The Flood

It’s August in the late, hot summer of 1989, weeks before we start our senior year in high school, and we are sitting in my 1980 Honda Accord hatchback in Amy’s driveway, listening to Indigo Girls on cassette. Amy is singing softly with the tape:

My place is of the sun and

This place is of the dark and

I do not feel the romance

I do not catch the spark

I am singing too, because I love this song. I love being with Amy. She makes me feel like I make sense, and she teaches me ways to think about people differently. I’m gearing up to tell her that maybe the way I feel about her is not just a friend-type feeling. We are both facing the windshield, when my mouth starts making words, fumbling through some excruciatingly emo buildup to a clunky confession of how my feelings about her are more than friends

There it is, it’s out. She turns toward me, takes my face in her hands, looks deep into my eyes and says “Oh, Matthew…” and I’m thinking “Holy shit, she likes me too and here comes our first kiss!” But instead she pauses, her gaze hardening to a stern intensity, and says, “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND how you DON’T KNOW that I. AM. A. LESBIAN.” 

I’m startled into Scooby mode like RRWHAT? She says “Dude… I love you too man, but not like that, and I don’t know how you don’t already know. I mean we are sitting here on our third replay of INDIGO GIRLS!” And I’m like “So….the Indigo Girls are gay, too?!?” Amy closes her eyes, emits a bellowing, guttural sigh, and exits the vehicle. 

I’m deflated and embarrassed in this crushingly vulnerable teenage moment, and for a few minutes I feel emotionally demolished, absorbed in my own self-pity. It feels like there is no coming back from this. I want to crawl under the car and die. 

But I sit there, and the tape is still playing.

Secure yourself to heaven

Hold on tight, the night has come

Fasten up your earthly burdens

You have just begun

In other words, buckle up, buddy, there’s a lot more happening here. Well, shit.

As I sigh and sniffle in the driver’s seat, I begin to consider that maybe this moment could be about something bigger than my feelings. I can now see something that I couldn’t see before –I have been trusted with a delicate thing. I am close to a person who has had to be very careful about showing who she is, and I didn’t even know it, and this friend has just come out to me. Sure, it was awkward, but only because I am a sheltered, self-absorbed, navel-gazing dumdum of a straight boy, and she thought surely I’d have figured it out by now. 

I begin to see that I am now a part of something. The gothy huddles at school and around town who had embraced me as a kindred spirit were not all just passively straight misanthropes. Some of them were actually gay and trans and non-binary, even if they didn’t have that language yet, or at least hadn’t all said it out loud. They had faced much higher stakes than me in how authentic they could be to their families and communities, and their experiences made my identity struggles pale in comparison. But they adopted me, they educated me about survival, showed me something about strength in numbers, how emotional expression is mandatory, how being your unedited self is true courage, how dancing is the cure for almost everything. Seeing this, accepting this, awakening to this – I could not unsee it. I could see past what was blocking my vision before. I saw my peers – and humankind at large – in a deeper way. Assumptions and conventions that had mattered to me before no longer mattered. I could never go back.

A few weeks after this night, it is September and our long-awaited senior year has begun. After a night of heavy rains and high winds, I awake in the morning to a darkened room, the blank, unlit face of my alarm clock. I am late for school. I jump up and turn to the window just above the headboard of my twin bed and see the needles of a tall evergreen smushed against the window, obscuring any incoming daylight. It dawns on me that this tree has been felled by high winds, its top landing directly on my window, miraculously not breaking through the glass and onto my face. 

I go downstairs and open the front door and see the trees of the neighborhood rising diagonally, horizontally, but few are now vertical. My dad, a middle school assistant principal, is still at home, drinking coffee in his underwear. He says there’s no school, that the hurricane we heard about on the news came much further inland than expected and that Charlotte is messed up pretty bad. We are without power for two weeks. I eat VanCamp’s Beanie Weenies straight from the can and sit in my room reading skateboarding and music magazines. I learn Indigo Girls and R.E.M. songs on acoustic guitar. I write sickeningly earnest poems. Roads are blocked by downed trees and neighbors I’ve never seen before are out attempting to clear the streets. The buzzing whine of chainsaws is in the air, constantly, for days. Phone lines are down and for a while I can’t reach Amy, or anyone else. 

When the city is back up and running, and school starts again, I expect the teachers to invite us to talk about it, but they don’t. 

We don’t talk about it in class, but we do at lunch, in my corner with my people. We tell stories and laugh and cry and hug, even though we are not supposed to hug at school. We all know that there was a before and now we are in the after.

Now we all are chosen ones

Now we all are chosen ones

Now we all are chosen ones

Now we all are chosen ones

Wednesday, September 25, 2024: I’m in the Main Street barbershop in my small Western North Carolina town getting a haircut before my wife takes the car for a few days to babysit our niece and nephew while their parents have a much deserved weekend getaway. The barber and I chit-chat about how warm it still is in late September and how it doesn’t look like we're gonna have a very colorful leaf season this year. Somebody waiting for a haircut says they heard we got some rain coming.

I pick up some books at the public library since I’ll be stuck at home with no car until Sunday, looking forward to reading on the porch with the sunbathing cat until the sun goes down. I think to stop and pick up a couple things at the grocery store before I don’t have the car to do it, but there are no empty spaces in the parking lot. I’m like “It’s noon on a Wednesday, what the hell?” At the next grocery store down the street, it’s the same thing. I decide to just forget it. I get home and see several alert messages on my phone warning of potential flash flooding. I get emails from two separate utility companies warning of possible outages. A client reaches out to ask if we should reschedule tomorrow’s appointment because of the storm. 

WTF? How did I miss this?

I check local news and watch a video from an area weather forecaster who urges viewers to take this storm seriously and prepare for catastrophic damage. She says this is going to be MUCH WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT. My wife has already left with the car, heading two hours east. She doesn’t know a thing. We have one of those marital inside-jokey agreements that I’m the weather guy in the relationship and as such, she never misses a chance to rib me when my predictions are wrong. This doesn’t stop me from insisting that she bring a jacket when she’s going to be out after dark, of course, but I have learned to turn the intensity down a few notches to avoid the eyerolls. But at this moment, I fear I have failed her. 

I call her and she answers, and yeah, she’s seeing some heavy rain and dark gray clouds but she’s halfway there and she thinks she’ll be alright. I tell her what I’ve learned and she says OH SHIT. She calls to tell me she’s made it to her sister’s house fine, but she’s worried about me. I say “Well, I think I’m good. I got some stuff to eat and everything I need if the power goes out for a few hours or whatever, me and the cat are gonna bro down and read some books.” We hang up, not knowing it’s the last time we’ll hear each others’ voice for three days. A steady, dense rain continues to fall for the rest of the night.

Thursday, Sept 26th: In the morning, more alerts show up on my phone, and the flood watch is now a flood warning. I contact all my teletherapy clients and move my afternoon sessions to the morning, as the local NPR station is saying that the situation will intensify as the day progresses, and losing power is a likelihood. The storm, and its rapid escalation, is a significant subject in all my sessions, creating a palpable anxiety. We review Acceptance & Commitment Therapy skills that may be helpful. Almost every session ends with a “Maybe this will all be much ado about nothing” sentiment, followed by nervous chuckles.

The heavy downpour continues, steady, unwavering, relentless.

I’m awakened from sleep that night by eerie, ghostly wind noises, and I can tell that this is now when it’s really going down. The cat has moved from his usual position of sleeping on half of my face, and has hidden under the bed. I’ve just slipped back under the surface of sleep when I begin to hear a repeat knocking against the wall of the bedroom. I try to ignore it, but my mind is jarred awake trying to figure out what could be making the noise. There are no loose parts on our apartment building – no shutters, no adjacent trees, nothing that explains this noise. I get up, put on sweatpants and a raincoat (at 3:30 am) and go to the balcony porch to see what it is. 

When I look out across the parking lot, the streetlights are out and I realize there’s no power. I dig out my headlamp and open the door to a drenching gale. I’m instantly soaked, down to my socks. The knocking is from the pull-down sun shade on our porch, that I thought I had secured sufficiently the night before, but no, it has unfurled like a sail and is draped over the railing, the metal rod at its base flapping repeatedly against the building, undoubtedly keeping everyone in the apartments below and above me awake. I pull it back over the rail and lay it down on the porch. I feel like a negligent asshole and mentally prepare an apology to my neighbors for when I next see them. By now my brain is fixated on this, and sleep is not a direction it is willing to go.

Friday, September 27th: The rain and wind continue through the morning and into the afternoon. I make coffee and oatmeal on my gas-powered backpacking stove. It’s kinda charming, actually, and I get to use all my sweet backpacking gear. I sit on the floor with my back against the couch, in the pale light of the big window in my living room. I scan my tall stack of library books, choose Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy and start reading. The language is easy to read and familiar, like a conversation. I think to myself that I can probably finish this whole thing today as I wait for the power to come back on. I text my wife that, from the window, which faces our apartment parking lot, it doesn’t really look that bad, just a whole bunch of leaves and twigs blown around. I tell her that the rain is slowing down, even if the wind is still kinda strong, but that it seems like the worst is over. She texts back that no, it’s much worse than that based on what she’s seeing on TV. She is very worried. I open Facebook on my phone and it fails to load. I’ll try later, I think, and go back to reading.

I take a break from my book and I think I might go out and look around in a minute to see if she’s right and if there’s any damage, but before I do, I think to myself “Do I still have any kind of radio?” I think I might have saved my last Sony Walkman cassette player from the late 90s, but which shoebox is it in? I go spelunking in the storage closet and I finally locate it. It does in fact have an am/fm radio and it takes two AA batteries. I set it up and it turns on. Then I realize that I also have to find a pair of wired headphones with a plug-in. More spelunking, and then finally I find a pair of those white, wired earbuds that used to come standard with iPhones. I sit near the window and find Blue Ridge Public Radio’s air signal, 88.1 fm. A woman with a calming, sweet voice named Helen lists the numerous areas of our region that are without power, along with numerous road closures. Her voice is comforting, though she sounds a little more nervous than usual. She says they are running on generator power. I will check in throughout the day for any updates. I go back to reading.

By evening, the power has not come back on. Helen of the radio says they are getting reports of heavily flooded areas, substantial mudslides and innumerable downed trees that have decimated parts of the region. I feel a little confused, as that’s not what I see out my window. Some friends show up to my place and tell me that the damage in our town is really bad, that I should come with them to see it, and then we can go to their place and grill all of their food before it goes bad. We drive to their house on unlit, carless streets littered with leaves and sticks and trash and I see that indeed, the damage is more severe here than at the apartment-complex island I live in just a mile away. Hundred-year-old trees are uprooted from the ground, pulling up entire root systems that now stand ten to twelve feet high. The trees lay across roads, across caved roofs, broken into bedroom windows. Power lines criss-cross streets and dangle untethered like untied shoelaces. We grill food and have a feast on their patio as the sun goes down and the tropically warm, moist air mercifully cools. Despite the observable damage, we still carry a “this kinda sucks but is also kinda fun making the most of it” vibe into the evening, like a snow day.  

Then my friends’ tween son comes out of the house and says there’s no water coming out of the faucet.

My friends have no backup water sources, so we drive to Publix to see if they’re open. As a Florida-based food-chain accustomed to this sort of thing, we’ve heard they all have generators. We get to the store and we are right – they’re open, but we were not the only ones with this idea and the place is packed. People with carts overflowing with groceries, mostly bottled water, form lines from the registers to halfway down each aisle. To say there’s an air of panic here is an understatement. I go to the men’s room and there’s a line there too. I begin feeling anxious, too close to everyone and I realize that my body is remembering the first days of Coronavirus, just before mandatory lockdown. I pivot and make an anxious beeline for the door. When I return to my apartment, I check the sink and my water is out too. I sit on the couch in the light of some candles as the implications of this new development sink in. I text my wife to tell her about this and I get a repeat message in red text that says “Failed to deliver.” My one bar of LTE soon turns into SOS. This is not fun like camping anymore. This is bad.

The next three days are a timeless haze of sameness and uncertainty. I feel stressed, because everything requires so much problem solving – cooking, eating, cleaning up, going to the bathroom, hygiene, etc. It’s the first of the month and I can’t move money at our bank to cover the auto draft for our rent. The payment will likely bounce. I’m restless, alternating from the couch to the balcony porch, listening to public radio on the Walkman, and writing texts that never go through. Helen’s voice has a weariness to it now, but I’m impressed that she’s still there. She announces that Buncombe County officials will be doing live briefings at 10am and 4pm daily, and I listen as various officials describe the situation in the region and the status of response efforts. I learn of major damage to our water system, power grid, and cell phone towers and our Sheriff verifies multiple fatalities. One official calls it our Katrina. Despite being asked by multiple journalists, all the officials insist there is NO TIMELINE for utility restoration. I-26 that runs north to south from here is closed. I-40 that runs east to west is closed. My wife can’t get here, I can’t get out. I turn it off and feel myself going numb.

On the third day after the storm, I hear on the radio that I-26 has just been cleared and I have an idea. I try texting my wife and after multiple failed-to-send messages, one goes through. She texts back: 

WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU TOMORROW.

It’s not until I arrive at my sister-in-law’s house in an unaffected part of the state that I gain internet access for the first time in five days and see the footage. I am floored. It is breathtaking in its magnitude. I read reports of people buried alive in mudslides, houses swept away with people still inside who literally had to punch their way out through the roof to escape, bodies and parts of bodies recovered from the limbs of overhanging trees. 

I had no idea. For a while, I cannot speak.

I spend eight and a half days of suburban comfort in relatively unscathed Huntersville, where I am well-taken care of, fed, housed, hugged, licked by animals and invited to kids’ rec league baseball and softball games. I attend gratefully, a part of me needing some grounding normalcy. This grace, however, cannot overcome the disequilibrium of the experience. Something feels wrong, like I shouldn’t be here. None of these people should be here. Parts of my town have just been destroyed and I’m not there to help. I’m sure my discomfort is palpable to the cheering parents in folding chairs. I pace and try to settle myself, clapping for the kids and taking slow, deep breaths.

On day nine, we get an email from our apartment manager saying that power, water and internet have returned. We talk it over and decide that we’re not sure we are ready to go back. It’s not just that we aren’t prepared to go back into a disaster zone; it’s that we know we don’t want to go back to the life we had before. Turns out, it wasn’t so great – we were bored and unhappy, stuck in a rut of sameness and working too much. 

This experience, and now the time away, has illuminated something. We want to make changes. We want something better.

From afar, we read stories of neighbors helping neighbors, videos showing grass roots mutual aid efforts where people are rescuing, nurturing, feeding, cooperating and comforting one another. Donations of money and supplies coming in before government aid arrives. Faith communities stepping up, supplying communities and offering labor. Someone in my town has a printer powered by generator, and is handwriting bullet points of info they get from the daily public radio briefings regarding water and food distribution, and they are printing these out on paper and handing them out on Main street so people without radios will know what’s up. Our aforementioned tween friend creates a scavenger hunt for the hordes of now schoolless bicycle and scooter-mounted children. The grand prize is a baseball signed by members of our local minor-league baseball team. 

Despite the awfulness, something magical is happening. We want to go home, but we don’t want to go back. 

Friday, October 11th, we’re back home in Weaverville, NC, two weeks after the worst day of the storm. I’m sick as a dog with an upper respiratory thing I picked up in our last days in Huntersville, begrudgingly parking on the couch to watch TV and rest my body so it can fight this bug, whatever the hell it is. I’m so pissed that I’ve gotten sick because we just got back to town after evacuating and I have places to go and people to connect with. I signed up for an in-person mental health emergency response training so that I can feel more effective in my work right now,  given the present circumstances. I have a supportive therapist consultation group I desperately want to connect with in-person. But I have to forfeit my spot in the training, and I meet with my consultation group virtually. 

I force myself to stop doom-scrolling on Facebook, stop trying to “be productive” and plant my ass so deep in the couch it might get stuck there. I open Netflix and it suggests a documentary called It’s Only Life After All, about the lives and career of Indigo Girls. A pressurized guffaw leaps out of my swollen throat before I can stifle it and I am flooded with a sense of serendipity and existential validation that I can’t yet name. The universe seems to be reminding me who I am, where I come from, and how ground-shifting events have always been an invitation to level-up. Bravo, universe.

So of course, I watch it, and I guess this is where I should explain that when I am sick, I become a sentimental, weepy puddle. I’m talking snot-crying-at Downy-commercials-crying puddle. This is much to the endearment (but mostly amusement) of my wife, who swats me away laughing after I tell her how much I love her–no, like, I really love you–for the hundredth time. 

And now I’m crying again, because these two women made music that was the soundtrack to some of the best and the most emotionally difficult moments of my life. The documentary traces their individual and shared journeys of liberation from external and internalized expectations of their gender, sexuality, spirituality, political views, lifestyle and identity. They process aging with dignity, evolving and letting go. They make fun of their own cringey lyrics, some of which I still sing at the top of my lungs when I hear them, even if they are overwrought and wordy. Emily Saliers shares her addiction struggle and experience with gaining sobriety. Amy Ray shares her long-fought-for acceptance of her body. They do not seem, for even a minute, to consider going back. All of the pain, all of the storms, brought them to where they are now. 

We have a long, long recovery ahead. Driving along the now-passable roads of my town, past endless stacks of splintered tree limbs and debris, I see restaurants and churches with signs reading WNC STRONG and WE WILL REBUILD. I wonder what they mean when they say rebuild. I don’t think anyone believes we can restore or replicate what we have lost, and I, for one, hope we don’t take that aim too literally. 

If this DayQuil-soaked insight I’m having on this couch on a Friday afternoon is anywhere on target, if these dots I’m connecting truly make a map, then this recovery period is an opportunity to let some broken things go, fix what we can and embrace what matters. It’s admittedly easier for me to say this, having suffered relatively little compared to others more directly in the path of the mud and deluge. But no matter how we’ve fared,  we get to choose how this changes us.

Who was there for us when the ground gave way? We were. 

Generator powered radio stations, alkaline batteries, acoustic musical instruments, wood-fueled campfires, gas-powered camp stoves, bottled water, paper and pencil, the printed and spoken word. Mutual aid networks, service-focused faith communities, volunteers, blood families, chosen families, neighbors. Sharing, caring, connecting,informing, crowdsourcing, feeding, clothing, sheltering, uplifting, hugging, soothing, loving. Things we’ve had for decades. We had it in us all along. We already had what we needed to survive. So what is it that we want to “rebuild”?

The documentary ends and the song “Watershed” plays over the credits. 

And they say only milk and honey's

Gonna make your soul satisfied

Well I better learn how to swim

'Cause the crossing is chilly and wide

I gaze out the same window, the same view from two weeks ago, when I was sipping the last drops of my drinking water over Helen’s weary but steady voice, waiting to know what to do next. There’s so much I don’t know, so much I cannot yet see, but I know more than ever that nothing is permanent, and that the gift of survival is getting to have a second or third go at living right, whatever that looks like for us. The sun is shining today and I have to rest this ailing body for a marathon, not a sprint, because I’ve been here before, and I know that our next chapter ain’t gonna write itself. Amy texts from her home in Massachusetts to check on me and I text back “I’m alive”.

*Photo & copy editing courtesy of Samantha K. Pollack

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