He Told it on the Mountain

On the first day after Hurricane Helene, I helped Curtis Church and his Ford 5000 tractor ford the river of on his property, so he could use it to plow a smooth enough road for us to get the 4x4 diesel truck out. On the second day he pulled up in the truck and asked "you wanna go on an adventure?" I thought, this man read my mind.

As we slowly meandered what mountain roads we could (almost none were passable), he pointed out local points of interest and gathering places. He explained the significance of a few local centennial oaks, shared the past liveliness of current shells of buildings, and lamented the destruction at every turn. Each sight was met with the same refrain, "never in all my life. Oh my goodness. I have never seen anything like this before."

Hear stories of the McGuires, Churches, Trivetts and Elk Park, as we watch Curtis recant seven decades of mountain history, on the sites where they happened, while witnessing what they look like in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

(Read more below pictures)

Part 1: Curtis Church and the HideOut RV & Campground

It was my first night of camping at the HideOut Campground when I met Curtis Church. He was energetic and welcoming, and he was proud to tell me all about the farm that had been in his family for generations. He told me to explore the trails that meandered the twenty acres of mountainside, take a drink or fill my water jugs from the mountain spring-fed cistern, and wander through the field past the barns to the river for a beautiful view. After asking if I was familiar with the area (I wasn’t), he told me all the usual highlights as well as the insider knowledge on spots to look for and times to avoid the crowds. Overall, he just encouraged me to get out and explore and take it all in for myself. He was a great ambassador for his farm/campground and for the whole of Avery County as well.

If Curtis hadn’t urged me to take refuge from Helene in one of his RVs, I might have been swept off the mountaintop at “Big Rock” Camp Site 6. Instead, I rode out the worst flood western NC has ever seen in the comfort of a 24-foot travel trailer equipped with bed room, bathroom, shower, dining/kitchen/living space, cable TV and WiFi - at least for a few hours until the storm hit, taking out all services and utilities in the middle of the night. As the rain poured into the morning hours, the entire mountain flooded, and the waters rose under the trailer, fascia and insulation. For hours the water battered the outside walls, and I wondered if the trailer would be swept down the mountain-wide river. The rain and flooding lasted well into the Friday after Helene had passed, trapping me in the trailer until around midday.

When I finally emerged from the RV, the field in front of me was a wet, washed-over mess of mud and debris covering everything. The river that ran down one side of the camp raged over its banks and a second river, newly formed, ran from behind my trailer down the entrance side of the lot, completely washing out the dirt and gravel road. There were no driveways, roads, or even dirty paths off the property, only gullies of muddy water and boulders in piles. When Curtis came walking up from the river, in my shock or disbelief (and perhaps gratitude for being alive), I blurted out, “Well that was something, huh?”

“Something? I might be ruined.” he responded, defeated. “Look around. Everything’s gone or destroyed.” As I looked back, I saw how badly the trailer’s fascia and insulation had been completely removed, along with the front porch and steps, that now sat several feet away. But all the trailer damage paled in comparison to what I saw when I looked to the rest of the campground and realized how badly the land had been damaged. The driveway bridge onto the property from Dark Ridge Road was completely washed away. Of the ten or twelve giant logs that formed the base for the compacted gravel drive, only one remained. Even if the bridge had survived, the mile plus driveway to the top of the camp, which was also used by a neighboring property for access to their home, was completely washed out for more than one hundred yards. The half-mile portion through the woods was blocked by dozens of trees. There would be no accessing the campgrounds or the two houses on this hill by vehicle any time soon. For a seventy-year-old retiree turned campground operator in Elk Park, North Carolina, Helene’s flooding was every bit of life-ruining.

Curtis just looked around and turned to me and said, “I don’t know if I have the energy to rebuild this all. Just look at it. I might have to call it quits.” I looked around and could only muster back, “Nobody would blame you” and I hated that it felt like the only honest thing I could respond with. I couldn’t imagine having to lose not just his livelihood, business, and property, but also the remains of his family’s legacy on that mountain.

---

Later on, I caught up with Curtis as he tried to get a plowing tractor from the campground side of the river to the RV and street access portion of the property. With the driveway bridge washed out and the footbridges too small, the only way was through the raging water. Curtis repeatedly failed to get the Ford 5000 tractor across the river, as the giant 48-inch tires tossed mud and water. Exasperated, he said he didn’t think fording the river was going to work. He mentioned the only way to get traction was to toss enough rocks into the river that it made an underwater rockbed to traverse, but that would take “a long time even with two of us.” In that moment I saw part of him want to give up, and the idea of him throwing in the towel at this stage, after a lifetime of work to make it here this long, didn’t sit well with me. Also, I too was trapped at this camp until I either got myself out or someone else happened to blaze a trail up the mountain to find us. Due to this, I had plenty of time on my hands, so I just started grabbing the rocks that were nearby. (As Curtis would later remark, “there’s no shortage of rocks in this area.”)

My initiative must have at least somewhat inspired Curtis (or perhaps he too realized there’s not much else we could do), because he joined in once he saw I was serious. Eventually, even the neighbor who had the use of only one arm started grabbing the rocks on the shore and chucking them down in. After a solid hour of tossing stones and boulders, Curtis tried to ford the river again, to no avail. More rocks and more tries followed, and on the fourth attempt, the tractor rose gloriously up the far bank and into the RV area to begin saving the day. It was a triumph for all of us involved, but it was only the first step toward clearing an open pathway off the mountain. More importantly, it was an essential step away from quitting and toward some hope for rebuilding and a future of the HideOut Campgrounds and the Church family farm.

Part 2: Tales of Dark Ridge Road

As I followed Curtis Church and his friend Nanda, scrambling over fallen trees, around landslides, and hanging over cliffs to make our way down Dark Ridge Road, I was given a crash course in the history of this neck of the woods. What looked like a driveway off the road at one steep curve is actually the remnants of a large equipment hauler that took a nosedive off the cliff and got stuck in the ravine for months. Other gravel driveways boast hand-painted signs, letting us know that a Jones or Reames lives in the trailer or cabin on the property. A couple of the nicer properties are owned by the “rich out-of-towners,” people Curtis thinks don’t care as much for the land as the locals do.

Both he and Nanda commented on the Christmas tree farms in the area and their effects on the environment. Years ago, a piece of the Church family farm that belonged to Curtis’s brother was sold after his passing. That property’s field sits directly above the highest campsite on the HideOut campground where I stayed, and the hillside now boasts orderly rows of pine trees. It looks beautiful as a backdrop, and I hadn’t considered the downside to these Christmas tree farms until Curtis and Nanda mentioned how, on top of clearing the indigenous plants and animal habitats, these farms spray a great deal of pesticides on the trees, chemicals which then run down the mountain into all the other farms and properties, affecting their ability to grow crops and contaminating anything that does grow.

Neither of the two locals I accompanied were perplexed by people’s decision to grow trees despite the damage it can do - they know there’s not much else one can do for work in these mountains. There aren’t many jobs, and the tourism industry is growing, but not bustling. In this area, people have used what they could from the land for many years. Curtis told me how strong the logging industry once was in the area, and Nanda chimed in that they’re down to 1% of the original old growth forest. Before Helene, there were only four remaining 100-year-old oaks in Elk Park (the “centurions” as Nanda called them). On the first day we got off the campground property and started driving, we saw one of them shattered across the roadway. By the time we came upon it, someone had chainsawed the main trunk into pieces to clear the road. We stopped, and Nanda grabbed one of the stumps to save for woodworking. Later, we stopped again so she could grab a branch with acorns in hopes to propagate this “grandmother tree.”

Back on Dark Ridge Road, we didn’t have as much luck with the fallen trees. Unfortunately, there was a mile-long stretch of the road over hills in the woods that had seven different blockages from fallen trees and/or landslides. At either end of this stretch were two washed out roads, hundreds of yards long, completely impassable by any vehicle, including ATVs. Luckily, there were only a handful of houses on this stretch that were occupied during the hurricane, but those few had no way out but to hike through blocked and washed out roads. Curtis, Nanda, and I had water and some food and general supplies, so we carried some things over the hills, fallen trees, and muddy ravines and set out to check if anyone needed help.

To our relief, a cabin that we had been worried might’ve washed away in the storm was still standing, and when we ran into a local neighbor, he said that the 12-year-old girl inside rode out the storm alone after the roads were blocked while her parents ran to the store. Thankfully, they were reunited just after the storm. Next door, a young couple’s home did not fare so well. Not only did the property flood so much that the garage held over a foot of mud and the door wouldn’t close, the floodwaters lifted one of their vehicles, swept it directly into their house, and ripped off the front porch before depositing both in the field next door, the car hood propped up full of logs and debris. Nanda and I got them a gas can in Boone the next day and saw them hike out with the man’s brother the following day. Their plan was to head to Johnson City, and it was unclear what they’d do next.

The final neighbors we visited actually lived on the other side of the second washout, so they had some access off the mountain through Tennessee. As luck would have it, the husband was a local tree surgeon who, with his wife, operated a small organic farm, as well. This couple was probably the most prepared on the mountain. They were even able to get some low-speed (perhaps satellite) internet, powered by a generator, which felt like finding water in the desert, finally getting a simple quick message out (just that I was alive and well and would be in contact soon). Joe the Treeman, as Nanda called him, and his wife and toddler daughter actually seemed to be handling this devastating storm pretty well. They had all the tools, transportation (Joe had a few trucks and even a rugged e-bike), and supplies to fend for themselves for quite awhile, and they proved to be a lifeline for many of their neighbors in this time of need.

On the way back to the campground, Curtis, as he got tired, stopped and sat on a log or leaned on a post every so often, using the time to tell me a bit more history. At one point, we sat and looked at the mountain ridge, where his great grandmother's cabin once sat. It was on the state line, as it turned out, so years ago it was disassembled and moved to another hillside. The former cabin is now mere ruins, marking of one of the old stores we passed on our drive the day before. Sitting across from a large flat field, Curtis tells me that we’re looking at the Cherokee summer hunting camp. After wintering near Knoxville, Cherokee hunting parties would set up here in Elk Park for weeks each summer. The area as a whole (and particularly that field) is full of arrowheads, non-native flint, and other artifacts to this day. Passing another long-overgrown driveway, Curtis recants going there late one night with his brother as a child, and how it was so dark they carried a kerosene lamp to light their way up that old man's spooky mountain driveway.

Everywhere he looked, Dark Ridge Road and Elk Park were full of history for Curtis Church. While walking the washout, he stopped and gestured to his right, “When I grew up, this whole side of the mountain was all Churches. They lived on that way” then to his left “and this side was all McGuires, and my mother was a McGuire.” He also mentioned Trivett lineage, and looking at the map of the area shows roads and family cemeteries bearing all three names from his family tree. His farm goes back in his family for more than 125 years; his ancestral heritage runs deep and wide in this part of Avery County. It was heartwarming to learn all his history and connections to this place, and heartbreaking to think he might be at risk of losing it all because of a single, powerful storm.

Despite all the destruction we'd witnessed in the past three days, on the walk home that day there looked to be light on the horizon. Curtis spoke fondly of this place and his place in it. His tone no longer struck me as that of a man defeated, but of a man that remembered why he loved Elk Park. Perhaps that would be enough for him to rebuild his property even better than before.

Part 3: Nanda

Nanda is a passionate, entrepreneurial traveler, whose story gets more interesting with each wandering conversation. I met her just briefly on my first night camping at the HideOut, because on top of helping Curtis operate the campground, she cooks hot fresh pizzas from scratch upon request. Having driven seven hours to reach the camp, I took her up on the offer and assumed it would be a freshly cooked pizza from some frozen or at least store-bought dough, but when she delivered the delicious hot pie to my campsite, she told me how she makes her own dough from scratch because she was once a baker, so uses only the healthiest ingredients and all fresh toppings. She said her dough wouldn’t finish fermenting in the stomach like lots of other pizzas do. It tasted darn good after a long day, but that was my least interesting interaction with the woman who made it.

I didn’t know it at the beginning of the week, but by Friday, I would wake up stranded on the campground with her and the owner for several days by Hurricane Helene. With no power, no running water, no internet, no cell signal, no landlines, and the roads washed out and blocked by trees, it would be up to myself, Nanda, and the camp owner Curtis to figure out a plan to get ourselves off the mountain and back to civilization. The following 72 hours involved a lot of working together, and a lot of walking and talking together with my fellow stranded Elk Park residents.

In our conversations, I learned that Nanda's Portuguese ancestors were not from the mainland, but the Azores, so they were hearty seafarers and adventurers at heart. She spoke with a light openness of her travels and hardships through life, as if she is proud to be living up to the reputation of her people. She spoke of her grandparents in rural Brazil, of her own youth in the favelas of Rio before she was discovered as a fashion model. She recanted living in New York City in the 1980s, then London and a few other stops in Europe and half a dozen of other states before landing in western North Carolina, where she’s been for ten years.

She told me her seventeen-year-old lives in Boone. When the roads to town were finally cleared (enough) after the storm, we made our way down to get gas for a neighbor and check on Nanda’s son Jojo. On the drive there, I learned about her family as I maneuvered around the fallen trees, power lines, and debris covering the mountain roads. She has four children, and to my astonishment, her oldest child was my age, forty-two. I heard about the various business ventures and relationships that took her all over the globe, from Europe to South America, Asia, and landing in these Appalachian Mountains that have been home for a decade. She talked about her current and future plans, and her general philosophy towards life, people, and the world.

If there was a defining theme for the time I spent with Nanda, it was her love of plants and animals. Living in her RV camper (her “bus” as she called it) were five beautiful rescue dogs of different mixed breeds, all full of energy. They owned her heart. When we’d come upon a fallen century oak, she grabbed a log and tossed it in the truck bed to save the wood for a project (rather than allow it to be scavenged for firewood). When we passed the tree again later, she stopped to grab a branch full of acorns in the hopes to propagate this tree with those good hundred-year genes. These are the trees that are the most important to save and grow seedlings from, Nanda says.

Nanda told me how when she sees the Christmas tree farms and the pesticides workers spray all over the mountainsides, it breaks her heart. It also worries her for the sake of the workers’ health, the children in the area, and the plants and animals that will ingest the runoff chemicals. Beyond her dogs, she tells me about all the injured animals she’s rescued from the roadside or just found injured. She wears her empathy like a uniform that commands her to duty. She simply loves all natural, living creatures.

Before we could reconnect with the rest of the world, Nanda had made two trips down the blocked mountain pass that was Dark Ridge Road. The second trip she made alone, carrying groceries for a stranded couple. She checked on every neighbor she could find before she rested. Seeing the aforementioned couple days later, as they hiked out with a relative, they could not have been more thankful. Nanda may have been born far from these hills, but she was every bit the type of neighbor I saw over and over: people put in extreme circumstances, rising to the occasion and showing the best that humanity has to offer. This slender, sixty-year-young, ball of compassion and energy did not rest until she knew she’d done everything she could for those around her.

Returning from the last trip down Dark Ridge Road that week, as Nanda carried the heavier of our two packages of supplies (she insisted, I swear!), we were met by three young men in North Carolina Wildlife Commission uniforms. They offered to carry our bags for us, a welcome relief. We informed them of the status and condition of everyone that we’d been able to contact down the impassable mile-plus of Dark Ridge to the Tennessee border. They took our information and thanked us, and we felt that at least we’d handed off the feeling of responsibility for the stranded neighbors now that we were certain authorities were at least aware of the situation.

Nanda’s final concern for the immediate future post-Helene was getting her five dogs out of her bus on the campground and somewhere safe with some space to run for the time being. I was delighted to see that by the time I left on Wednesday October 2nd, she had moved all five dogs (in two trips in her Prius) to stay with her son for a few days. In the few short days I spent following Nanda around Elk Park, I witnessed this enigmatic world traveler exhibit incredible amounts of compassion for the plants, animals, and people of western North Carolina that she’s made home, and that challenged my own concept of what a true modern-day mountain man or woman looks like.