‘Dig or donate’: What I found in the NC mountains after Helene wrecked Appalachia
Charlotte Observer journalist Julia Coin traveled alongside volunteers as they went into the North Carolina mountains near Spruce Pine to find people who needed help after Helene. Here are stories and photos about the people she encountered.
Jennifer Bowman grabbed a holster and one of the hundreds of water bottles lining her ranch home.
“Sorry, I hope you’re comfortable around guns,” she said.
In the mountains, she explained, you need a gun. Especially now.
Jennifer, 47, had been shuffling supplies since remnants of Hurricane Helene, which turned into Tropical Storm Helene, settled over Appalachia on Friday, Sept. 27. It flooded homes, towns, valleys and farms.
All Jennifer wanted to do was help. Helping was the only thing she could think to do.
“I don’t even know what day it is,” Jennifer said as she checked the safety on the black and tan handgun.
It was Wednesday, Oct. 2. After volunteering at a small Hickory airport — about an hour northwest of Charlotte — for a few days, she was heading out west. She was heading to the places not even pilots could get to.
That plan hatched hours earlier in the airport parking lot. After a day of observing helicopter supply and rescue missions, I walked by just in time.
“Jennifer, can you and Graci get the horses here by 8:30 tomorrow morning?” a dark-bearded man in military tan and green asked.
Graci Silva, Jennifer’s 16-year-old daughter, nodded.
“You got an extra horse?” I joked to the strangers I’d met moments before.
“You know how to ride?” Jennifer asked without pause.
I did.
There were no more questions on my horsemanship, only my lodging. Every hotel was filled with linemen repairing the draping and downed power lines across the state. Jennifer insisted on sharing all she could — a spare room, a ride, a meal, a hug — in an instant.
It was refreshing. But it was not entirely unique, I’d soon learn.
Millionaire volunteer pilots shared the same spirit as on-the-ground care package assemblers filling bags with diapers, insulin and stuffed animals.
Over the next two days, we covered a 40-mile spread from Cranberry to Turkey Cove, passing though Spruce Pine and Plumtree on our way to the smallest of towns. There was Newland, Frank, Todd and Little Switzerland.
Crushed cars and swirled stables dotted every road. Most forests, with logs strewn on top of each other, looked more like a giant’s campfire pit.
Everyone’s eyes were wide with a desire to help.
In these areas, the desire to help was hard to satisfy.
Volunteer mom, military daughter
After loading backpacks with guns and Gatorade, Jennifer and Graci headed to McDonald’s.
They were going to see Jennifer’s 23-year-old daughter, Adysen McClain. She needed one of those bags and one of Jennifer’s three Jeeps. Adysen, a U.S. Army soldier of five years, had been near Broad River for the past five days. She was protecting a fire department from people trying to break in.
“You really should come home,” Jennifer pleaded outside the restaurant. “Take a shower. Sleep for a little.”
Adysen, a short, red-headed woman with tattooed arms, declined. She just needed food, she said. Then she needed to get back on the road. She changed out of her sludge-soaked boots and into Birkenstocks and walked toward the fluorescent lights and beeping cash registers.
For 10 minutes, the three riff about how bad Adysen stinks and how silly her toddler (who is back at Jennifer’s) has been.
Then Adysen climbs into the blue Jeep with a Happy Meal and the largest cup of sweet tea.
As Graci walks through her home’s front gate, which is guarded by three tail-wagging dogs, she sees a text from Adysen.
Love you. Be safe out there.
A trek out west
I woke up to an empty house. In the dining room, all the guns were gone. A pair of brown and red cowboy boots took their place.
They’re for me, Graci texted me when she woke up (long before I did). My black combat boots wouldn’t hold up “out there,” she told me.
It’s Thursday, Oct. 3. At the airport, a circle of men stand in front of a hangar full of water, pet food, generators and Starlinks — many of which were donated by Ivanka Trump. They’re in bright shirts and gym shorts; jeans and tattered tees; trucker caps and cowboy hats.
The dark-haired man who was outside Jennifer’s car the day before was again in monochrome, military-like attire. His name is Addison Lee. He’s an ex-military man who was “not so honorably discharged” in 2022 after refusing the Covid vaccination. He was this crew’s leader.
He’s a Trump supporter, he said later on, like many volunteers here. But political affiliations were revealed only in passing. They were typically prompted by the red, white and blue yard signs still poked into the soggy soil along westbound roads.
There was a mutual understanding: politics can come later. Right now, it’s about people.
After a three-hour drive, the fleet pulled into Teen Valley Ranch. It’s a Christian retreat camp in Plumtree, just outside of Spruce Pine and about 60 miles northwest of hard-hit Swannanoa.
The owners have opened its showers and kitchens to its crippled community. It also opened beds and a base camp to Addison, 27, who once camped and worked on the 147-acre property.
But he’s not from here. Nobody is. We didn’t know where to go. Maps weren’t loading. The mud was too deep. Jennifer couldn’t use the horses she just towed along in her 40-foot trailer.
Everyone wanted to help. Nobody knew how.
There was a lot of chatter, then Addison settled on a straight-forward order:
Go to the churches and donation centers first. Ask them who needs help and where to go. Then go there. Be back at 6 o’clock.
Jennifer told me to go, to hop in an ATV. But I should grab my bags out of her car before I do, she said.
“There’s no point in staying here if we can’t do anything,” she said.
‘Dig or donate’
I hopped into the only four-person ATV in the pack. I’m with Addison and his brother, Tyler Lee.
Tyler is a former Republican North Carolina congressional candidate for the state’s 12th District. The Charlotte Observer wrote about his 2022 public opposition to “Drag Queen Story Hour” in a Charlotte park and his loss against Democratic incumbent Rep. Alma Adams.
He was wary of the hitchhiking reporter to his left. But he was civil.
We both held snacks and diapers in our laps and laughed when we momentarily lagged behind Addison and the ATV’s driver. We kept getting stuck in the backseat. Neither of us knew how to work the door handles.
As we drove over mangled concrete, the landscape around us was everything the headlines said it was: apocalyptic, rubbled, catastrophic, devastated. In some places, dried muck that once sloshed over the pavement had dusted and filled the air. In others, stagnant seven-foot mudslides were still ready to swallow your next step.
At Newland’s Roaring Creek Missionary Baptist Church, the river out back had filled the 150-year-old chapel with three feet of mud. As we parked in the gravel lot, Pastor Dustin Hughes set down a shovel.
He had been digging for three days straight.
“I’m just a pastor,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
But he knew he had two options:
Dig or donate.
If he didn’t get the mud out, the church would mold and crumble, a contractor told him, and the riverfront plot would probably never see another church again.
Nearly a week after a hellish Helene swirled above the steeple, most of the dirt was gone. A faint floodline marked the panels.
Shredded carpet, broken wood and Phillip Hughes’ great grandmother’s piano sat outside.
Phillip, 74, didn’t know how old the piano was. It was definitely older than him, though, he said.
Phillip remembered when it sat in his family’s home. He remembered his father fiddling while his grandmother pressed on the white keys. He remembered a lot of things.
“My daddy used to send me down to the corner store that used to be right there,” Phillip said, pointing up to the nearest curve in the road.
He’d buy a Coke, a Baby Ruth candy bar and a pack of cigarettes with one quarter, he said, with just 25 cents.
“Yeah, a lot has changed here,” he continued. He looked at the twigs wedged between the muddied and yellowed piano keys. His blue eyes, their white parts also yellowing with age, glossed over.
“Seems like a lot more is about to change.”
Sending supplies down the line
Pastor Dustin declined most of the supplies strapped to the ATV — the only thing that could make it over the cliffed lanes.
Send them down the line, he insisted. There are people who need it more.
A family clearing out a shed of dirt bikes from beneath a massive mudslide also declined. A mom and daughter hanging laundry off their porch said “we’re good.”
Eventually, the tiny Frank Volunteer Fire Department accepted a load.
“How’re you holding up?” the ATV driver asked a volunteer.
“Hanging in there like hair in a biscuit,” the volunteer replied.
Next to him, a gray-haired man with one silver-hooped earring flipped dozens of chicken breasts doused in barbecue sauce.
His name is Teddy Bear.
Teddy laughed as he assured me that really is his name. His dad had a strong sense of humor, he said.
Wind interrupted his chuckles.
A Chinook from Hickory approached with food, water and generators. I looked up to see a volunteer I’d interviewed at the airport days before. He waved.
The people huddled around the grill turned their heads up, too. Most had never seen a massive, army green chopper like that before. Many took out their phones.
Few knew to move inside.
The helicopter’s rotating blades hurled twigs and dirt toward the white, metal department.
Teddy’s saucy fillets were splatted on the concrete or, at best, seasoned with debris. Rubbing his eye, he dumped everything in the trash.
The he pulled out another roll of tin foil and started again.
Growing families
Jennifer and Graci were gone when we got back to the ranch. A deputy told them they might find people in need in Burnsville, about 40 miles southwest.
The volunteers who stayed orbiting camp like we did gathered in the parking lot. They talked about who they found and what they saw.
One volunteer — a former army man and firefighter turned Charlotte real estate agent — had wobbled across a wooden bridge to a warped front door. He gripped a case of water in his hands.
The woman inside the creekside home almost turned him away entirely.
I don’t need a whole case, but I’d take a bottle, she said.
Are you sure you don’t need anything? he replied. Food? EpiPens?
Officials had recently called in requests for Benadryl and EpiPens to help curb allergic reactions to the yellowjackets swarming the area. Swats at the air accompanied most conversations.
Oh, no. I’ve got those, the lady responded. I just don’t know how to use ‘em.
Well, that’s not going to help you, he joked back.
She let the volunteer step inside the rickety frame, where he showed her how to self-administer the medicine — how to jab it into her outer thigh at a right angle. He also convinced her to take more water and even some food.
The rest of the stories blurred together. They were all pretty much the same.
Community centers — churches, restaurants, gas stations — turned help away. The people who could only leave their mountaintop homes or valley trailers by foot — the people who most needed help — politely declined.
“Yeah, these are mountain folk,” said Paige Roach, a fellow former Teen Valley Ranch camper and worker who still lives in the area. “They need help, but they’re weary of any help from the outside. They’ve been on their own most of their lives.”
We sat in the camp’s food hall. Rifles and old license plates and “Don’t eat the yellow snow” signs covered nearly every inch of its wooden walls.
Paige and Addison hadn’t seen each other for years, but Paige was one of first people Addison texted when planning his trek.
He knew she would know which churches would be most cut off. She would know Pastor Dustin’s church would be one of them.
She would know a lot.
The locals here had survived a once-in-a-century storm. Everyone had their own story, and every story was uniquely sad but also scarily similar.
Paige knew her pastor’s uncle was swept away in front of his wife as Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of water on Appalachia and the Southeast United States.
She knew a family of four died trying to escape the storm.
She knew linemen were finding bodies in the places search and rescue teams had yet to reach.
By the end of the week, every volunteer, reporter, pastor and mountain dweller knew one thing: Helene was vicious, but humans’ power was potent.
The people turning away supplies were just fine surviving with what they had. The private pilots back in Hickory were happy to work 18-hour days. The mix-matched, determined volunteers found people to help.
In Burnsville, Jennifer and Graci found Miss Jeremy, a 70-something widow. She didn’t have power or a generator, but she now had a mother-daughter duo checking in on her a few times each day.
Jennifer and Graci found more. Young families and elderly couples — who lost their homes and every trinket, photo and bed inside them — needed help, too. In two weeks, Jennifer and a Facebook group “Just Jeepin’ 4-A Cause” raised enough money to donate 10 campers.
Nobody, she said, should have to sleep in a car.
“I felt so guilty when I got home and got in a hot shower,” Jennifer said over the phone a week after we returned from the mountains. “I felt awful.”
As she lathered and rinsed the dirt off her arms, she thought of everyone who wouldn’t have running water for weeks — for months.
“They’re not grumbling,” she reflected. “They’re helping each other. Even in their worst time of need, they’re still helping others.”
Jennifer routinely updates me on her volunteering, which is now contained to weekends and after her shifts at an outdoor provision store.
“You know,” she said one time, “we brought another stranger home Saturday.”
A firefighter from West Virginia had taken my room, Jennifer teased, but he didn’t get a pair of boots.
The boots.
“Oh gosh, how can I get those back to you?” I asked. “They’re a bit muddier than when I received them.”
“Keep ‘em,” she said. “Until next time.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Dig or donate’: What I found in the NC mountains after Helene wrecked Appalachia."
