From Asheville, NC, Part 2: Living Large

We're so lucky. My fever didn't return. We've got 5-gal. bottles of water, a nearly fully propane tank, a grill, and half a bathtub of water for the toilet. To complain would be a sin.

Here’s a pic I took the day after the Hurricane. It’s from the Haywood Street Bridge, which looks over the French Broad River by where we live, in West Asheville. I’ll take another picture from this same place soon. The river has already receded back to within its normal banks, so then you’ll be able to get an idea of what this view used to look like before the hurricane compelled the river to go full maniac and destroy everything.

Hello again from Asheville! In a place where I know I’ll have wifi for about another 20 minutes, so—same as my previous post (except this one has a photo), I’ll just whang this out as fast as I can, and trust none of you will go all Grammar Cop on me, so that then I won’t, at my first opportunity, have to travel to where you live and start, at the very least, pretty severely haranguing you in the morning when you’re just trying to leave for work, or whatever.

Because I’ll do it, man. I will.

First things first: If you sent me an email or text sending me your love and offers of support, you better believe I have read that message about nine times. My heart and soul are full of this affection you have shown me. It’s really an amazing thing.

I have felt your love, and it has warmed and comforted me and my wife, Cat. I don’t know how else to say it. And there’s no way to say what it’s meant to us.

We’re going to be getting power pretty soon—within days now—and a week or so after that we’ll get wifi. Believe me when I say I’m looking forward to getting back to each and every one of you, to thank you for your … kind of unbelievable kindnesses. Thank you.

Secondly: No fever return for me! Whew-fucking-hew. Done. I’m at a steady 96.8 temperature (my usual number; I run weirdly cold), and my blood oxygen levels are daily climbing back to what they should be. Great!

This morning Cat said to me, “I can’t believe that this hurricane wasn’t the most intense thing that happened to me this month.”

She stayed with me, for every moment, for ALL FIVE FUCKING DAYS that I was in the hospital, so wired up to monitors and IV bags and blood oxygen monitors that basically I couldn’t move.

Honestly, the first night I was in the ER room of the hospital, I spent about 7 hour straight being so close to death I was . . . well, acutely aware of just how close. I’ll tell you what that was like later. But at one point poor Cat, who at that point has been sitting next to my gurney thing for at least four hours, scooted her chair as close to me as she could get, and laid her head on my thigh, with her arms across my legs.

I sure the fuck felt that. That is think that’s what got me sliding—angling ever so slightly—away from what I guess we’d call the darkness back toward the . . . lighter of the two worlds I was skimming my way between.

Anyway, she’s had a rough fucking September. I went down with this lung thing around Sept. 3. And here we are now.

(By the way, if you read my novel, Everywhere She’s Not, remember when David had Devil’s Grip. This thing that just happened to me, with my lungs, is that. I’ll explain later (if anyone cares), but … same thing. It has to do with being born in the Tennessee River Valley at the month and year that I was: there was, then, a Fungus Among Us which . . . has been with me ever since.

Asheville. Right. No water for another 5-7 weeks. But that’s all right: they’re now giving water away all over the place, and we’re loaded up. Fill the toilet with water we’re keeping in our tub for that very reason, and we’re literally good to go.

I’m loving this, really. I hate that others have and are continuing to suffer in ways I can barely imagine, of course. But also true is that this has proven to be a really, deeply, truly, kind of astoundingly fantastic experience. I don’t want to get power in the next couple of days. I like it that, when the sun goes down here, it’s fucking DOWN. It’s DARK.

I just love it. Come 5 o’clock, you better have all your shit together, because what you don’t have together inside your house, you’ll have to get together by candlelight.

Which is fine, of course. Is anything more beautiful than candlelight?

We’ve been living without power and water for only 7 days. And we have such a routine already. You know what Cat’s been doing every night, in the dark, save for the glow from the iPad we’ve been charging in the electric car that we are SOOOOO happy we bought and fully charged right before hell came to visit?

Reading aloud to me! She’s reading me Sense and Sensibility, by that one English woman who wrote pretty well.

I mean . . . would I ever dare to want anything more out of life? Would I ever dream this magic could be a part of my everyday life? Sure, of course I could. But it’s not been. And now it is. And when the lights come back on, and I return to my job at Home Depot, and our nights are again filled with making a normal dinner and doing the dishes and going to the gym and getting laundry together for the next day and all that, she’s not going to be reading Jane Austin to me anymore.

Well, maybe sometimes. I’m not giving up this joy too readily.

But you know what I mean. Extreme times make for extreme pleasures. And that’s one of them for us, right now, in this weird, weird moment.

We put our kettle on the grill every morning, and have the best cups of tea we’ve ever had in our life. This morning one of your neighbors brought me over a single strip of bacon she’d cooked on her little camp stove set up, and that was—and I mean, seriously—the greatest piece of bacon in the history of taste buds.

This is a magical time. Everyone is helping everyone. Everyone in my neighborhood knows everyone in my neighborhood now, like we never did before. I go all over this town now, all the time—looking for water, looking for fucking hand sanitizer, of which I finally secured some this morning, and no ragged ancient miner was ever happier to see gold flying off the end of his pick—and all I ever do is STOP and talk to just about EVERY SINGLE PERSON I meet, and the conversation is always about how are you, how’s your family, how’s your house, do you have enough water, how are you set for food, do you need anything, if you do here’s my phone number, or here’s where you can get that stuff you’re looking for, and it’s just . . . a whole other level of interacting, to say the least.

This has been a monumental, horrifying tragedy. And continues to be for so, so many.

But in my humble, non-descript little world, the brilliance of the silver lining around that dark, dark cloud just keeps blinding me, and bringing water to my eyes.

Shit. Gotta go. LOVE YOU! THANK YOU!!!