From Asheville, with love (and some fear)

Harrowing times here in The Land of the Sky/Beer City. We're okay. Many aren't. What happened here isn't imaginable.

Photo added a week after I sent out this newsletter. Courtesy of (well: wholly lifted from) CNN’s website. This is a Walgreens I go to all the time. Or was.

Hi friends. I’m finally in a spot with a wifi connection, and wanted to post a newsletter real quick by way of answering so many of your kind emails and messages asking how my wife Cat and I have fared during the catastrophe that has so devastated Western North Carolina generally, and our home town of Asheville particularly.

Cat and I are fine. Here’s how it’s been for us:

I was in the hospital for five days. Almost died (for real!) of some lung-attacking virus or bacteria—but didn’t, because for five days straight they pumped gallons of every known antibiotic through my veins. Sent me home some eight days ago, with 7-days worth of more antibiotics.

The idea is that, having finished those final antibiotics, we would see if my fever returned. If it did, I’ve got a real problem in my right lung, cuz whatever I have is a whole other level of Fuck You. If my fever doesn’t return, then I just have to wait for my blood oxygen to normalize, and I’m gold.

I can tell you this: I haven’t slept for more than 90 minutes straight in a month. I’m sooooo tired of coughing out my lungs all night. It’s the worst.

Anyway, I took the last of my antibiotic pills night before last. If by this time tomorrow I still have no fever, yay! If, though, the fever has returned, then . . . boo. Because, you know: I had my big follow-up appointment with my doctor today—which I went to, because I had no way of calling or messaging the doctor to see if his group’s office was even open today.

It wasn’t. Note on the door: no power, no water, sorry.

Which was fine. I don’t have a fever. So far so good. (Last I checked, anyway. I haven’t been home since around 9 this morning. It’s 3 now. We’ve been out trying to get cash and water and all that.)

So if, come tomorrow, I do have a fever, then . . . yikes, because that means I need some serious tending to, but quickly. But everything is seriously closed, because nobody’s got any power or water. But we’ll see. I feel good. I think I’m fine.

My five-days in the hospital were the culmination of my having been flat-out sick for the previous three weeks. I haven’t been to my (beloved) job at Home Depot in a fucking month.

Anyway, so I come stumbling and wheezing my way home after the hospital. Three days later, this fucking hurricane settles directly over Asheville—and then, the morning after its horrible visitation, it’s like when Dorothy first steps out of her hurricane-relocated home, only instead of beautiful flowers and legions of encouraging little people happily singing to you, it’s nothing but massive trees laying on every road and on countless houses and cars, and more power lines down in the streets than up in the air, and the lovely French Broad River, which is a 5-minute walk from our house, turned into something that, for the rest of my life, will remind me of how atrociously limited my imagination is.

I couldn’t have possibly imagined what I saw looking at the French Broad from the Haywood Street Bridge. I’ve seen it, and I still can’t imagine it. If you don’t know the area, then of course anything I say won’t matter.

If you do, then: standing on the Haywood Bridge, looking toward the River Arts District, all you saw was light brown water moving with shocking speed. And in that water was floating all kind of huge shit that was never meant to float. Not just 50-foot trees moving bobbing along like a child’s toy ship in a little creek. But massive storage containers, industrial propane tanks, whole or parts of buildings that had previously held all kind of local business everyone loved and knew—all of them, turned into so much flotsam and jetsam, unmoored, traveling to a place they were never meant to be.

Turn the other way to look up the river, and what do you see? Nothing. Just, again, a river that’s maybe twenty times wider than it usually is, hiding beneath its terrible vastness every normal thing that used to be there.

Again, this won’t mean anything to you if you don’t know this area, but I have to say for anyone who does: You know how, if you’re standing on the Haywood Street Bridge, and you look towards the 240 freeway, you see, between you and the 240, the Craven Street Bridge—that two lane bridge that, like the Haywood Bridge, also traverses the French Broad? I drive that bridge over the river all the time.

Yeah, it was gone.

Looking at the 240, I said to my wife, “Wait. Is that the Craven Street Bridge?” And she goes, “No, that’s the 240.”

And this huge Latino guy who was standing next to me with a bunch of his friends and family says to me, “Wait. Dude. Isn’t there supposed to be a bridge there?” And I go, “Yeah! The Craven Street Bridge!”

“Dude!” he cries. “Where the fuck is that bridge?”

“It’s under water,” said Cat, pointing. “See? You can kind of see where it’s breaking the water a little. It’s that kind of line you see in the water.”

”Wait,” I said. “The whole Craven Street Bridge is under water?”

“Dude,” the guy beside me said flatly. “She’s right. That’s what happened. That whole fucking bridge is underwater.”

I said the only words that came to my zombified mind. “That’s not right.”

“No,” intoned the guy. “It is definitely not right.”

You’ve seen the pictures of what’s happening here in Asheville, and in all the mountain towns around it. But any one picture of the devastation caused by this hurricane (which I can’t bring myself to humanize by referring to it by name, like it’s just some bothersome aunt we’ve all had to deal with), is like looking at a picture of a bombed-out building in London in 1940, and going, “Yeah. That’s what World War II was.”

It’s not. There’s no lens big enough to capture a mite’s worth of it, no video that could begin to comprise it. It’s like trying to take a picture of the Grand Canyon. Not gonna happen.

All we’ve heard, in our neighborhood, for four days now, is the sound of buzzsaws and sirens. That’s the music of our lives now. (And, lately, helicopters. I think they’re bringing in supplies, or rescuing people, or something equally awesome and necessary.)

I don’t know when my wifi will kick out here, but I wanted to say real quick: Human beings are a blessing to each other. As of last Friday, we’ve had no water, power, or internet service. And because I’d been in the hospital, we weren’t as prepared for the hurricane as we might have been otherwise.

Although, that said, it’s not like we know shit all about being in a hurricane. Earthquakes, I know: the ground starts shaking, and you run outside and immediately starting drinking with your neighbors. Fires, I know: You watch them coming, hope the wind steers them another way, and then run if it doesn’t. But hurricanes? I hadn’t any idea. We secured everything in our yard that might blow away, Cat went and did a huge grocery shopping while I laid on the couch like a zombie, and . . . and then we laid awake all night listening to the 140-mile an hour wind literally blowing our world apart.

And then, right away: no food, no water, no internet. Just a whole bunch of severely discombobulated people, walking around the streets like they’re in some freak dream they’d really like to wake up from, but can’t.

And then all those stunned, stupefied people started organizing themselves and each other. They start doing things. And what most of them really started doing is helping our other people.

My next door neighbor works for an egg farmer out in the mountains who has a well. So this neighbor took a 5-gallon Home Depot bucket of mine, along with a couple of other rando water containers Cat and I scrounged together, out to his boss’s property, and came back with, like, 10 gallons of water for us—and 3 dozen eggs!

Another neighbor of ours did the same thing for us: same containers, takes them miles away to her friend’s well, and that night delivers them to our doorstop, each holding all the water it could. And just like that: Cat and I have enough water to drink AND to flush our toilets.

We couldn’t be more grateful for these acts of sheer kindness.

Last night my neighbor across the street asked us, “I have an extra propane tank. Need it?” Well, fuck yes: we have a grill, but almost no propane—which you can’t buy to save your life. Well, my neighbor steps up for us, and, yeah baby: now Cat and I are making omelettes and tea on our grill, like we’re royalty.

I was standing in line to buy a five-gallon container of water from a local mountain-spring water service place. I learned from the people around me that that bottle would cost me $14. I had $10 on me. I was telling the woman behind me in line that I have some change in my car that I use to feed parking meters, so, if she’d hold my place, I’d go fetch that and be okay.

It was then that the lady in front of me—with whom I hadn’t spoken at all; I’d only seen her back for about a half-hour at that point—turned to me, holding out a $5 bill.

“Do you need this?” she said. “It’s yours. No problem.”

Just like that! Five dollars! You can’t get cash in this town; no ATMs are working anywhere. And just about anything that’s being sold is for cash only. And here this woman, standing alone in a long long line, in her baggy old jeans and her worn black sweatshirt, was offering me, a total stranger, the $5 cash she thought I might need to buy some drinking water.

I almost started crying.

Of course, I took her $5. Fuck spending my meter money. Now I could use that money for something else.

Har! Kidding. Except for the almost crying part. That was as real as me very quickly using my shirt sleeve to wipe my eyes.

Everywhere you go around here, people are doing the actual work of helping others. No one has any internet access whatsoever, so the only information to be had is by word of mouth. But everyone knows something that others are happy to learn: there’s a store up the street selling 5-gallon bottles of water; some businesses downtown have power; a neighbor two streets over has set up a satellite thing where you can sometimes get the internet and can definitely charge your phone.

I’m not sure the internet has ever provided me with the volume and quality of information I’ve been getting from total strangers since this happened. Turns out people—just regular people, walking around with their dogs and kids in tow—are better at being the internet than the internet is. Who knew?

The current word is that we might get electricity by this Monday, and it could be a month until we get water. (For us, power is weird. We’re on this weird little grid thing, with only SIX other people. We have two huge trees that have doinked our power lines all to hell. But the thing is: seeing that only SIX houses get power isn’t exactly a top priority for Duke Energy right now. They’ll get to us, of course. But later than sooner, for sure.)

Bottom line: Cat and I are now sitting pretty darn pretty. I can do stuff now without getting too terribly winded, so I have been: going out to try to find a working ATM, snagging water or food where I can, etc. At present we’ve got two 5-gallon bottles of excellent drinking water—plus the good well water our neighbors brought us. So that’s a lot. There’s a guy up the street who’s letting people access this brook/mini-river that runs through his property; he’s got all kinds of buckets people can use to haul back that gray water for your toilets. Cat and I happened to get into a short line the other day at a Trader Joe’s, where we were able to buy a bunch of non-perishable food. We’ve got propane now.

Basically, we’re set.

And this whole thing is kind of fun—now that our immediate needs are set pretty well, of course. But the second you feel like, “Wow. We’re having hot tea and scrambled eggs with toast—this is awesome!” your heart collapses, because you know how very, very many people are out there right now, suffering in ways you can’t even imagine.

I talked to a guy who’s entire house got ripped off its foundation and swept away. He grabbed his father’s ashes, two photo albums, and some stuff belonging to his son he saw floating by. He has no idea where his house or his two cars ended up. None. He just knows they’re out there somewhere. The night before he and his wife had agreed that she and their two toddlers should flee the area by heading east towards Charlotte—and he hasn’t heard from them since.

I met a guy who was carrying a one-gallon container of gas way the fuck out to his car on the freeway somewhere. (Nobody’s been able to get much gas for days now; but I think that’s getting better. We have our little electric Chevy VOLT, so that’s been gold for us, because we fully charged it the night before the hurricane hit.) The last this guy had heard, a tree had crashed through the bedroom he shares with his wife and baby girl. He hadn’t heard from them in 24 hours.

I know a million stories like that. Everyone does now.

So, yes. Personally, Cat and I are fine. We’re good. But, kind of . . . who cares? if you know what I’m saying. It’s hard to enjoy a good meal with a starving person standing beside you.

As you probably know, I’ve worked at Home Depot for the past two years, selling doors and windows. In that time I’ve met a LOT of people from all of these towns that are up in the mountains all over this area—all over the whole of Western North Carolina. Well, these mountain towns are where so much of the suffering is right now. Because so many of those places are now unreachable: no power, no water, and no way to get to them. It’s fucking awful. People are just . .. suffering up there.

I gotta go now. Thanks for the loving messages and inquiries. I’ll keep you up as I can. For now, most immediately for us, it’s all about whether or not my fever returns; whether or not the doctors at the hospital actually killed the thing that was trying to kill me. If they didn’t, and that thing is still there, it’s gonna come back at me fast and large—and I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to do about that. And I only mention it again because in the time it’s taken me to write this, I actually have started to feel, well, feverish. So, honestly, I’m ever so slightly frightened right now.

But I’m sure it’s nothing: it’s just been another really long hot stressful day here. I think just need to rest a bit, and I’ll be good.

Sorry. All of this stuff that’s happened kind of screws with your emotional bearings. It’s so hard to see so many homes destroyed, so many people displaced, so many people so desperate to find out what’s happened to their loved ones. So much, so cruelly and suddenly swept away.

It makes you kind of crazy, basically.

Plus, man. A SHOWER would be nice.

Love to you all. Thank you soooooo much or the loving inquires. I’m so glad to have this way to communicate with you. I’ll do it again soon. LOVE YOU!