“Not in another hundred years, could a disaster happen to the Bat Cave region, no matter how heavy the rains.”
—W.S. Fallis, chief engineer of the state highway commission, 1916
In the Bat Cave area, locals have long referenced the Great Flood with trepidation. In 1916, it devastated the region, triggered landslides, destroyed nearly every dam in Henderson and Buncombe County, killed dozens of people, and wiped out the railroad, severing all access to Western North Carolina. I remember as a child, a Henderson County neighbor pointing out two giant millstones beside Hominy Mill Branch, the only remnants of a mill washed away by the flood. The flood haunted the land in gulleys carved by its torrents and dry riverbeds where waters flowed before the flood relocated them forever.
I spent the summers of my youth in the Hickory Nut Gorge. Encounters with the past, through the stories passed down from older neighbors and artifacts discovered on long walks through the hemlock woods, entranced me. I wondered about the former occupants of my family’s cabin, about the lives they lived, carving sustenance out of the steep. I studied the history of the place on the page and in the woods. Eventually that research became a novel, Hemlock Hollow. It was my ode to the gorge and its people. I fear Hurricane Helene has turned that ode into a requiem.
Helene, a behemoth fueled by warm Gulf air, smashed through every record set by the 1916 event. The storm dumped half a year’s worth of rain on the region overnight. A ground already saturated by predecessor rains gave up its tired fingerhold, and steep hillsides plummeted. Mountain streams blustered into torrents that fed the Rocky Broad River. The river overflowed its banks and washed away the riverside cottage, where as a two-year old I had waited with my grandmother while my parents worked on our cabin just up the highway. It took out the Bat Cave Apple House where at age twelve, I had gathered with family and friends for a Nature Conservancy hike up to the Bat Caves. It pummeled the village of Chimney Rock where just two months ago I enjoyed a birthday dinner while admiring the view. It gutted stores and restaurants, motels and homes. In an instant it muddled memories and dreams into shards that shot downstream torpedo-like, bashing through the flowering bridge at the mouth of the gorge, spilling into Lake Lure, and threatening the dam that, in the end, held.
An untold number of lives were lost. Bodies are still being recovered. Still, there are missing loved ones. The entire village of Chimney Rock is gone. Livelihoods are ruined. The gorge remains cut-off and mudbound, and once again forever altered.
This scene was not unique. In Swannanoa, mountain turned to mud and the river wiped roads clean off the map. In Asheville, homes and cars eddied like so much flotsam. In Marshall, French Broad floodwaters surmounted buildings that had withstood the 1916 flood. In Boone, streets raged with rapids. As I write this, people are still stranded. As I write this, hundreds are unaccounted for, roads gone, rivers rerouted. As I write this in the dry warmth of a home far away, a week after the fact, thousands remain without power, without water, without food.
In Hemlock Hollow, the main character is a scientist who wrestles with the ghosts of her past. She must come to grips with loss by learning not to turn away from it. But how do we do that with a loss so immeasurable as to be unbearable?
I wish I had the answer. I do know what I see happening from afar. Neighbors turning to one another. Strangers offering helping hands. Friends providing shoulders and solace. Families connecting. I see it in outpouring of support, in the throngs of lineman headed west, and in public officials cooling the heat of contentious campaigns to offer aid. I see people not turning away, and it gives me hope.
What will endure are the ties that bind us to each other and to these mountains. As in 1916, with time and effort and the hearty resilience of those who have made this place their home, we will recover.
But other storms will come. In the last century, Earth’s climate has warmed substantially. Warmer air super-sizes hurricanes and induces rapid intensification. Helene was an order of magnitude more intense than her 1916 predecessor. As we burn more fossil fuels and warm the air, future storms will be stronger still and more frequent. I fear that if we continue to do nothing to abate the warming of the climate and to build resilience on the ground, the ghosts of our choices may haunt us forever.
