
Letter from North Carolina
By Matt Teague, TVA writer
The storm announced itself with silence, at first.
The ceiling fan in our bedroom stopped turning Thursday night, Sept. 26, and in the quiet I knew Helene had knocked out our electricity. It’ll be back on soon, I thought, and fell asleep.
At some dark hour a series of rapid snapping sounds erupted outside our window — crack, crack, crackkk — and then came the shudder of a giant tree crashing to earth.
Before I fully awoke, my wife, Bo, had scrambled off the bed and across the room, where she had thrown herself across our toddler’s bed. I ran outside and saw an oak had come to rest across our only road out.
We live in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, on the North Carolina side of the Tennessee line; we’re surrounded by trees and steep slopes. So I knew two things: We were trapped. And the power wouldn’t likely return soon.
It’s all right, I thought, as the rain soaked my shirt. How bad could this really get?
***
“You prefer it this way,” I told Bo after the sun came up. We’d made a fire outside, and now she cooked eggs on a skillet. Plenty for us and our three children.
She smiled. “Like we’re on the Oregon Trail.”
The storm forced simplicity, and we enjoyed the moment. Cast-iron and candles. But I’ve spent years reporting around the world from inside disasters, natural and man-made, and a thought flickered at the edge of my mind: There’s a grace period. A couple of days while people get by on what’s left in the refrigerator. But soon they start to feel thirsty, and hungry. They start to get sick. They start to feel desperate.
And an elderly couple up the mountain had medical complications. We needed to move that oak.
Our nearest neighbor arrived with a chainsaw, and we spent much of Friday bucking, cutting, and shoving around that tree and others. Any other day I would have showered afterward, but we had no running water; I scrubbed down with my son’s baby wipes. Probably good enough, I thought.
By Sunday morning I had started to shiver, covered from eyeballs to ankles in poison ivy. Doctors’ offices were closed, so I picked my way to the emergency room.
In the waiting room I found Helene’s human aftermath: a middle-aged man with a broken arm. A young woman in withdrawal. An old woman gasping for air, after the batteries died in her supplemental oxygen system. A tableau of suffering.
Among them other people, seemingly healthy, moved more furtively through the waiting room. After a while I realized they had come to siphon the hospital’s electricity. They charged their phones in hope of reaching a loved one, or maybe anyone from the outside world.
Molly and Evie Teague, daughters of TVA writer Matt Teague, visit a stream in western North Carolina to collect water for household needs.
The days sped up and slowed down. A smear of time.
An exhausting trinity of priorities arose and dominated daylight hours: Water, food, fuel. Water, food, fuel.
Water, food, fuel.
Above them all stood the promise and hope of electricity. With it our family could pump water from our well. Gas stations could resume pumping. Then we could drive to search for groceries.
With electricity, too, we might reestablish communication. I knew from working in destroyed places — whether by war or weather — that in an absence of information people will grasp for any pattern, real or imagined.
Now a veil had settled over western North Carolina, no different than Somalia or Sri Lanka, and people picked up scraps of news like wind-blown litter. Rumors of dams breaking, when they had not. Fears the nation had abandoned us. The government was distracted by emerging overseas conflict. No help was coming. All untrue.
The world shrunk to what we could see before us. During the day that meant gathering jugs of creek water to flush toilets. At night it meant staring into the darkness through the trees, hoping for illumination. A single watt of glow. Any candlepower of light.
And then it came — after how many days? a week? — a blast of light through the woods. A truck lumbered up the mountain like a well-lit alien craft, all crane arms and roaring saws. A crew of linemen trimmed fallen trees as they went.
As they passed, I stumbled alongside them in the dark, crashing through the brush and shouting, “How long?”
A voice came back: Not long, now.
Less than an hour later the ceiling fan started turning again. Water ran. Information started to flow. I sent a widespread message: “The power company just turned on power at our house. An answered prayer. Anyone who doesn’t have power or running water, or could just use some company, is welcome to come stay at our cabin.”
We had too much for one family, it seemed, when many people in our community had nothing at all.
Hurricane Helene's floodwaters brought devastation to communities throughout western North Carolina and east Tennessee.
Gas stations began to pump fuel again, and what had felt like a small, personal disaster revealed its scale in the days that followed.
Our little church in Swannanoa, North Carolina, sat at what seemed to be the epicenter of the destruction, and traveling there was a tour of smashed homes, missing bridges, wrecked lives.
On the way we detoured through an evacuated women’s prison to reach the Black Mountain Home for Children, where an avalanche had thundered through but somehow left the children uninjured.
Other places, people had been less fortunate. To see it all — the overturned terrain, the upended lives — felt like a valuable act in itself. The first preservation of what will become historical memory.
At church we received a list of people in the community who hadn’t been seen for days and needed checking. Searching through a landscape of rubble, we found some of the people on the list. Others we didn’t. The last was an 83-year-old war Veteran we found sitting in the dark of his living room, in his wheelchair. He had cancer, he said, and something had gone wrong with his hip.
His eyes watered as we left behind everything we could — food, toiletries, water — and promised to return. He lifted his chin and said, “You are — and I mean this as a compliment — random help.”
***
I write this from the makeshift refugee camp of our old cabin. Home to 14 people, so far. A place of inflatable mattresses and fuel cans and paper plates.
I write this as an ode, a love letter, a message in a bottle. People call electricity power, and I understand that with a brightness and clarity, now. It is power: the power to care for ourselves. To push back the darkness. To bear witness in the light.
And the power, in the end, to help others.
PHOTO AT TOP OF PAGE: Amid the darkness, workers in a bucket truck clear trees near the Teague family's cabin in the Smoky Mountains.