Joy Follows the Flood

“Lansing Is Back,” declares a hand-scrawled message on the post office window. And that is mostly true. 

Rolling into town on a fall afternoon, with live music echoing across the creekside park and Old Orchard Creek General Store serving up wine and cider, you have to pay close attention to know this place was wrecked to the rooflines last September. 

Big Horse Creek, an idyllic little trout stream that runs well downhill from Lansing’s two-block stretch of storefronts, filled the valley to bursting during Hurricane Helene, flooding the fire department, the pizza parlor, the post office, and the grocery store. The storm washed out roads in so many places that all-terrain vehicles became the primary mode of transportation around Ashe County, which borders both Virginia and Tennessee in the northwest corner of the state.

The early days after the storm were harrowing, exhausting, and just plain hard. And now, a year later, many people miss them.

“You’re together 12 hours a day, working and focusing,” said Rene Shuford, who lives a couple of miles up the road from Lansing and saw the bottom floor of her house destroyed by the storm. “We were so connected, very goal-oriented, and trying to get people help.”

Shuford was among a group of volunteers, both locals and outsiders, who refocused their lives to help get Lansing back on its feet. It’s a tiny town with fewer than 200 residents, and for weeks many of them gathered at dawn, worked past sundown, then gathered again to eat and drink, to talk and cry. “We all were having this collective experience, this very close experience,” Shuford recalled. “We were there with each other constantly.”

Nobody wishes for disaster; no one relishes the suffering of friends and neighbors. But across Western North Carolina, people have also found joy in the wake of calamity. They’ve formed intense, tightly bonded communities. They’ve felt a clarity and shared purpose that is all too rare in the fragmented hustle of regular life. And along the patchy road back to normalcy, there’s a bittersweet nostalgia for the urgency and unity of those early days.

“You’re waking up in the morning with a fire lit in you and charging hard all day,” remembered Leeth Davis, who drove into Lansing every morning for weeks with his wife Emily to aid the disaster response last fall. “Then every night, you’re hanging out with all of these people and having way too many beers and talking about the day. All of that feels really good.”

Bridgework 

The Davises were well-positioned to pitch in. Emily is a licensed structural engineer, and Leeth is a commercial helicopter pilot with a background in construction. Their mountainside home about 12 miles south of Lansing escaped damage, and they possess a rugged four-seat off-road vehicle and the get-it-done mentality of homesteaders. 

Once they understood the scale of the disaster—not an easy thing in those first days, with communication down across the region—they both felt a call to contribute. “We never even really discussed it,” Leeth said. “Our time and our direction kind of picked itself for us.” They took their two young children to stay with their grandparents in Gastonia for a few weeks and started spending every waking hour on disaster response.

At first, that meant delivering food to more remote parts of the county, sourcing diesel fuel for generators and trucks, hauling building supplies for emergency repairs—whatever was most urgent. But eventually, given Emily’s engineering expertise and Leeth’s construction skills, they zeroed in on the problem of washed-out bridges. 

Mountain geography being what it is, a lot of people in Ashe County rely on small creek crossings and culverts to get from a paved road to their homes, or to get from one side of the Christmas tree farm to the other. “Private bridge” is the commonly used term, but that suggests something much fancier than is typical. Sometimes the crossing was little more than a pile of rocks with a rusting pipe through the middle; sometimes it was an 80-year-old locust-pole span with weathered slats across the top. Whatever people were using to get their cars and tractors across the creek, there was a decent chance Helene obliterated it.

That left hundreds of families with no way to get to work, buy groceries, or fill up heating tanks heading into the winter, since propane is delivered by truck. There was no state or federal playbook for a mountain hurricane, which meant no immediate relief programs designed to cover the cost of private bridge repair. (North Carolina finally created one in March, committing $100 million in relief funding and quickly collecting 6,543 requests for help. The Department of Public Safety says more than 4,000 sites have been assessed and “dozens of projects have already been completed or are now underway.” DPS has also pledged to work with nonprofits and local governments to expedite the work.)

“We decided that if we can focus on one thing, one big need that other people are not as focused on, we could make a bigger impact,” Emily said. She and her husband started the nonprofit Lansing’s Bridge to Recovery and began taking donations of money, material, and expertise. By January, they had worked on more than 50 crossings and estimated there were hundreds more awaiting help just in Ashe County.

Emily reached out to one of her former professors at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and he tasked a class of engineering students to help assess collapsed bridges and design replacements. Leeth tapped contacts across the state to funnel donations of construction material and equipment into Lansing. And they worked through the spring to transition their nonprofit into a more formalized operation, trying to create some breathing room to return to their prestorm lives.

“You can’t stay in this zone where burnout is inevitable,” Leeth explained late this summer, standing outside their home near Bluff Mountain. “You want to give as much as possible, but at some point you also have to take care of your family. Sometimes you’ve got to split wood, and sometimes you’ve got to stop and sharpen the axe.”

The murky transition from emergency response to long-term recovery has been especially fraught for Emily, who still gets requests for free engineering work from people trying to rebuild. “I work in this industry that people need because of Helene, and that’s wonderful because you have a way to help,” she said. “But eventually you need to make a living. And that’s a moral dilemma either way.”

The family finally took a vacation this summer, celebrating their daughter’s birthday with a rafting trip on the Nantahala River. The far-western region of the mountains escaped most of Helene’s damage, and it took Emily and Leeth a while to stop looking for signs of disaster. “It was weird, floating that river,” Emily said. “No old refrigerators or car hoods!”

It was good to get away, but not for too long. “Everyone I’ve talked to about going back to daily life, they talk about how hard it is,” Emily said. “You know you’re making a difference, and it’s hard to step away from that.”

Pie in the Sky

Matt Cordell still hasn’t taken a vacation, or had any days he would describe as “normal,” since his Pie on the Mountain pizza shop was inundated. “I haven’t been anywhere since the storm, unless it involved a funeral,” he said a few weeks ago, holding a cigarette and a bottle of Rolling Rock as he stood inside his partially rebuilt restaurant. 

Pie on the Mountain has been an anchor of Lansing’s growing tourist economy, drawing a line of visitors in the summer and fall for its funky pizzas and devotion to local ingredients. It sits next to the general store and across from the park. Having it dark for a year has been rough on the town. “It’s all become so symbiotic,” Cordell said, taking a drag of his cigarette. “People tell me, ‘Without you guys open, our sales are hurting.’”

But even Cordell, still slogging through the painful and costly process of getting his shop running again, talks about Helene as a galvanizing moment. “You know, for a long time this town was going south, and in the last few years it was going the other way,” he said. “After the storm, I think people are even more committed to seeing the mom-and-pop places, the individuals with an interesting idea who want to make it work here.” 

He has lost count of all the people who have offered aid—money, labor, construction supplies—to get the restaurant back open. When the renovation is done, he plans to put a decorative border at the 5-foot, 3-inch mark along the walls of the dining room, as high as the water rose, and invite everyone who had a hand in the cleanup to sign it. “I want something people notice,” he said. “Something to thank everyone who got us back.”

He took a swig of beer and looked around the 90-year-old building, which has uneven floors, warped walls, and a very heavy pizza oven that still needs reinstalling. 

“Lansing isn’t the easiest place I’ve ever lived, but it’s the best,” he said. “These people have character.”

Healing Arts

Shuford has an interesting way of describing her decision to dive headlong into disaster recovery and volunteer organizing. “It was selfish, really,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to look at my house, so I just started working on everything else.”

In the days after the storm, she started showing up to the impromptu town meetings, held on the unflooded second floor of the fire department. “It was open to anybody who wanted to come, just to talk through this and figure out what we needed to do next,” Shuford said. She volunteered to keep track of all the different assignments, from organizing food donations to dispatching heavy equipment. That blossomed into a yearlong commitment to coordinate the hundreds of volunteers who streamed into town.

One weekend this summer, Shuford was in the middle of replanting flowers along the little bridge downtown—Lansing is big on beautification projects—but she kept getting interrupted with phone calls. A church group from Charlotte was clearing the mountain bike trails. More volunteers were mucking out houses, while others were slogging through the river to clean up debris. Two guys from Charlotte had towed in a pig cooker and enough food to feed a couple hundred people, so most of the town was gathering in the park for a shared meal. 

“It’s good to see all of this life,” Shuford said. “This is a town where you can find Moon Pies and you can find organic wine, and we want it to stay that way.”

Shuford has the right temperament for shepherding civic-minded chaos. She is a former public school teacher who retrained as a somatic therapist and founded the Blue Ridge Healing Arts Academy. She is well-practiced in the craft of getting traumatized people to open up, which came in handy after Helene. The same spirit that inspired all of the “Mountain Strong” banners and hashtags also captures a certain amount of mountain stubbornness, an insistence on going it alone even in tough times. “A lot of people turned down help, initially,” Shuford said. “There’s always a belief that someone else must need it more. But once people trust you, they’ll let you help.”

And once people experience the outpouring of communal support in the aftermath of a disaster, they don’t want to let it go. “When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell. Solnit examined the aftermath of famous disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago in New Orleans, and found not Hobbesian darkness but an almost euphoric spirit of cooperation: “That purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amid death, chaos, fear, and loss.”

When Shuford reflects on the year gone by in Lansing, she thinks about the hard winter, the anxiety that still comes with heavy rains or howling winds, and the way other recent tragedies around the country—the Texas floods, the California wildfires—have hit closer to the heart.

But most of all, she thinks about all of the people–neighbors and strangers alike–who showed up with a desire to pitch in and be part of something good. “I want you to really put this in your article,” she said. “In Lansing alone, we had people as far away as Missouri, Canada, Michigan, New York, Ohio—people showed up and stayed for weeks at a time to help us. It’s a lot to leave your life and come help somebody, and people were happy to do it.”

There are stories like that all over the mountains, of help given and received, of places wrecked and remade. 

“We’re definitely a different community than before the storm,” Shuford said. “We were great before, but now we’re very close.”

Jesse Barber contributed reporting.

Go Visit!

One of the easiest ways to continue supporting Helene recovery is to spend a weekend in the mountains, and spend it generously. 

Start the day in Lansing with a visit to Old Orchard Creek General Store. Grab a coffee and a slice of quiche, browse the small but excellent selection of books and wine, and settle into a spot on the deck. There are pastries from Stick Boy Bread Co. and brew from Hatchet Coffee, both based in nearby Boone, and Saturday afternoons usually feature live music. Owner Shelby Tramel bought the place only about a year before the storm and managed to get it running again by December. She’s often behind the counter or catching up with friends on the porch and is always happy to give local advice.

Just across the street, you can stroll through Creeper Trail Park, which includes an expansive playground and creekside walkway. Cross the pedestrian bridge behind the fire department and you’ll find a woodsier path and mountain biking trails. Ashe County is a destination for ambitious cyclists, so tackle one of the “Blue Ridge Brutal” routes if you’re up for a challenge.

For those who prefer more leisurely weekends, browse the offbeat collection of stationery, candles, recipe books, and home decor at The Squirrel & Nut, which had been open all of four months before Helene.

Then head up the hill to Molley Chomper Cider, which offers deliciously dry drinks made from North Carolina apples, including a recent addition to the menu called Helene’s Wrath. “Any cider worth its salt will list the kinds of apples on the label,” local grower Chris Emmaus advised during a recent visit, pointing to a bottle that included Puget Spice, Black Limbertwig, and Goldrush apples from Ashe County. 

Whenever Pie on the Mountain reopens, you can take a pizza to go and settle at an outdoor table at the cidery. In the meantime, The Liar’s Bench serves up sandwiches, soups, and salads along with live music, while The Log House at Lansing offers a long menu of country classics (beef tips, ham steak, catfish, breaded okra). Lansing is not a late-night town, so don’t dawdle on the dinner hour.