From Asheville: You have no idea

I didn't either. I still don't. And I never will. None of us will.

I don’t know why I chose this picture, of the seemingly hundreds I’ve taken of the mind-breaking devastation that now surrounds us everywhere. This is on a beautiful trail by the river that my wife and I have walked a thousand times. But you could go just about anywhere in Asheville right now, close your eyes, point your phone, shoot, and get a photo showing something at least as appalling as this cargo container wrapped around a bridge pylon.

Hello from Asheville.

I wish I knew more words than I do. If only, like Trump, I had all the very best words.

But I don’t. I don’t.

I don’t have the words to capture everything I’ve seen and learned in the last few days.

Everything feels ruined. Because so, so much of it utterly is. The whole of the River Arts District. All of Biltmore Village. All of Swannanoa. The entire—

So, I’m not even going to try to capture what’s happened not just to Asheville, but to all the towns and people throughout the mountains and counties all around Asheville.

Though I will say this: everyone out here knows that the dead haven’t even begun to be counted yet. Literally innumerable homes and buildings and businesses and shelters were swept away, almost without warning, inhabitants and all. And when a 20-foot wall of water suddenly comes roaring over you, you don’t start swimming. You start dying.

My wife Cat and I are lucky. Cat has been able to return to her job as the Finance Director of Helpmate, the non-profit organization that serves victims of domestic violence throughout Buncombe County and beyond. This Monday I’ll be returning to my job at Home Depot. (I’ve been on a medical leave of absence since the first week in September, due to this pneumonia thing that very nearly killed me and put me in the hospital for five days. But finally I’m better!)

Well, Cat and I have jobs to go back to. That puts us among the very lucky ones, for which we am inexpressively grateful. Asheville lives on tourism. If there’s a brewery or restaurant or bar or club or music venue in this town that wasn’t wiped off the map, then it still has to survive four or five more weeks of being shut down, because that’s at least how long it will be before their water is turned back on. Most of these kinds of businesses can’t take a hit of that order. Half of them were just getting back on their feet after Covid.

Anyway, here is why I’m writing. A lot of you decided to help us out by upgrading your subscription to this newsletter to a paid one—instead of keeping it at the free level, which of course everyone is free and welcome to do. I can’t even begin to tell you how much it’s meant to me that so many of you chose to upgrade your subscription in that manner.

So, but here’s the thing. Cat is now getting together again with all of the people that she works with at Helpmate: they had their first all-staff meeting today, and there she reunited with people extremely dear to her whom she hasn’t heard from or talked to since Helene rained down so much hell everywhere around here.

When I return to work Monday, I’m going to hear all kind of horrific stories, both from my co-workers and customers. I have so much affection for so many of my fellow Home Depot employees. I know I’m going to hear what’s happened to many of them and their loved ones, and how they’re managing to live now. And I know that hearing a lot of those stories is going to feel like my soul is being put through a meat grinder. I know that’s coming my way.

So here’s what I am trying to say: I want money. Cat and I want to be able to help the people we know who are suffering. So often people we know or have met just need money to buy—God, just think of all the things people need and have lost: clothes, furniture, air purifiers now that their homes are covered in mold. It’s just endless.

So many of you have already helped make it possible for Cat and I to offer some assistance to people whom we know: neighbors, friends, co-workers. And for that we cannot thank you enough.

If you would like to know that your money is 100% going to help actual, real people in Asheville and the mountain communities that surround it—people whom we actually and really know and care about—then, please: upgrade to a paid subscription to this newsletter—or simply Venmo me (@Norman-Shore-1, or john@johnshore.com.)

The core truth of this is that Cat and I need help. We are feeling what so so so many people around here are, which is acutely and profoundly desperate. We’re desperate to be able to provide any comfort or help to people who have had their fucking lives destroyed. People with parents they’re caring for, children who need clothes and food and a place to sleep that’s not covered in mud and mold, pets that need food and maybe a cozy pet bed to snuggle up on.

Anything. All of it. We need to help. Not being able to is beyond agonizing. Cat and I are financially okay now: thanks, again, to so many of you. We’ll handle my medical bills; I have good insurance through my job, and safe to say we’ll have time to pay that stuff off. We’re both working again. We’re good.

But goddamn if we’re not surrounded by extremely good people who are not fine, who don’t have a financial way forward, who’ve completely lost their home or their job or the small businesses they spent years getting on its feet. And the government just isn’t geared up right now to be of the kind of immediate, “Here’s some cash” assistance that so many of them need right now.

And it’s not just cash that we want to offer people. It’s also, and maybe even mostly, just wanting to buy them stuff that we know they need. You know how it is: people are proud, so sometimes just offering them money is awkward. But giving them a set of flannel sheets, or bed pillows, or a million other things that people need in their daily lives? Priceless.

Except of course that that sort of stuff does have a price, and that’s where I’m hoping some of you might step in. If you could find it in your heart (and wallet) to help us help our neighbors and friends, I 100% promise that we’ll put your money to the same kind of use that you’d put it to yourself, if you were here. If you don’t know me, and so can’t trust me like that, of course I get it. But if you’ve been with me a while, and/or do actually know me, then . . . well, then you know me. So we’re good.

THANK YOU! I hope this finds you and yours well and healthy and warm and safe. And if ever in my life I’ve meant those words, it’s tonight.