our cove, our little tucked nook of Swannanoa. I finally got out of bed and texted my committee head and said I probably shouldn’t make the meeting, but perhaps I’d make it for presbytery. I considered that probable, actually. Soon thereafter, all the bars on my cell phone disappeared. The hurricane was here. Now.

The wind was never particularly terrifying where we were. Sure, I looked at the trees around my house and wondered how long they could hold the completely sodden ground. But I never heard any creaking or crying out. It was what I saw down the hill from us that made my jaw drop. The creek running through the middle of the level part of Buckeye Cove was gone.

There was a river. A large one. An angry one. A river that was roaring and ripping through, rising well above its normal stream bed. And I looked to the right and saw rivers of watery clay coming from a direction that I had never seen water flow. I put on my Chacos and a rain jacket just to walk in the raging water and make sure there wasn’t a moving mountainside at the headwaters. There wasn’t, that I saw. At least not moving quickly. But as I saw this cataclysm of waters on the very small scale of our very small community, I began to think: This could be bad.

Cell signal was gone and would be gone for a long time. It was the first true frustration. I could not text my parents to see if they were alright. I could not tell my sisters that we were fine. I could not check on others or get news of the larger valley. It was infuriating and isolating and scary.

I left our side of Highway 70 as soon as I could, as soon as the worst was passed, to see if I could find a way to my parents. My wife suggested that it was likely that trees would be down on the smaller roads we ordinarily take to get there, so we ought to head down 70, a main artery for our community. We went as far as we good before we saw the real river, which was not even close to finished raging. It was over the highway. It was through the bridge. Eventually, buildings, a hotel, were removed from their foundations. We pulled to the side of the road and I just thought, “Oh no.”

We went home and I later went the other direction on Hwy 70 to see if I could find a way to my parents, find a way to our church building, find a way into the heart of Swannanoa. I was cut off in the other direction by the Swannanoa River. My brain could not compute what I was seeing: The river was a furious, frothing lake that had spread through the entirety of our small town. Everything was… gone. That’s what it looked like. I went home and I just said to my wife, “Swannanoa is gone.” She was confused, not able to understand what I was saying. I couldn’t even understand what I was saying.

Life accelerated quickly after that long, graciously quiet day (for us). The next day, we found a way to my parents. They took our kids and left town, hoping to make it to Georgia to stay at their lake house. We eventually found service hours and hours later to hear they’d made it easily on (apparently) the only road out of town and found all of the hallmarks of civilization that were completely gone for us.

Power gone. It would be gone at our house for two weeks. With it, our well water. Internet? A hilarious rumor from the past. Cell service? Frustratingly difficult to find.

And homes. So many homes.

Gone.

Athletic fields were debris fields where people’s homes and, apparently, people themselves, were strewn as if thrown by a demented giant toddler beset by frustration.

River silt was everywhere. You could see the mark on remaining trees where the waters had once risen to and your mind could not comprehend how you, standing up above and yards away safely on the remainder of a road, were where the new riverbed once was. Sunday morning, when I parked further away and walked to our church building to see how it fared, I was sliding around on riverbed and listening to water dripping off everything.

Our world was saturated. Over-saturated. My kids’ only hometown looked like what every disaster movie had ever tried to approximate. This is our home, a mess we could not turn off. Our lives.

It was, immediately, impossible to take in. An enormous knot too terribly large to untangle. How do you get shipping containers out of treetops? How do you put back together a mobile home slung half a mile away?

We are beginning to find the answers.

This is the remarkable thing: I have seen zero bodies, mourned over zero dead family members or church members or friends. People I love have taken massive losses to their businesses, but count themselves as grateful people, alive and dry and whole. All of that is true and it’s still the worst thing I’ve ever seen in person and it isn’t particularly close.

And yet.

I have seen some of the most amazing things. I cannot express adequately how quickly help has rushed in to chase the floodwaters. People have run to us to bring anything and everything. People from all over the country have sent working crews and machinery and groceries and money and an endless list of other things. And anything we’ve needed, we have had a superabundance. Eventually, we had to tell everyone that our church building was too full, that no, we could not accept more help right now. Not that we will never need it, but that our storehouses are not large enough. People who, just a few weeks ago, could not say “Swannanoa” if I’d just told them where I live, now informed me that their eyes, their prayers were on Swannanoa and they would not leave us.

And the most amazing thing I have seen is the residents of Swannanoa have decide that our neighbors really, really mean something to us. Many people were already much better than me at this, of course. So they were on the leading edge to take care of people. But all of us Swannanoans, we make it our norm now to see anyone and everyone and to ask, “Are you ok? Do you need help? Can I help you?”

My church has found itself at the strange intersection of providence. Of mercy. The waters came to the middle of our driveway and no further. At the end of our street, neighbors pulled kids and parents out of a second story deck to pull them to safety, fighting for their lives as they were swept away by the current and caught by those mysterious storage containers.

And in our parking lot, day by day, evening by evening, I have seen the sweat and tears of our community used to provide food and water and toilet buckets and generators and diapers and so much more to our neighbors.

Evening by evening, our parking lot has become a dining room. And our neighborhood was invited. Our neighborhood has come.

This whole thing is indescribably exhausting. I was not sure that my brain would handle the 10,000 decisions, the weight, the responsibility that first week. I had to leave to go see my kids, to celebrate my daughter’s birthday, to be able to breathe. To come back required a deep breath, a surrender, a plunging into the coldest waters I’ve ever swam in, the icy grip of near-death and despair.

But, day by day, weary step by weary step, we’re all making it.

And do you know what our parking lot/dining room looks like? Not grim survival. Not war victims grimly staring into the distance. No, what I have found at those tables evening after evening is… joy.

It is so surprising to me, even now. I know so many people want some happy conclusion which a) isn’t possible for many people in our valley, those who are homeless and/or mourning and b)is a long way coming for the rest of us who, again, live here. It’s messy thing and I was resistant, quite early on, to being used for safe and dry and comfortable people’s emotional comfort and titillation. I think I, and many others, are already tired of the people driving through Swannanoa with their phones out, filming our ruins. I know it’s hard to capture and spreading the word helps. But still.

The questions presented by the wreckage are real and too difficult to be tritely used for the movie version of these events. My near-13-year-old asked me, after days of wondering if her friends were dead, the question that haunts almost everyone at times like this: Why? Why does this happen? Why would God not step in? You can see those things on your screens and ask that theoretically. Our people are asking it entirely differently.

Where was He? Where is He? Where is God?

But it’s the craziest thing. At those tables every night, I can’t shake the feeling that despair is going to lose this one. Death will not have final say on Swannanoa’s story. Death will not have the final word on the world at large. There’s flooding and ruin and chaos and destruction, but I have seen signs, evidence, time and time again in these weeks that there is a stronger story, an older magic in the world. It’s so tempting to see only carnage and ask “where is God,” but even if, in my lament, my anger, I wanted only those questions and objections, every night at these tables I keep seeing whispers of an answer. I can’t help thinking with chills sweeping over me, “Oh there You are.” I cannot tell you the number of times we have seen someone needing a specific thing of some kind and then, within minutes, a stranger walks up with the precise number of that thing. It’s almost comical at this point. The examples border on the absurd. And those stories don’t even begin to encompass the thing we are feeling at our tables, the sense that the God of Mercy, the God Who Sees, is putting us at tables with one another to see and be seen, feasting in a way that feels so deeply and divinely life-giving.

I am confused and bewildered and tired and uncomfortable and very much in over my head. There’s no denying that. It’s true for all of us. I don’t know the answer to our toughest questions in the dark. But I also cannot help but see that there’s more going on here. And there’s something coming that will overshadow every corner of the worst the darkness can muster. I can’t get over this sense that God really is here. I can’t shake the conviction that our church has a name for a reason, a reason we didn’t know until now.

Our name is Valley Hope. And it’s what God is doing in Swannanoa.