I realize that I have not taken any pictures of the river in its devastation. It feels like snapping an inappropriate photo of a dead body. I have been avoiding looking at what I know to be.
I realize this makes me no different from the outside people who deny and turn their heads from the horror of what has happened to us - no different from the preachers and their congregations in our communities who refuse to open doors for refuge while preaching fire and brimstone from a “House of God.”
For three years my time and energy was dictated by my driven fantasy for a new career allowing me to share my talents in a way that could change the lives of my past and future students, offering classes in my very own school I was creating based on 25 years of developing and teaching an understanding of bodywork, mind and spirit. I was creating a space for my colleagues too. Creating space for everyone’s potential.
Wednesday night the biblical rains began. By morning the mountains were glistening and quiet after a summer draught. It was this eery calm that caused panic. The storm had not yet arrived. I texted late, admitting to friends in Chicago, Colorado and Montana,”I am scared.”
KK and I called and texted each other all night. I watched Z on Facebook, his weather updates more dire by the hour. I told KK to pack a bag in case she and the kids had to run. Every few hours the warning siren burst from my phone telling people to evacuate. I left my bed before dawn, knowing it was too early to ask Elane, an hour away, if my river classroom was still standing. I had just finished it. Grand opening was two weeks away. What I didn’t know is that she couldn’t even get down the steep driveway near the river because the water was already 45 feet above the road, churning its way to Erwin with everyone’s hopes and dreams. It would take her husband four days to get home from Raleigh.
I gripped my coffee cup and paced the house, the garage and basement filling with muddy water, knocking on my son’s door to please come downstairs because I was afraid of the silver maple crashing onto his bedroom. Stop being so dramatic mom. Trees I never noticed before violently swung from side to side. At 7:30 trees began simultaneously dropping around the neighborhood as I rushed outside to see where they landed. The huge elm in my back yard neatly slammed to the earth, politely avoiding harming anything in her deathly fall. Fallen trees hemmed us into our lot in every direction. Powerlines lay scrambled and scattered.
When the winds stopped, we walked around the neighborhood wide-eyed in a soft drizzle of rain, stepping over tangled power lines, trees like handfuls of giant pixie sticks. Sirens blared around an otherwise deathly quiet scene. We still had no idea how bad it was. Nobody was answering texts, internet was down, and calls would not go through. Cries for help were silenced. We still had no idea that nobody could call each other and that we were on our own.
We drove together to take in the horrors. The sun sparkled on the devastation of landslides, houses floating down swollen rivers where businesses were entirely submerged, and helicopters began swarming. What used to cause us all to stop and stare, now became the normal background noise of a war zone. Sirens and choppers filled the air.
Now I sit in the middle of the river on a pile of rubble where excavators move the river bottom to put the river back where it was. Two of the nine 25-foot concrete columns the permit office forced me to build lay next to me while the flimsy deck across the river smugly stands. It took me more than 30 hours of hard labor, teetering on a sketchy ladder to pry the sonotube wrapping from these concrete pillars. Homeland Security stamped their approval on my permit.
The men in the excavators continue to work, moving like robots on a moonscape. They don’t see how the river goes where the river will go? They don’t see the power of water even after this? It dictates everything. We don’t get to build our beaches back. She chooses, and she has made her choice.
She is brown like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. She is brown, like the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon that continuously churns. She has drowned the fish, ripped the ancient trees, and taken the people along her banks who built their lives on what she once offered. She continues to live after her murderous, drunken spree.
I stare into a puddle trying to capture beauty when I see chasers and skimmers above small darting fish and it catches my breath as if I witnessed a weak pulse in a body who’s death I am currently mourning.
I watch my son walk along the river, his hands dug deep into pockets, his head dropped, and upon his return I see red, leaking eyes. I am crushed. This child has spent 16 years scrambling along the river banks, screeching in delight, gifting me rocks, teasing me with crawdads and showing me the beautiful fish he catches before lovingly releasing them back into the waters after a brief encounter. His face was always filled with excitement, determination and awe. Now it is defeat. Our best friend is gone. I wouldn’t let him fish without learning to swim. I wouldn’t buy him a John boat until I was certain that he could read the river and navigate by paddle. One of the most beautiful memories of that river was launching him in a kayak, the evening sun sparkling from the surface, him in his cowboy boots, clutching his rod, telling me to fire up the grill with promises of dinner.
My motherhood has been nourishing the things my boys love. I feed them what means the most to them, creating opportunities, partnering in personal projects and keeping their love and passion alive. When Wyatt brought home tadpoles, we grew frogs and released them back into nature. When some of the tadpoles died, he cried. I’d admonished myself for putting the tank in the hot sun at his birthday party and vowed to do better. When he convinced me to get chickens and then came screaming into my room after a murderous possum reached into their cage, I spent $500 on chicken surgery and then built the next flock a fortress. I learned everything I possibly could so that his heart would not be broken again. The family dog dying in front of me was devastating, but even worse was having to return up the road to my boys with the family dog to bury.
How do I protect their hearts? When I nearly died with that brain aneurysm, I freaked over my boys living with a story that included losing their mother.
When Wyatt was 9, he dreamed that he had broken his arm, came to me scared of the hospital, so somehow I fixed his arm. I felt so validated and seen by him. It was evidence to me that he could rely on me to be in the trenches with him, no matter what the circumstances.
Now here we stand at her banks and his sadness is far from my control. I choke on my helplessness. My tears are not just for this river and the community desperately clawing their way out of the mud and into each other’s arms, but for giving up the status of protecting the hearts and souls of my children.

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