By Randy Johnson
If you’re getting tired of still trying to turn on the lights instead of a headlamp in your dark house—if you’re lucky enough to have a headlamp—take a deep breath. The constant thump of helicopters and wail of sirens, sometimes together, reminds us there are a large number of folks bearing the hardest hit of a flood just now denting the national news cycle’s preoccupation with politics and war.
Last Friday’s storm is easily being compared to the suffering of the 1916 and 1940 floods, adding a third apocalypse to modern memories as legendary as those earlier disasters.
Foscoe, Newland, Banner Elk, Valle Crucis and many others are a few of those hard hit places, where up to 20 inches of rain brought back memories of the 1940 deluge. Near the town of Seven Devils’ entrance, Valley Creek “was baaaack!” As in 1940, the torrent down from high above the town’s popular Otter Falls Trail interdicted N.C. 105 in Foscoe at the same point where it forever severed the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad in 1940, the ET&WNC’ so-called “Tweetsie Railroad” route, named for its shrieking whistle. That spelled the end of the storied line from Johnson City, Tennessee to Boone, where the last remnant maintenance building of the railroad, the Portofini Restaurant, was recently razed to make way for “ the future.”
The flood also seriously interdicted access across the Watauga River to Grandfather Winery and Vineyard and into the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood , though Sleepy Hollow’s quaint covered bridge, often-pictured over the years in the media, appears to have survived despite serious damage to approaching roads. It’ll take a while for it to reopen.
Sleepy Hollow residents are getting out a few other routes including through the Mill Ride community, whose bridge held despite severe damage to the yards of riverside homes. In 1940, the entire flood plain in that area was eradicated, according to US Army Air Force aerial photography taken a few months after the flood.
Community spirit surged all over the High Country, with neighbors helping neighbors shovel out debris, ferry in food and fuel and water where some could get out for resupply and others couldn’t. With N.C. 105 shrunk to one lane and alternating traffic at a massive debris blowout at “Rock Crusher hill” just south of Boone, many waited a few days to try to get to town, but people took action.
In Mill Ridge neighbors went door to door asking if they could help and recently elected board members stepped in to man the office, recently renamed the “Member Services Center.” Residents Joey and Ashley Long diverted a natural spring on their property into the back of their “waterized ” pick-up truck and dispensed water to neighbors who brought their own containers and delivered to houses in need of water for flushing and washing, or boiling for drinking.
In Boone, the Harris-Teeter grocery store was a hotspot, with twin tractor-trailers parked out front dispensing truckloads of free water and ice starting on the weekend. One employee thanked by a customer taking away bottled water responded, “what else would neighbors do?”
The national news might have been slow to register the disastrous dilemma in Western North Carolina, but neighbors were helping neighbors as we all were getting used to longing for a hot shower and timing our meals to daylight hours for maximum light and minimum burned food.
For many the hurricane eliminated thoughts of politics and the impending election and focused us on the silver lining of community. It hasn’t been easy for those of us having the easiest time of it, but for many, the realization dawned that the challenges of finding light, power, food and drink, and navigating the daily disrupted schedule of natural disaster was difficult enough to make us thankful that we weren’t, like some people in the world, being bombed at the same time.
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