What Remains After Hurricane Helene

One Month After the Hurricane in Asheville, North Carolina

  
There is a man swinging a pick mattock against the floor of a Presbyterian church. Normally, as a backcountry trail crew, we used this tool to maintain trails in Wilderness areas—federally protected land where there are no roads. Now, NCDOT advised that every road in western North Carolina should be considered closed, and instead of restoring a vision of wilderness in the mountains, we’re gutting it out of town.

But Asheville is gone, it was said early on. Marshall is gone. Hot Springs, gone. When the region lost power, it seemed that everyone had vanished. They did not. One month after the floods of Helene, the most dizzying thing is not what’s gone, but what remains. The things that remain are in the wrong place.

   

There is a Ford F-250 packed with eight adults headed into downtown Marshall, where the French Broad River rose 27 feet in two days.

There is a rumor that a PVC factory washed away upstream; now the chemical-laced mud is disintegrating rubber boots.

There is no way that’s happening, authorities report.

Still, there is a Tyvek suit to wear, Muck boots, gloves, goggles, respirator, and a waiver to sign.

There is a cardboard sign that reads, “WE SURVIVED THE FLOODS OF 2024”, signed by as many names that could fit.

There is a tree where a man was last seen trying to climb it.

  

At Riverview Station, there is a heap of highly photographed rubble spanning several blocks.

There is about a million distinct pieces of art in that rubble—cups, bowls, portraits, stained glass—all soaked in fecal mystery mud.

There is a 2024 Jeep Wrangler filled with that mud.

There is a muddy handprint on the windshield.

Every day at 6 p.m., golden hour, there appears an influencer and a man who holds a light for her. Recording from an iPhone, they take care to face the wreckage instead of the river itself, where you might see someone driving, or jogging, or someone lowering their N-95 to sip coffee.

There is a chance she is saying things like, “Asheville is gone.”

There is a similarity here to the way I photograph mountain views, avoiding the crowds of people recreating alongside me and instead zooming in on the wilderness itself, framing an illusion of human absence.

Now, wilderness has engulfed the city, and the city is floating in wilderness.

To find the city, look to the river. To find the river, look to the city.

In Burnsville, there is a fire department that’s turned into a donation center.

There is a man there dressed in full army regalia—though he is not in the army—carrying an AR-15, a Stihl chainsaw, and a bag from Zaxby’s.

There is an elderly couple asking for screwdrivers.

Well, there is an elderly man quietly asking his wife to ask for screwdrivers, because he cannot ask for them himself.

There is not a screwdriver in sight, but there is a box filled with flipflops and another filled with toothpaste. Some boxes labeled “hygiene” contain pencils. Other boxes containing clothes are labeled “Christmas.”

There is a stack of 2,400 Nature Valley granola bars.

There is a woman here who knows how to give people things who arrive saying they only need one thing. Folks are embarrassed to ask, she says. Get it to them anyways.

There is a man putting army-themed bibles into the bags of each person.

There is a woman putting tampons into the bags of each person.

There is a man with a Simpson grin, cigarette in his mouth and one above each ear, slinking around the women’s coats and taking those of designer brands.

  

North of Asheville, there is a Christian summer camp that’s turned into a makeshift barracks.

There is a police officer vaping on the patio.

There is a group of EMTs drinking beer around a campfire meant for Christian teens.

There was an enormous catfish in the freezer of one EMT. He flew out of Asheville the day before Helene, and when he returned home the power had been out for several days, heating the freezer into a putrid tomb. What did it smell like? I ask. He just grins.

There is a Blackhawk helicopter overhead.

There is another Blackhawk helicopter overhead.

Underneath a pavilion, there is a stack of 8,000 honey buns.

There is a man from Kentucky who hauled a 40-foot trailer packed full of buckets, diapers, and bottled water to this camp. The drive took nine hours.

After we finish unloading the trailer, there is a man offering a Busch Light to everyone he sees.

  

Back in Burnsville, there is a Baptist woman from Louisiana serving biscuits.

There is a trans-anarchist running the decontamination station.

There is a combat veteran delivering generators to rural schools.

There is a Red Cross worker stacking diapers.

There is a white man with dreadlocks smoking a joint.

There is a black man from Alabama cleaning respirators.

There is probably a FEMA worker somewhere….

Unlike on Instagram, there does not seem to be many people compulsively theorizing about FEMA. Most are too busy actually helping.

  

Back in Marshall, there is a pile of about 300 boards and 10,000 nails on the road. Drivers stare as we continue dumping the boards onto the road (which we have been instructed to do).

There is a gubernatorial candidate walking down Main Street and a roost of younger men following him. They shake hands in front of rubble and photograph each other shaking hands.

There is also a woman named Alice. Her apartment, which she’s lived in for 15 years, is now somewhere downriver.

“It was hell early on,” she says. “But it’s getting better. Everybody’s helping everybody.”

“Some of us have food to give. Others got generators, water, even music.”

She is swinging a hammer, hitting her groove, growing a smile.

“Some of us got nothing left to give but a hug.”

There is a woman and man hugging in front of what used to be a barbershop.

There is a sign out front that reads “Now Open.”

“There’s no sense about it,” one man keeps saying. “A hurricane? In the mountains?”

There is a slew of articles mourning Asheville’s status as a climate haven. “It was supposed to fare well with climate change,” one author writes.

That illusion has washed away, and its absence is well documented. But what drives these articles, and what drives me to take so many pictures, is not the absence of illusions but the rearrangement of their remnants. It’s uncanny. Beneath the veneer of our categories – connection and disconnection, urban and wild, land and water, river and sea – is a drowning morass of interpenetrating, indistinguishable, unmanageable muck.

  

Now, there is a man who lives above a six-inch creek. The creek leapt across the road. It swallowed his house. His family’s possessions are strewn about the yard, glommed in discolored sludge.

There is an estimated six months to one year before he gets electricity.

There is a wild look in his eyes. “I didn’t handle it so well at first,” he says.

Near the creek, there is what looks like an enormous carp rotting under a pile of two by fours. The boards were part of an elaborate chicken coop. Nobody has seen the chickens since the storm hit, but he asks us to keep an eye out, just in case.

There is still no sign of any chickens.

But when the wind blows, there is a whiff of decaying animals, plant detritus, and warm mud.

It almost smells like the sea.