oh hai Helene in shiny things

I will be making a whole bunch of England entries soon – it was an amazing trip!!! Well, it was amazing after we…finally got there. Which involved quite a fraught situation. Everything not only worked out, but worked out very well, though. That’s a story for next time.

In Current Time, unfortunately, the town I live in was hit by a hurricane. I live like 400 miles from the coast. We are in the NC mountains. We don’t get hit by hurricanes!!! We do have the very occasional storm from hurricanes that make it this far, with rain and winds. This time Helene caused a full fledged massive flooding event with landslides, trees falling, roads and homes swept away, shocking devastation - the works. And we weren’t hit nearly as badly as Asheville, where I grew up and my family still lives. There were entire areas literally washed away. Swannanoa was destroyed. The water rose over the roofs of houses all along the river. Biltmore Village, a very historical area where the Biltmore House is, was decimated. The River Arts District, an amazing place full of old warehouses that are now artist’s studios and breweries and restaurants was under water. Chimney Rock and Lake Lure were destroyed too - they aren’t in Asheville but are much loved vacation spots nearby. I don’t actually know what the death toll was in this area, but it will definitely rise since they are still hunting people. My sister in law’s aunt died in the flooding. My uncle nearly did - he is 87 and has memory issues, and lived alone. My cousins couldn’t get in touch with him for I think two days but he was rescued by boat and is okay.

We just got our power back on last night - it was off for ten days, and our power is NEVER off for more than a few hours. We did mostly have water since we’re on a neighborhood well that has a generator, although it would occasionally run out of gas and we’d be waterless again for a little while. And we were trapped in our neighborhood for a couple of days by a downed utility pole and several downed trees, but fortunately neighbors with chainsaws got us out, and also brought in supplies for all of us while we were stuck. SO being without power was definitely just an inconvenience after that. We even had cellular so could get online and keep up with news on our phones. Which actually we are still doing since the internet is still down. And the grocery stores stayed well stocked, kind of surprisingly. A lot of things are closed but we had no problem finding essentials. Asheville is much worse off. My brother’s family still doesn’t have power or water, but can get out, and stores are starting to get restocked it sounds like. It will be a loooong recovery for sure.

This is a very disjointed entry, but I feel like I have a very disjointed brain after all this! The university has shut down till at least the 16th, but we’re able to get into our offices, which is where I am right now. Our sad icky old dorm-converted-to-office-space really saved Baker B and I, since we were able to bring in all the portable chargers every day and recharge them — and thanks to my kind of bizarre obsession with portable chargers, I have a WHOLE LOT of them so we always had plenty on hand. Now I do not berate myself for being a portable charger hoarder. AND we could take showers here in the old shower areas, which are ancient and a little icky looking but are a whole lot better than no showers at all. (As an illustration of how old this building is, I lived five doors down from my current office when I was a sophomore here. And before Baker B and I got married we lived in a house where the well pump died and the landlord took forever to get it fixed, and we came to this very building for showers way back then. We were young enough to pass for students and they did not have the security there is now. We’ve been married 33 years so it’s been awhile.)

SO my other project has finished at last - getting my England pictures to load up to Flickr - so I am ending this sad tale now and will have happier entries before long. As we keep saying, we were SO LUCKY it was not worse for us. We live on a hill so no flooding in our house, and nothing fell on us. Same for my brother’s family and Kim. Kim has power and water back too finally, so hopefully my brother will soon. It’s very inconvenient and no fun, and we are not good pioneers, but we’re fine and all our stuff is fine, unlike so many people here. All over Western NC.