On an October day last year, in this flood-ravaged town of fewer than 1,000, musician Doug Carr stood in the gutted Old Marshall Jail. He strummed a dusty, beat-up Japanese-made classical guitar his friend Colston Byrd had given him.
Another friend played flugelhorn, and three female vocalists hummed along as Carr sang a haunting melody about Byrd, who had nearly died in a landslide during Hurricane Helene.
Byrd, 34, had been up all night editing a short film in his rental home in Bat Cave in Henderson County when the storm ripped through. Flood waters dislodged an avalanche of trees, debris, and boulders. The force sent his home down Bearwallow Mountain, and Byrd rode with it, splitting his head open, breaking his ribs and nearly every bone on the left side of his body, and puncturing a lung. Everything he owned, including $100,000 worth of technical equipment, was ruined.
you carry lives upon your back
bearwallow mountain
clad in armor shorn of clouds
that settle softly on your shoulder
you let down your endless flood
you motherfountain
It took Carr, 36, a week to learn what happened to his friend. The song Carr wrote was his first after the floods, which he then performed as part of a fundraising project called the Resonance Sessions.
The melody had been kicking around in his head for months. But he wrote the lyrics quickly, mostly while traversing the region in his 2010 silver Toyota Prius, trying to find out how Byrd and other friends had fared. He also spent a lot of time parked in the Best Buy lot in Waynesville, one of the few places with a Starlink for internet access. Carr describes his music as “glitchy, experimental, electronic pop.”
and without warning you were maimed
bearwallow mountain
you were sobbing in your gorges
they were helpless to console you
then on the morning when you claimed
my brother’s house and
everything between its walls
it became yours
“It’s really about awe in the face of just this kind of indifferent power of nature,” said Carr, who now lives in Marshall. “I tried to capture … just feeling really small in the face of something really powerful.”
Twenty miles north of Asheville, along the French Broad River, Marshall is the Madison County seat. A year after Helene, the town’s Classical Revival-style courthouse and post office are permanently closed. The building that housed the Town Hall, as well as the maintenance and police departments, was also destroyed. Those employees now work from a rented 1,400-square-foot office outside of town. Flooding also caused extensive damage to the volunteer fire department’s station and equipment; it now operates from an airframe-like structure and trailer on land donated by the First Baptist Church.
A massive volunteer effort helped to reopen some of the downtown businesses. Carr led briefings for volunteers and outfitted them with Tyvek suits, gloves, boots, respirators, and eye protection. He now is program director of Marshall Relief Alliance, a nonprofit that emerged after the storm to address the community’s immediate and long-term needs.
Artists like Carr in Madison County and beyond have turned to their music, photography, pottery, and other crafts to help them navigate the trauma of Helene.
“Usually for me, songwriting and processing grief are very closely intertwined in my life, and so I’ve always used songwriting as a way to kind of sublimate grief,” said Carr. Even before Helene, he was coping with the end of a nine-year relationship and treatment for a benign but aggressive tumor on his pituitary gland.
Moving his emotions through music “get[s] me to the other side of it in a way,” he said.
Science can help explain why art is healing, said psychologist Kelly Graves. It “helps us to regulate our stress hormones,” said Graves, a retired professor of psychology at UNC-Greensboro who now runs an outpatient mental health clinic. “It creates this calmness.” “The other thing that art really helps people do is regain a sense of control,” she said.
and now it’s over…
as indifferent as the wind
that blew it over
you’ve been overpressured
overweathered
oh it’s coming now
it’s an awful lot of grief
that you’ve been holding
Through the Eyes of Children
Art has also helped children process their own feelings related to the storm.
Mandy Sheehan, 42, has taught art in Madison County’s public elementary schools, including to children in Marshall and Hot Springs, for the past nine years. She follows an approach called Teaching for Artistic Behavior, which considers all students as artists and her classroom as their studio. Sheehan believes the approach was especially helpful for students working through the trauma of Helene.
One of her fifth-grade students, who lost his family home in Hot Springs, indirectly expressed that experience in watercolor and markers. For Madison County’s annual winter holiday card contest, the boy created a winter landscape, “but there was lightning and it was very stormy,” Sheehan said. “So not your typical, ‘here’s a snowman.’”
He stayed late one day to finish his work, as Sheehan cleaned up her classroom. “And he was so proud,” she said. “He needed extra time.”
As he drew, he started talking about evacuating and losing his home.
Sheehan recalled another student from Marshall, a third-grader whose family took in another family displaced by the storm. “Her piece was all these little figures holding hands, and it was her family, their family, and all their people together,” she said.
“Whether a student is actually creating imagery that actually looks like the experience, or if they’re literally just making marks or using their hands to create something,” making art can help them process loss and trauma, Sheehan said.
Sheehan said it’s true in her own life, too. Five years ago, she and her husband lost their son, Phoenix, while Sheehan was giving birth. She took up weaving. “I use my weaving loom and I will not be thinking about anything except how to thread hundreds of tiny threads,” she said. “And yet still, I find that my brain starts to actually work through things,” resulting in fewer flashbacks.
“Art,” said Graves, “is so helpful because it helps to unlock our sensory memories, which are actually stored in a different part of our brain than other memories, like our math facts.”
Our brain stores normal memories “like uncooked spaghetti,” she said—it’s in straight lines. “Trauma memories are stored in the more primitive parts of our brain, and they’re stored like cooked spaghetti.”
Art, she said, “can help make sense of that spaghetti.”
Old Art Forms for New Trauma
Sarah Jones Decker, 43, a documentary photographer, lives on an organic farm with her husband outside downtown Marshall. She spent the first month after Helene joining hundreds of other volunteers digging the town out of the mud.
Decker was documenting the disaster on her iPhone 15, but felt compelled to do even more. She asked herself: “How can I use this to document maybe one of the biggest things that’s ever happened in my life?”
A month after Helene, the local and national news media left, and Decker turned to a skill she had learned before the floods: tintype photography. Images are created on thin sheets of metal coated with light-sensitive emulsion. Decker converted the back of her 2012 Subaru Outback into a mobile darkroom.
It was a similar technology used to capture images of the last major flood in Western North Carolina, which was in July 1916. Decker said her fellow townspeople were like “lost souls,” struggling to figure out how to rebuild. “And I got to spend an hour of time with them and make art with them. That is a tangible thing that they can have forever,” she said in an interview at the rebuilt Zuma Coffee and Provisions.
The subjects keep the photographs. In October, Decker’s work will be exhibited at the Weizenblatt Gallery at Mars Hill University.
“Choosing tintype might have been the slowest way to capture the moment, but it allowed me and my subjects to catch our breath and create an image instead of a fast digital capture,” she said.
“Because of the physical challenges and the technicality of working in wet plate collodion, it’s like the combination of how hard I was pushing myself that became an outlet for me to be down here and to take my work and use it to help others in the community see themselves.”
For Carr, surviving the storm has given him a new perspective on the valuable role of human consciousness. He’s also appreciative of the capacity to understand our vulnerability in the face of the power of nature, and to be able to express that through art.
“Just having, as a species, reached probably a bit of a deeper understanding of a lot of the world around us than maybe any other species on our planet has,” he said. “There’s a lot to be grateful for in just being able to experience that.”
Allison Salerno is an independent multimedia journalist who also is an avid Appalachian Trail backpacker. Among other places, her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times and on America Test Kitchen’s podcast, Proof. She won an award in 2024 from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists for her coverage of Venezuelan asylum seekers traveling through Georgia, and another in 2025 for a radio documentary about farmworkers dying in extreme heat in Florida.
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