Dateline, Asheville: Day 11 of Life After Helene
I have seen the light
First, I very much want to express my gratitude to those of you who upgraded to a paid subscription to my newsletter. You were of course perfectly free to not do that. That you chose to really matters to my wife and I right now. That’s not the most comfortable thing to admit—but sometimes comfortable and reality just aren’t on the same page. So thank you for being there for us during this particularly uncomfortable time.
Also: I don’t yet understand Substack—like, at all. I just don’t know how it works. I know how to send and post a newsletter, and that’s it. And that’s become a distinct drag, because a lot of you are showing me the good Substackey love, by sharing and liking and “restacking” (?) and leaving comments on my posts and so on. I want to reciprocate all of that love; I want to participate in so much of the great stuff I see going on here. I just don’t know how to yet. Substack is one rich and complex platform. I’m going to spend the week or so before I can return to work learning it, so that I can share and recommend and follow the work of others—so that I can do unto others as they have done to me.
Plus, there’s just so much good stuff to read on this platform. But I can’t even figure out how to FOLLOW the Substacks of others—much less recommend them, show them on my home page, leave blurbs for them, etc. But, as I say, that ignorance is definitely on its way out. Thanks for your patience on that.
Okay, so. You know how last time I was bemoaning the encroaching possibility of having to use a Home Depot bucket in a way that God never intended because my toilet doesn’t work because a Godzilla of a hurricane settled atop Asheville because global warming is turning our heavenly earth into an apocalyptic hellscape?
Though—wait. Because, to be clear, I work at Home Depot. So I’d use a Lowe’s bucket. But you know: potatoes, potatolowes.
Hey, you try being funny when you haven’t taken a shower in 11 days, and the latest most exciting thing you’ve learned about your living situation getting any better has to do with how, if you can get your hands on a pool noodle, you can slice the thing all the way down one side and then use it as a seat cushion on your now-luxurious Home Depot Lowes port-a-bucket.
That life hack for the discerning survivalist came to me via a flyer stapled to a telephone pole (are they still called telephone poles?) near my house. One of our neighbors put it there. I don’t know why. Everyone’s toilets are working fine; miraculously, the hurricane spared Asheville’s sewage treatment plant. True, you have to manually fill your toilet tank with water before flushing it, but non-potable water isn’t exactly scarce around here right now—or ever. There are natural streams and creeks running all over this neighborhood. That was of course part of the problem during the hurricane.
Now, getting your hands on a bucket to carry that water is a serious challenge. And if you’ve lucky enough to possess a bucket with a lid on it—so that the water you’re hauling home from wherever you found it doesn’t splash out onto your pants and instantly disintegrate them because so much of the water flowing around here right now is more toxic than, well, Godzilla’s pee?
Then you, my friend, just became the envy of all of your friends and neighbors whose pants are missing a partial leg or two.
But I am fully digressing. The main thing I want to report is that we now have electricity (and the internet!) at our house! Our power was restored last night. In the dead of night I watched Our Hero, who was way up in a wobbling basket crane and lit by a spotlight from an accompanying pick-up, reach out with a long pole and deftly lift the switch on the transformer that’s up on an electric power pole (I looked it up) located just up from my house.
You know the thrill of watching a big Christmas tree at night as it gets plugged in and suddenly lights up? This felt just like that! Only instead of a lit Christmas tree we got a working refrigerator for the first time in 11 hot days.
So, almost as good.
But, yeah, no more suddenly failing to comprehend how even the most avid of kinksters could possibly find sexy having hot wax poured onto them as, candle in hand, I’m tentatively making my way down our staircase toward my goal of freaking out our pet feral cat who lives under our bed with the vision of me cleaning out its litter box in the dark like some spectral weirdo.
It’ll still be weeks before our water is restored. But power!
The truth is, though, there was a lot that I loved about not having electricity. Chiefly, I was spellbound by how, once the sun went down, the earth was so utterly and wholly given over to The Power of The Night. The whole world became so inky black, and quiet—and also kind of eerily loud, with all the cicadas and tree frogs and owls and roaming lunatics who just lost it during this freak time, and were starting to roam around in the darkness, howling at the moon and calling out to nobody in particular, and just generally disturbing everyone—not that anyone could do anything about it, since every cop within 100 miles of here is way too busy to come deal with anything like that.
True nighttime is such a movingly primal phenomenon. It was so awesome to experience it again—and while simply standing on my porch, no less.
Plus, I got all circadian-rhythmed up. By eight I was winding down, and by nine I was asleep. Come just before sunrise I’d awaken, ready to start another day of hunting down drinking water, toilet water, even one bucket with a lid on it, and . . . well, that’s about it.
Because it is all about water now. Accordingly, my wife Cat and I have some 60 gallons of bottled drinking water in our house right now, and four 5-gallon (lidless) buckets of gray water for our toilets sitting on our porch.
And that’s enough. It’s plenty for now. We’re all good.
Yesterday I met a guy who, from the roof of his house, watched as a nearby family of four scrambled atop their roof during the worst of the flooding. The family—wife, husband, and two preteen sons—waved to the man. He waved back. And then the family’s roof collapsed, the water swept over them, and the man watched helplessly as the entire family quickly drowned.
So, yeah. We’re okay. We’re a good deal more than okay.
All love possible to you and yours. Thank you for spending this bit of time with me.
Glad you're more than ok. Hope to read your book about surviving Helene.