Helene in WNC: Friday, Sept. 27 — Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024

For several years now, I’ve kept a diary. I’ve decided to share an edited version of what I’ve written over the past few weeks, with names anonymized for privacy. I debated with myself about whether to share this, but ultimately decided to go ahead because I see so much misinformation about what’s actually happening on the ground, and even the most sympathetic portrayals from those outside our region miss vital context and dimension.

I’m aware that stress and trauma can alter recall and skew or blur details, so please keep that in mind as you read. I couldn’t write anything for the first few days after the storm because we had no time for anything but the immedate disaster, so I began writing my recollections on Thursday, Oct. 3rd. This is what I’ve seen since Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, the day Helene hit Western North Carolina

Friday, Sept. 27, 2024

Earlier last week, I signed up to work several shifts at the emergency shelter at a church near my house. It was a measure Buncombe County was taking out of an abundance of caution. I don’t think anyone thought the shelters would be needed as badly and for as many people as they ended up taking in. My first shift was supposed to be 7 a.m. — 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27th. I couldn’t sleep the night before. I tried to go to bed early, but at 3:17 a.m. the first of many emergency warnings went off on my phone, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay there listening to the wind and rain for a while.

Around 4 a.m., a message came through saying they were moving the people at the shelter near my house to a larger shelter at the WNC Ag Center, out by the airport. I got up, took a shower, ran some dishes in the dishwasher, got dressed, and watched TV for a little bit to try to calm my nerves — some show about the British comedian Jack Whitehall becoming a father. Sometime in the five o’clock hour, the power went out. I finished getting ready in the dark — put on my chai necklace and hamsa earrings like talismans, laced up my most moisture-resistant boots, and put on my raincoat. I left at 6:30 a.m., figuring I would need some extra time for the 12-mile drive.

Things weren’t too bad until I got out onto I-26, at the point where road construction meant there was nowhere to pull off. The wind was blowing the rain in sheets, and the water was skittering across the road in my headlights. It was so dark. Even with my hi-beams, I could barely make out what was ahead, and there were patches of standing water that I came upon suddenly. Larger cars were dousing mine with spray as they hit the water, and I began thinking I was very stupid and should have said I couldn’t come.

I made it to the Long Shoals Road exit just before 7 a.m. and pulled into a gas station that still had lights. It had taken me 30 minutes to go 8 miles. Cell service and 5G was still working at that point, so I was able to figure out that it was a shorter distance to go to the Ag Center than to turn around and try to go back home. I texted my boss J to let him know I was going to wait for it to get a little lighter before getting back on the road, then took the opportunity to fill up my car with gas.

When this is over, I want to write a letter to whoever owns the gas station and tell them how amazing the woman running the station was that morning. She welcomed me in out of the rain in a warm and calming way that I tried to take forward with me into the rest of the day and emulate when helping other people.

I finally made it to the Ag Center a little before 8 a.m. I got turned around briefly because it was still raining so hard, it was difficult to see where to drive and there were a lot of buildings on the property. My pants got soaked through trying to go into one building before I figured out it was the wrong one.

I finally found the right building — a cavernous, metal-sided structure with a concrete floor where I think they usually hold livestock shows. It was utterly dark inside, lit only by a single lantern-style flashlight on a table. A door alarm no one could silence was letting off a high-pitched alarm. Several sheriff’s deputies and other staff were clustered by the table, and beyond that, I could faintly see cots laid out on the floor. Sheriff’s vehicles were at the back of the bay. I could hear dogs barking from what I later found out was the kennel for people’s pets and a clanking, grinding sound that turned out to be the sheriff’s deputies trying to open one of the bay doors. Every sound echoed. Some of the people on the cots were huddled under blankets, trying to block out the din, but I can’t imagine any of them were able to sleep.

The staff first thought I was someone seeking shelter and offered me a blanket, but then seemed excited when they realized I was there to work. The whole scene was chaotic and confusing. There were people from a bunch of different County departments there — Parks and Rec, HHS, Libraries — along with Red Cross volunteers and a mysterious group of people at a bank of computers on the far side of the room. They never spoke to me or anyone else as far as I could tell, and the only explanation I ever got for their presence was, “They’re from the state.”

When I arrived, it freed by boss J up to go home. He hadn’t been scheduled to work the shelter that evening at all, and had gotten an emergency call in the middle of the night to go out to the Ag Center. He was clearly overwhelmed and stressed when I found him, and worried about getting home. He seemed relieved when I was able to tell him the part of I-26 that led to Long Shoals Road was the least treacherous part of my drive, and that he should be able to get there without any problem.

After he left, I connected with a social worker from HHS who was doing intakes. She showed me how to do those as best she could, and since there wasn’t anyone coming in at that time, I made it my mission to figure out how to turn off the door alarm. I finally got it after a few tries. Some construction workers from across the road came in and didn’t want to stay, but I was able to get them some breakfast boxes. There was another woman there whose partner was disabled and needed a diaper and a change of clothes, but there was nothing to give her, and with every hour that passed, she grew more distressed.

Then people started trickling in — a mom in her pajamas and bonnet with two kids. A tree had fallen on their house in the middle of the night, and she was crying and scared. We got them checked in and gave them breakfast. Then an extended family of fifteen people who I was able to translate for. People with pets. Most of them came on a transport bus from Swannanoa, but a few came in their cars. It was incredibly hard to see by flashlight, and we only had red pens, which made seeing what we were writing even harder. At some point, a Red Cross representative showed up and got us a little more organized. They started a generator, which powered a single light, and when the rain slacked off, the Sheriff’s deputies opened some more of the bay doors to let the light in.

Around 11 a.m., I stepped outside for some fresh air. The wind had died down and was only blowing in a small mist of rain. We had no cell service in the building, but if we stood in one specific spot outside, sometimes we could get a text through. Around that time, we had run out of breakfast boxes and it became clear we didn’t have anything to give people for lunch. The sheriff’s deputies went off and came back with two gas grills, hundreds of hot dogs and buns, water, soda, and chips. From what I heard later, all the local stores had lost power and could only accept cash payment, but they just gave the deputies what they asked for. We set up tables and the grills outside.

When the sun came out a bit later, we had a brief lull where I was able to call Jeremy. He told me a tree had fallen on our house, but nothing was leaking and nothing was poking through the roof. It had made a terrible noise and scared him out of sleep, but he was okay and glad to hear I had made it to the shelter safely that morning.

I also tried checking in with C and K, our friends who live down at the end of State Street, right next to the French Broad. I had told them on Wednesday night that I had a bad feeling about the storm and that if they wanted to come up to our house, they were welcome to. C said they were surrounded by water and were moving everything they could up to the second story. If I had known how powerful the force of the water was at that point, I would have been far more worried, but I imagined it more like a bathtub filling up, not like whitewater, and thought surely it wouldn’t get up to their second story. I had heard that the river would peak that afternoon and into the early evening, but my brain wouldn’t let me put together that information with what C and K were going through, I think because part of me knew I couldn’t do anything about it and had to keep functioning to take care of people where I was.

Around 2 p.m., we were able to have people start lining up outside for hot dogs. We eventually got everyone fed and brought the food inside to set up a sort of canteen area. I staffed that for a bit, handing out more hot dogs and food. I was only halfway through my shift, but feeling a bit punchy and took some enjoyment in showing off our bounty of hot dogs to the staff who came through to eat. There was a man who was deaf, and I tried to remember my finger spelling to communicate with him a little bit, but I wasn’t successful beyond him telling me he needed paper towels. I taught myself to finger spell in high school, and was kicking myself for not keeping up with it.

The bus driver who had been ferrying people from Swannanoa returned with the news he could no longer get through to the town. He’d had to turn around and come back. We started getting reports of mud and rockslides, and or the highways being closed — I-40 near the pass at Old Fort and I-26 past Hendersonville. I initially thought my way home might be blocked and I might have to stay at the shelter overnight, but the bus driver was able to tell me the route was still open.

We had a brief period of calm where everyone was checked in and fed. I took a break to eat an apple and some chips. I’d eaten one of the veggie hotdogs earlier, but it was profoundly gross and not helped by the deputies not knowing they needed to grease the grill in order to cook them. They were both burned and missing pieces that had stuck to the grill. I was so hungry I drowned it in ketchup and mustard and ate it, though. I tried texting Jeremy again.

As I was getting ready to go back inside, one of the young women who had been at the shelter all morning came outside shaking and crying. She’d heard stories of bodies in the river at Swannanoa, and she hadn’t been able to make contact with her uncle, who also lived there. I offered her a hug and tried to help her calm down by letting her know we knew some people from Swannanoa had been taken to the other shelter at the Civic Center. She said she couldn’t stop thinking of the worst case scenario, so I talked her through some alternatives, like maybe her uncle being at the Civic Center, until another staff member took over. I don’t know if that was the right thing to say or if that was helpful. I knew it was likely her uncle might have died, but I thought the best thing for her at that point was to stop the grief and panic from taking over and just get her through the day.

Then another busload of people arrived — I think also from Swannanoa via the Civic Center. Time gets fuzzy and I’m not sure what happened when exactly, but at least two transports of people came in from trailer parks, campgrounds, and apartment buildings in the Swannanoa Valley. They had stories about sheriff’s deputies knocking on their door and telling them they had 90 seconds to evacuate and get on the bus, about being rescued from the second story of their apartment building.

Two people I’m still thinking about are a young woman who told me she was 22 and had just exited foster care and gotten her first apartment. She was still smiling and taking everything in stride somehow, or maybe that was simply her response to trauma — mask it with a smile. I hated she was being dealt this blow on top of how hard life had already been for her. Another was a man who told me during intake he had been sober for two years, gotten off the street, and started his own window-cleaning business. He was on suboxone, which fortunately the nurses and EMT on site had with them, but he was worried all his paperwork from his business would be destroyed and he would become homeless again. I tried to channel the woman from the gas station and talked to him about how today we were going to make sure he was physically safe, and that there would be help for those things coming later on. I told him I was sure this was going to be declared a federal emergency, and explained what I knew of the kind of aid people got after the 2004 flood. That calmed him down a lot, and in turn, he was able to calm down some people from his apartment complex who were really scared and angry.

We had another period where things were busy, but still under control, and we were working on getting people assigned to cots and giving them blankets. Then around 6 p.m., more buses started rolling in with people moved from the Civic Center to the Ag Center shelter. We had five stations set up to do intake, with Spanish-speakers getting sent to my station. A lot of people were from the Veterans Restoration Quarters, which had also been evacuated, and I kept trying to focus on making a human connection with everyone — apologizing for the bureaucratic questions I had to ask, giving my name and explaining I was normally a librarian, and saying that I was scheduled to be there until 7 p.m., and if they needed something, they could ask me. Every time I looked up, though, the number of people waiting for intake had doubled.

The intake forms were a confusing nightmare, and they took forever to fill out. There were three different version of them that asked slightly different questions, I guess because the organizers had grabbed whatever was on hand. There were tons of questions to ask, most of which were soliciting really helpful information, but really personal information, too, like whether the person had experienced homelessness in the past two years. Then there was a scoring matrix to determine how vulnerable that person was. I understood the importance of getting that information eventually, but with the huge influx of people, it was making things really slow, and some of the questions probably could have waited until the next day.

The one good thing about the intake forms was that the first question it had you ask was whether the person had any immediate medical or other needs right then or in the next 6 hours. Some people were on oxygen and were literally running out.

Around 7 p.m., someone showed up to relieve the person at the intake table with me, but no one had showed up to relieve me yet. S, one of the assistant county managers, was there and had been amazing throughout the day. I let her know I was supposed to have left at 7 and was glad to stay, but that I was flagging. I could tell my ability to speak Spanish was slipping, and I was starting to have trouble organizing my thoughts in English, too. The intake waiting area was filling up more and more, and we were quickly running out of forms. Some people had walked in and were trying to take cots without going through intake, and the deputies had to yell at them to go back to the waiting area.

At one point, I overheard the guy doing intake next to me ask the woman he was talking to if she had connected with the local synagogue. I had just finished with the person I was speaking to, so I leaned over and offered that I had connections at our synagogue if she needed that. Her eyes fixed on my chai necklace, and I saw them light up. She said, “Yes!” I explained that as soon as someone came to relieve me, I would come find her and we would exchange contact information so I could get her connected. We had run out of intake forms at that point, but I managed to get some blank paper. We kept the last form for reference so we knew what to ask.

A little later, S tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around and saw one of my fellow librarians there to relieve me. I was so overwhelmed and grateful to see her, both because it meant she was okay and because it meant someone was there to relieve me. I asked if I could hug her and told her how happy I was to see her. I showed her what we were doing, and then went off to find the woman who was trying to connect with the synagogue.

I eventually found her sitting on the floor. She was there with her young daughter and a friend. They had been camping in the area when the storm hit and had evacuated from one of the campgrounds. “I just want to be with my people,” she told me. “If I have to be among strangers, I want to be with my people.” I imagine everyone at the shelter felt that way.

I got her phone number and gave her mine. I told her communications were difficult, but I would start looking for a place for her to stay. “You’re not alone,” I told her.

She pointed out my necklace to her daughter. “You see that?” she said. “That’s the Hebrew word chai. It means life.”

After that, I signed out and left. Things were getting even more crammed chaotic. Even though we were out of cots, there were 50-something people in the official intake waiting area, another 20 or so in the short hall leading into the building proper, and then near-chaos outside. More buses had come with people transported from the VRQ to the Civic Center, and then out to the Ag Center. I couldn’t see the end of the line of people because it was fully dark and the parking lot was packed with cars slowly rolling through.

As I walked out the front doors, a deputy was yelling at the people, “You either get in line, or you go to jail!” And then the veterans from the VRQ were yelling back that they were the reason any of us were here at all and asking why they had been taken from the Civic Center to another shelter where they couldn’t even go inside. I stopped and took out my phone, because I was worried some violence was about to erupt. But at that second, a man ran up to the deputies and explained he was having an asthma attack. That completely diffused the situation, as everyone stopped yelling and focused on getting him medical care.

I got in my car and tried texting a few people from temple, then texted Jeremy I was on my way home, and got on the road. It was dark, but clear and relatively dry all the way back. Jeremy had warned me there was a 7:30 p.m. curfew in effect, but I figured I had a good explanation if I got stopped.

It was nearly 9 p.m. by the time I got home. As I walked up the path, I saw candles burning in the windows, and felt relieved. Jeremy greeted me at the door with a flashlight and helped me take off my boots, because I was so sore. The electricity was still out, but the water was running, so I took a quick, cold shower by candlelight and fell into bed.

I didn’t sleep well, because without the electricity, I couldn’t use my CPAP. I woke up at 7:30, remembered the night before, and immediately texted J asking him to pass a message to the Eemergency Operations Center that the Ag Center shelter was in dire need of supplies and help from anyone who could give it. I got repeated text failure messages, but if finally seemed to go through.

I got up to use the restroom, but that’s when I discovered the water had gone out. I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate that — it happened in 2004. But for some reason, it took me by surprise. I climbed back in bed and fell back into a fitful sleep.

Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024

I woke up again a little later that morning. My throat was really sore and I felt as though something was caught in it. I tried swallowing and started coughing so hard my eyes watered. It felt as though a piece of my throat itself were stuck in my throat. I couldn’t understand what was going on and started panicking. I was scared I would need some kind of medical care, and with everything I had seen the day before, I didn’t think I could get any help. I hurried into the kitchen and poured some water, which helped. I managed to drink and breathe, although I could still feel whatever it was in my throat.

I looked in a mirror and shined a flashlight into my mouth, and I saw my uvula was incredibly swollen, almost to the point that it would block my airway. Parts of it looked deep red, like bloody meat, and my throat hurt so much I couldn’t talk. I tried to stay calm and drank more water. When Jeremy got up, I whispered to him that I couldn’t talk. He gave me some throat drops and I kept trying to irrigate my throat and uvula. I felt fuzzy-headed and out of it, but without the respiratory symptoms I would expect from a cold, so I chalked that up to a night of terrible sleep. I figured I had caught something at the shelter, despite being one of the only people there wearing a face mask, and hoped it would pass quickly. One of the few smart things I had done was to make sure we had four gallons of water on hand before the storm, so I knew we had enough to drink for several days.

At some point that morning, I went into my office to check on our cat Hazel and found that the bed was wet. At first, I thought maybe she had been frightened by the storm and peed, but when I smelled the blanket, it smelled like plain water. I looked up and saw a small cluster of water stains on the ceiling and realized that the roof had leaked after all. It looked like it was relatively small, though, and I was honestly surprised a tree could fall on our house without causing an even bigger leak, so I still felt fortunate. I heard a seagull outside at one point and wondered if it had gotten blown in by the storm.

C and K texted that morning to tell us the water had risen higher in their house, and they had lost everything. I texted back to see if they wanted to come to our place and to offer whatever we had, but I wasn’t sure if my texts were going through. Late that morning, they showed up, though, and I was so glad to see them safe. They had tried to text but couldn’t get through to us, so they had just decided to come, which I was so glad of. They told us how their neighbors had rescued them from the second floor with their kayaks. They’d had to drop their dog and two cats down, and had almost lost one of the cats. K had a few extra clothes, but C didn’t have anything, so I rifled through my drawers and found the smallest clothes I could to give her, since she’s much smaller than me, along with some socks and shoes. They had found a room at one of the hotels downtown and had set up camp there.

After they left, I texted my immediate family with an update and tried checking in on my sister M, who also lives in Asheville. I was relatively sure she was safe, since her neighborhood was on high ground near downtown, but the last anyone had heard from her was around 11 a.m. Friday. K had told us the Sam’s Club nearby was giving away free water, and we had a nearly full tank of gas, so we went over to get some and take part of it to M. A huge tree had fallen across Florida Avenue and was blocking us from getting to Patton, so we went around the long way. All of the traffic lights were out, and people were not remembering from driver’s ed that you’re supposed to treat an inactive traffic light like a stop sign.

In the middle of the bridge on our way over to M’s, my phone briefly lit up and I saw I had a ton of messages, but then it was gone again and I couldn’t respond to any of them. She didn’t answer her door at first, and I was worried she couldn’t hear us. We had been hearing sirens all morning, but they were louder and more constant at her apartment, with 240 being only a dozen yards away. I tried texting her again and was just getting ready to start shouting for her or find a stick to tap on her window, when she threw the door open. We hugged each other tight and I could feel her shaking. I asked if she wanted to come to stay at our house, so she threw a bag together, put on some daytime clothes, and came back with us.

My brother I and his partner A had been out of town for a wedding, so we swung by their apartment on the way back to check on it. Trees and power lines were down all over Montford, and we saw at least one crushed car. We were a little worried, because although the house their apartment is part of wasn’t particularly low-lying, it is a basement apartment. There was a huge tree down in the parking area at the back of the house, but their apartment looked dry and undamaged, so we texted them to let them know. They had rerouted to Knoxville and were staying in a hotel, but were considering coming back in. I tried to convince them to stay where they were safe and unaffected by the storm, because A needed a prescription refilled and I knew no one would be able to fill it.

Our goal for that afternoon was to get up into the attic and see how bad the damage was, but we had to move a bunch of stuff out of the way to access the pull-down stairs in Jeremy’s office. M helped us stack it in the living room and move his desk out of the way, and then Jeremy went up into the attic with a tarp and a headlamp. Sidenote: we discovered our cat Juniper thinks tarps are the most fun toy in the entire world. She was clearly disappointed when we took her tarp away for stupid roof leaks.

The wild thing was that Jeremy couldn’t see any damage on the inside of the roof. We had heard from my dad by that point that my step-grandparents had a large tree fall on their roof and penetrate into the living room, so I was expecting we might see part of our tree sticking through into the attic. We spread the tarp out in the general area anyway, just in case.

By then, we were all exhausted. I laid down to take a nap and more lost consciousness than actually slept. I felt terrible and sweaty. At some point, Jeremy came in to tell me Itto Ramen down the road was giving away free ramen, and that he and M were going to get some and bring it back. After that, he was going to cook all the meat in the refrigerator before it went bad. I fell out of consciousness again and woke up an hour or so later to Jeremy telling me our friend MC had come by to check on us. I stumbled out on the porch — looking like hell, I’m sure — and we all swapped info a bit, mostly what we had heard about Swannanoa. There were reports the whole town was gone, many people dead, and a lot of confusion about what had happened with the reservoir there. We’d hear three different things between us — that the reservoir had overflowed, that it had broken, and that they’d been forced to open it. I still don’t know which is the real story, but overflowing sounds most plausible to me. I read since then that with all the rainfall we had before the storm itself, the reservoir was only 8 feet from its maximum height before Helene itself even hit.

MC, his wife, and their son were okay, though. They were out of power and water, like we were. He had a ham radio, however, and was checking on his mom in Burnsville and other people around town. If anyone could survive a natural disaster, it would be him. He told us that Buncombe County was giving briefings on 88.1 (local NPR) and 103.3 (local community radio) at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. every day, so we planned to listen to that the next day.

That night, Jeremy lit candles again and read to me and M. We tried Moby Dick, but it was too wet and gloomy, so he read us a chapter of a book about real life eccentrics and odd occurrences that told the story of a man named Sims who believed the earth was hollow and that the civilizations who inhabited the center of the earth could be accessed through holes in the North and South poles. It was the perfect silly thing to read to take our mind off things.

To cap off our evening, our third cat Matilda got excited about looking out the window, and even though we tried to shoo her away from the nearby candles, she somehow managed to sit on one and briefly light her ass on fire. It sparked and went out immediately, but it left a terrible smell of burnt cat hair in the living room. She was fine and more alarmed by all of us lunging for her to put out the spark than anything. We decided it was probably for the best we blow out the candles and go to bed.

Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024

Another night of terrible sleep without the CPAP. My throat still hurt, but at least it didn’t seem to have gotten worse. In place of the dark red splotches, there seemed to be white patches growing on my uvula and the back of my mouth. I wondered if they were scabs. What do mouth scabs look like? I kept irrigating and going through cough drops like candy.

We all piled into the car at 10 a.m. to listen to the briefing. It was delayed a bit by technical difficulties, but when they eventually got things working, we learned that all the major highways in and out of the area were closed and that the County had requested help and water, but we didn’t know when it would arrive because no one could get in. We heard the Ag Center shelter was full and that there was one pharmacy open in Weaverville — The Prescription Pad on Main Street. The sheriff confirmed there were fatalities, but couldn’t give the names or even the number of people, because their next of kin hadn’t been notified yet. When they mentioned Swannanoa later in the broadcast, M got very withdrawn and upset. She had a friend she cared for a lot who lived in Swannanoa, and she couldn’t reach her. She was afraid something bad had happened. I talked her through what I had heard on Friday about Sheriff’s deputies going door to door to evacuate people and how there were buses bringing people out — again just knowing we all had to keep ourselves from panicking.

We had devised a bucket system for our toilet, so Jeremy went out and dug a hole that afternoon while I went through the pantry and took stock of what food we had available. A lot of our cans were from the pandemic and were expired, but we had enough that I was fairly sure we could make it to the end of the week, even if the power didn’t come back. If it did, we would be in even better shape, because we had pasta and instant food we could eat. We threw out a bunch of stuff from the refrigerator and moved things like cheese and oat milk to the freezer, which was no longer a freezer, but still very cold.

I spent a lot of time Friday, Saturday, and Sunday texting to make sure people were safe — friends and family, but also people at the library. I checked in on my colleague who had come to relieve me to make sure she was okay, because I was sure Friday night at the Ag Center had been rough. Everyone I reached was okay and in a similar situation — no power or water, and cell service extremely spotty. It was nerve-wracking, because sometimes a text would go through after a few tries, and some would never go through. It ate up a ton of my time and attention just trying to manage that. I was also talking to my sister R who lives in Gastonia, because she was helping to file our claim with the insurance company for our roof. We couldn’t get a cell phone call to go out, much less get on the State Farm web site.

I & Awere still planning to come back into town so that they could pick up a relative at Givens Estate and take her to another relative’s house in Haywood County. We were also trying to connect C and K with another friend who lives in Waynesville, so I thought I might be able to kill two birds with one stone and have C and K bring our relative from Givens with them out to Waynesville. I was also still texting everyone I could from temple to try to find a place for the woman I’d exchanged numbers with at the shelter.

I was still feeling rotten and tried taking another nap that afternoon. Itto Ramen gave out ramen again, and we divided it and the meat Jeremy had cooked up between the three of us. The hot broth felt so good on my throat.

I and A texted to let us know they had made it back in through a Tennessee back roads, and not only that, but they had power at their apartment! They invited us to sleep there so that I could use my CPAP. We only had an hour before curfew, though, and M wanted to try to use the route they had found to get out of the area and evacuate to Abingdon, VA, where my dad and stepmother live. The power was out there, but they had water. She only had ¾ of a tank and I was worried about her driving in the dark, so I tried to convince her to sleep in her apartment that night and leave in the morning, but she was determined. We dropped her back at her apartment so she could pick up her car, and then we headed over to I and A’s.

We got there only a few minutes after curfew. The lights were on and they were playing soothing music through the Bluetooth speakers. It was so odd to suddenly walk into relative normalcy. I think we probably came off as a little traumatized, but we were extremely grateful. A made me some chamomile tea, which felt amazing on my throat. Jeremy had brought his external hard drive because I had suggested we watch a movie and couldn’t stream anything or get a DVD player connected. They deliberately picked something silly and brainless — Demolition Man, with Sylvester Stallone, which turned out to be a good choice.

I couldn’t concentrate, though, because I was worried about my throat getting worse. I was still having trouble swallowing. We had learned that our doctor’s office, which is in the River Arts District, had been completely destroyed by the storm, and as far as we knew, the only medical care available was at Mission Hospital, where no one wants to go in the best of times. I texted my mom, who is a retired nurse, to get her advice and tried to send some pictures, but I couldn’t get them to go through. Eventually we figured out that I most likely had strep throat, which she said was easily treated with antibiotics and might resolve on its own in a few weeks, but could also develop into something more serious. I resolved to text my doctor in the morning and see if I could have a prescription sent to the only pharmacy I knew of in the area that was open, a place called The Prescription Pad in Weaverville.