opal knives 002 (special release): petrichor
september 2022
Hey y'all. Long time no see!
Welcome to the second (kinda) edition of opal knives. I apologize for keeping everyone waiting for so long, but due to the fact I and everyone else in my life just got molly-whopped by Hurricane Helene, I'm sure you can understand. The original second issue of o.k was done and in the process of editing when the storm hit, and in the weeks following I decided it would be best to put the entire thing on hold. With all of the trauma still fresh in everyone's minds, I couldn't focus on anything else. I had already been writing about the event to keep myself sane and I thought it best to provide a written record and a place to break apart my thoughts on everything. What you are about to read is a (somewhat) edited version of the over ten thousand-word breakdown I had over the past two weeks. This isn't formatted like regular opal knives, rather it reads much more like a journal. It's messy, it's rough, but it's important to share. I hope by reading this you can either find solace and kinship with me if you were also affected by this disaster. And if not, I hope to provide you a more intimate and realistic view of the situation. Truthfully, as much as I wish I could continue to flesh this out into a serious body of work, I cannot be pissed to look over the draft for this again. I cannot continue to write and engage about this, I want to get back to things that don't open a pit in my stomach. So I am letting it out into the world and dusting my hands of it. Writing and editing this has been a labor of love in some ways and a labor of horror in most. Due to its formatting, much of the information is out of date. The recovery effort in Appalachia will be ongoing for months if not years and this only serves to provide a timeline for the immediate days following the storm. If you would like to continue to support mutual aid in the area, the end of this issue will have a list of resources.
I want to thank everyone in my life who kept me sane and stable enough to even get this out, and for keeping me alive in general. My friends and fellow community members have stepped up in unimaginable ways and I have more faith than ever before in the power of organized leftist action. This issue, and most of the ones following this, features artwork from my lovely and infinitely talented creative partner Violet Gammon. Links to more of her work will also be available below. I would also like to thank each and every o.k reader and subscriber for a great first month and I intend to release an insane bulk of writing for you guys in the next two weeks.
The aforementioned scrapped version of opal knives 002 will be out this weekend as another special release. September and October's Music Review Roundups will be combined for one massive release in just a few weeks. We also have a very fun Halloween-themed release coming at the end of the month. Do not fear, we have not abandoned you. This is not the release I wanted to make but it was the one I had to. I'm excited to get back to talking about dumb online culture drama soon.
Thank you again to anyone engaging with this, I want people to have a record of the destruction that's happened in the Appalachian Region, and all eyes need to be focused here right now (in terms of US Issues). Please consider donating or assisting with the mutual aid groups listed below as they are the lifeline of our communities now more than ever.
Stay safe out there.
PETRICHOR
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 3:31 PM
The air is still. Thick with the smell of blood, dirt, rusted metal, and smoke. The only sounds cutting through the blanket of silence are the continual drone of sirens. So many ring off on top of each other that it all starts to sound like an ambient buzz backgrounding whatever nature was left alive and able to make noise. Out of the window of my girlfriend's home, I am sitting and watching a couple play a game of Tennis. Playing on a regulation-size, forest-green court on the back lawn of the local high school. I wonder if the couple is thinking much of this entire situation. Maybe this is all they have to distract themselves. I couldn’t judge, given that watching them play their set was my own and only form of distraction. I wanted to go out and join them, but I couldn’t find any tennis balls. I’m sure they would have been happy to share some of theirs with me. But in times like these, maybe hoarding such objects would be in their best interest.
I don’t feel compelled to write much of anything. More accurately, I don’t feel like writing anything that anybody else will read. I have tried to distill my feelings on the past week into something cogent, a task that I have found futile. I don’t expect the following text to be anything other than a complete emotional dump, a spite-fueled tirade. I wish I could grapple with everything that has gone on, and what will continue to go on. But my natural inclination in the face of all of this is to tune my brain to TV static. I don’t think I feel this enough. I don't want to feel the weight of any of it at all. Maybe through writing this, that train of emotions will finally make contact with my bones. I have learned that my overall capacity to feel the gravity of a situation is leveraged by a form of nihilistic instinct. I feel the intensity of trauma in tandem with it’s closeness to me. That has never been more clear this week. Going through your entire life without ever having to experience a natural disaster is already an extreme privilege within itself. But going through that disaster, all things considered, unscathed while your neighbors and community have lost everything short of their mortality. Some have even lost that. It gives you a much clearer view of privilege, your good fortune, and how thin and fragile the line between normalcy and complete damnation is, one that we all toe every day. Some people have to plan for a funeral when most cemeteries in the city are six feet under water and here I sit, vouyering in on a tennis game to get any semblance of entertainment.
By the time you end up reading this then you will assuredly know or have lived through what happened in Asheville, North Carolina and the surrounding Appalachians when Hurricane Helene touched down. As of the time I’m writing this at least 30 people are dead, and over 1000 people are missing. The city where I have lived most of my life, the place where I still currently live, is completely decimated. Since the storm touched down on Friday morning the entirety of the area has been in complete blackout. No power, cell service, water, or transport in or out of the city. The two emergency shelters are full, there are less than 10 places in the city with functional connections to the outside world.
We are reaching 100 hours since impact and there are still no emergency food or water supplies. Hundreds are still trapped in their homes, some only have the roofs of those homes left to seek shelter on. People are running out of medical supplies, all of the remaining gas in the city is being rationed out with hours-long queues. People have no way of contacting their friends and family let alone have a route to reach them in most cases. Any structure near any kind of body of water is gone. Whole districts of the city have been washed away under dozens of feet of water as if it were nothing but a dry lake this whole time. Mny of the smaller towns on the outskirts, the ones even higher up in the mountains, have vanished in the course of a weekend. The term “never saw it coming” does not do justice to how unthinkable and completely unfathomable this was. But that is not to say there haven’t been warning signs this whole time. The alarm bells have been ringing for years for anyone aware enough to hear them.
The events of Helene are not surprising to someone living in a coastal area, someone who has lived through much more destructive storms and lives with that threat every day. The architecture and planning of the city are done with all of this at the forefront. As technology has progressed the destruction caused in many of these areas has not been able to be completely avoided but mitigated. Appalachian towns like Asheville, landlocked and hundreds of miles away from the nearest coastline, never consider the damage these places have seen as being able to ever touch them. None of the developments in an area like this are planned with this kind of natural disaster in mind. Asheville may as well have been a medieval fiefdom with the level of infrastructure put into place to sustain a storm of Helene’s magnitude. Nobody in charge could have ever imagined something like this happening, so there was no thought given to what would happen if it actually did happen.
From a rudimentary perspective, a town nestled between mountains and thousands of feet above sea level wouldn’t have to worry much about catastrophic flooding. The only reason people know of Asheville, North Carolina is because of our mountain range. How dense our forests are and the massive waterways that flow through all of them. This aesthetic appeal has driven more people than ever should have conceivably lived in a place like this to settle in the area. This continuous rapid expansion with little to no regard for the temperate ecosystem we live in has left the infastructural core of the city brittle, and dying. This disaster was inevitable, the cracks in the foundation have been there for decades and it was bound to crumble in on itself if not now, then certainly soon. A large bout of flooding would have been enough to cause serious damage in these overdeveloped riverside areas, but a disaster of this caliber was enough to take out every hastily built gentrification project in a 50-mile radius. This was nothing short of the single worst disaster this area has ever seen. From all angles and all points of view. And it's the continuously forgotten aspects of infrastructure in this region that have allowed this hurricane to be as destructive as it was.
In the coming months, there is going to be a lot of conversation about exactly how this happened, and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. This is not a conversation that should take very long at all. There are blatantly obvious people and systems at fault, there is a place to put the blame and demand answers. Nature is infinite and chaotic, yes. But we can play god now. We CAN control nature. Hurricane Helene was not a force of nature, it was the hand of man playing the hand of god forcing nature on a path of destruction. At every level from city management to the federal government, we have been failed. We have been subjected to the worst kind of side effects from climate change and gentrification. There is still uncertainty about whether there will ever be a full recovery in a place so woefully unprepared for this. And there now is a countdown on the region being able to prepare for anything like it happening again. Suppose it were, even within a multiple-year timeframe. It could mean the entire area being wiped off the map. Now, more than ever, these people need to be held responsible. These are crimes against humanity, and there are specific people with the blood of untold lives on their hands. The same individuals who have time and time again sold out this area to private interests and tourism and have left our integral systems to rot are the same individuals trying to feign service and dedication to aid now. Not even an attempt to clean up the mess they made.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 9:16 AM
When I was out driving around in an attempt to make sense of what was going on after being in a complete blackout the past two days. I had almost forgotten the existence of my car radio, and radio as a whole until I was met harshly with the reason that it’s still around. I was able to listen to the county and city meetings and public announcements. Yet another thing that I tried to shove to the back corners of my mind until it became crushingly apparent how much I needed to rely on it. During one of these meetings, a Buncombe County manager described the events of the storm as “biblically catastrophic”. I am not a Christian nor a very religious person. But as someone who grew up in the church and carries a certain mix of Baptist and Catholic trauma with them, I couldn’t help but agree with the man despite the unsavoriness of the act of bringing the religion into a dire county aid meeting. I do not want to glamorize or create a narrative surrounding the horror of what has happened to my city. But in a lot of ways, biblical is just about the only word that fully encompasses the scale of devastation we are experiencing. I would assume almost anyone native to the area has never experienced anything close to this. The transplants from Florida who ironically saw this as the safe place to be during hurricane season may have familiarity with the event but not with the lack of preparation put in place.
When we as a collective region are going on four days without any contact or support from the outside, the already thin societal fabric begins to shred itself. Nobody has a clear view of anything. It’s going to take weeks or months to fully be able to understand the final toll of everything. Any rumor or hearsay that is spread around in line for gas or at the few available spots with phone service, has to be taken as fact with nothing else to work on. In the past few days, I have heard many terrible, bleak stories. A family trying to evacuate their flooding home lost grip of their newborn and helplessly watched as they drifted upstream into the raging water. They were not able to recover the body. A photo was circulated around of a family standing on their roof waiting for a rescue that never came. All six have been reported deceased. Most of the farms and pastures using the mountain riverways to supply water have been completely taken by the flood. The corpses of cows, pigs, and sheep are washing ashore with the remnants of the land they had lived on. Rumors of why there has been a communications blackout; “it’s population control” “They’re hiding the death toll — I’ve heard that there are more than a hundred bodies in the mud” “the blackout was planned by the Biden administration, or was it Trump?”. One of the most debated stories still, is the assertion that the local government blew the dam holding back the Swannanoa River. Any area remotely attached to it is now underwater but survivors in the area are reporting that they were told to evacuate due to the imminent planned failure of the dam mere minutes before untold feet of water came crashing down on them. None of these have been substantiated yet, but in light of everything that’s occurred, they all may as well be true.
Back to that level of conscious separation from tragedy I talked about earlier, when this level of horror is at your front doorstep it’s much harder to rationalize what is going on around you as anything else but divine punishment from something wholly stronger than this world. What is biblical is not the destruction, but the sheer inability to rationalize this as being possible in our manmade world. In the time before information, the people of Appalachia would not think but know that this was their creator smiting them for their misdeeds. Many would still fervently hold to that even now, but the strength of modernity is in the fact that we know the devil is man-made. Our suffering is wrought by our own filthy hands, in one way or another.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 4:41 PM
The months have changed over, It’s October — which under normal circumstances would have me in a better mood as it’s my favorite month. But now, just a day shy of a week since all of this happened, my ability to feel grounded by time has weakened severely. Without power, or much in the way of communication, any reason to be on my phone has gone away and I now find myself without the distraction. Operating off an archaic schedule of following the sun. I wake up when the sun begins to seep in through the windows and fall asleep not long after it gets dark. The markings for hours passing have lost most of their relevancy, outside of the city announcements which I have learned play on the radio at 10 am and 4 pm. The better part of me is attempting to pull something from the experience, as if I could grow as a person by suffering this complete detachment from the modern, digital world. Maybe if the situation were less of a nightmare then I could, but I find myself losing all sense of direction or understanding of the wider world and begin to spiral. I have spent the past three days attempting to make more sense of the situation and try to assist in any way I can. The amount of information I’ve gained since the last time I wrote hasn’t been enough to give me any clearer picture of the situation outside of its growing immediacy and seriousness. I have learned that the official death toll is now over 50 (a number that I know is much higher given everything else I have heard and seen). I know that there are resources being brought in by FEMA and the National Guard — resources that are only coming once a day and usually are all consumed within less than an hour of their arrival. A few places and apartment blocks have power back on, no clean running water or communication though.
There is a strange dichotomy in the streets between people who have moved through this situation relatively unscathed, already on the road to getting back to "normal", inhabiting spaces with people whose lives have been completely ruined, who are never going back to any kind of normal. Everyone is operating on differing levels of despair, even social privilege in a time like this affords people even less comfort. Events like this bring about a profound sense of community, yes. But in turn, being able to see that level of mutual aid be realized only in the face of catastrophe only further contextualizes how sad it is to see the complete and utter lack of it at any other time.
If there is any silver lining to all of this pain and misery, it is that right now you can see leftism in practical action more than it has ever been visible in this city. There has never been a time in my life when organizations like FEMA have had to come to my community, and the federal government was mobilizing the National Guard to help recover from a catastrophe. And yet, I have gone through this experience without ever interacting with, or even truly needing them. In the four days since the federal response arrived (three days after the storm), I have heard or seen very little of any tangible assistance they have provided. What I have seen, however, are droves of photos and personal sightings of these individuals standing around and gawking at victims. As if we were all aquatic animals in some fucked up aquarium. They simply watched, almost basking in the horrific theater playing out in front of them. All while patting each other on the back and giving each other looks that could only be translated as “We’re the good guys, we showed up, and we’re doing our part by standing here and observing this shit show”. The local police and sheriff's departments have been even less helpful, if not helping worsen the situation. The trips I have made in and out of the city in the past week have not led me to see a single member of law enforcement do anything beyond guard empty store parking lots and wander around in a confused daze. The same thing they would be doing under normal circumstances, whether it was a disaster or not. Any statement made by these agencies has solely focused on the protection of private property, on how “overworked” they are having to deal with looting and B&E, and to “please stop calling about welfare checks”. The police and sheriff’s department talking heads spoke with an air of annoyance rather than any kind of concern or stress. These things are not remotely surprising. There is never a moment that we should allow ourselves to place trust in these organizations or agencies to protect us. But I, for a moment, deluded myself into believing that not only law enforcement but every city official would be making an attempt to appear as if they were helping. It’s a natural hope to have after your community has experienced such a radical shift. A massive chunk of the people who live in this city do not have the political or social understanding to figure out why the people in charge of their homes are nowhere to be seen. My only guess as to why Mayor Ester Mannhemier and any other major public official has been sparsely seen in these public forums is in an attempt to run damage control on their personal careers.
I am fully aware that there have been actual relief efforts conducted by all of these state and federal groups. There have been people who were rescued or assisted at the hands of state employees. But the reality for myself and a mass majority of the hundreds of thousands of people in this area is that these people have been nowhere to be seen. The cops, or even the National Guard, aren’t the ones that are saving them from roofs, unblocking roads, bringing supplies, coordinating relief funding, and sharing vital information. Their neighbors, friends, and fellow community members are. Hurricane Helene has constructed the single largest mutual aid project this area has ever seen. At these times of complete collapse, when societal guardrails are dissolving and people are forced into life-or-death situations, capitalism continues to fail everyone. It breaks under the weight of its own constraints. Leftist ideology is in a place to raise people out of these situations, and to cement the importance of mutual aid and community. It allows people to completely reframe what’s important to them, and who really has their best interest in mind.
This past week, I have seen more selflessness and acts of charity than I ever have in my two decades living in this city. The current conditions absolutely warrant it more than any other time, but the rapid response by community-led outreach programs has given me more hope in a leftist movement than anything before or will come after. I haven’t seen state or federal workers rescue people from flood water, or travel hundreds of miles to acquire supplies, or turn their spaces into medical tents. But I have seen that from my fellow friends and neighbors, I have seen the leftist organizations in my community rally and provide more support than the people who we are supposed to be relying on. Tenfold, or perhaps more. We have nobody but ourselves, our community to thank for our collective survival, and continue surviving through this event. We have been let down at every turn by the people we have voted into office and put our faith in. At every possible junction, community-led organizations and the pure generosity and information of others have supported our city and are now more than ever putting that into action. There have been a lot of false statements and empty promises made by the officials overseeing all of this; unrealistic claims that have led to the continued and prolonged suffering of people, or worse. But when the same leftists I have seen for years preach about mutual aid and supporting the community without the influence of police or government had the opportunity to make those words into physical action, they went above and beyond their words and cemented their ideals as tangible. I have seen my friends save people's lives in a multitude of ways this week. I feel assured in seeing this as someone who has only relied on my peers and peers alone.
There is an unimaginable power in collective class consciousness. When that consciousness is realized and utilized it will always provide more than the machines of empire ever could. This kind of action needs to stay in the forefront of everyone’s mind. The conversations being held about continued relief and rebuilding after this should always be underpinned by what the community did in place of the state. In any other future issues, whether personal or communal, what mutual aid was able to accomplish here should be the blueprint for how to react.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 8:46 PM
My relationship with my car's radio has become akin to the one I share with my phone. I anxiously wait around it, and even when I'm not actively tuned in my mind is plagued by what kind of information I could be missing. Most of what I hear, though, doesn't provide me much in the way of solace or knowledge. Almost every single radio station in the southeast has turned into a 24/7 call center/live news hub covering the aftermath of the storm (this is due in part, to iHeartRadio having a monopoly on most local Radio Stations in the area. An overall nefarious practice that just so happened to play out in our favor.). When the station is not running audio feeds of county personnel fumbling their way through relief meetings, its hosts take live call-ins around the clock, collecting and spreading what they can to anyone in earshot. I would not discount the utility of such a thing, as I have heard first-hand people be reunited with family members, spread crucial information, and talk about the event in a much more realistic manner. But that does not make any of it a pleasant experience to sit through, nor do many of the individuals being brought on air have any kind of perspective on why things are going as badly as they are.
Truthfully, I do not expect these people to be taking to the airwaves and demanding answers from local officials, or calling for rent strikes, or talking about the importance of collective action. Many of those people are too preoccupied with attempting to survive or provide relief wherever they can. Many of the individuals most affected by this disaster, who have the most claim for demands, don't even have the ability to make contact with anyone let alone a radio station. It begins to run counter to the primary goal of call-ins if for every person brought on to briefly question where the state resources are, why it's been days with no updates on anything, and why there are still people trapped. There are a dozen more business owners, church members, and local officials eating away minutes of air time to essentially run a free promo for themselves under the guise of "helping the community", all while the hosts of this coverage continually lap up city officials, power companies, and law enforcement. Making excuses for the people they have learned very well over the past days are responsible for the suffering of their audience at every turn they can.
At one point today, while listening in hoping for any kind of crucial information I could disperse out. After listening to the same thirty-second soundbite of President Biden saying that the federal government was "going to cover the bill for all state recovery efforts for the next six months" on a loop at least six times. The hosts reported back in to express their excitement and gratitude over Dave fucking Pourtnoy releasing a charity "NC Strong" shirt on the Barstool Sports Shop website. There are so many layers of bleak framing there I can not and will not even begin to comprehend it. That is where I ended my attempts at salvaging anything of merit from the broadcast. It would be better for my, or anyone's, mental health to stop engaging with it altogether. There are only so many conversations on praying, building back stronger, and "see something, say something" before you start to feel like the emotionally unhinged one for being angry at it. I want to be more charitable to those kinds of people. They deserve to have something to latch on to, no matter how trivial. They shouldn't deserve to live in fear, or to feel like shit because they don't have the tools to understand the wider scope of the issue. But it would be a complete denial of the reality that we're in to not at least mention how little understanding the wider community in Buncombe County has of the political ramifications of this disaster. It brings me great sadness more than anything to see people in my community struggle to clean this entire mess up by themselves while still giving grace to those in power responsible for their suffering. These people, more than anyone else, are the ones who need to see where their support is coming from, who is there to help, and why/how exactly the state has let them down so badly. This is why the presence of mutual aid, the presence of valiant leftism, is more pressing than ever.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6, 9:33 PM
There was something that I noticed in the discussions I’ve had with other people affected this week. A throughline that hadn’t been immediately apparent to me and has only begun to resonate more the better scope I begin to have of everything. Beyond the shock and trauma of the general situation, there is this feeling of intangibility. Small things that are static become objects of permanence, and take their places in the corners of your memory. Those small things suddenly disappeared, washed out of existence in less than one rotation of the Earth.
It’s this intangible feeling of loss, longing, grief. These are places that we didn’t own, didn’t frequent every day, didn’t have personal belongings in. And yet, we can never go to them again. It’s the same feeling as losing a house. Things like “I had my first date there”, “That was my favorite sandwich shop”, “I grew up here”. and “I saw this band at that house years ago”. It’s a feeling you become familiar with if you live in a city your entire life and slowly see it morph into something you can’t recognize. Sped-up on an almost incomprehensible scale. It’s one thing to see a place you love close down, and it’s a completely different thing to see a hundred of them get washed away at once. I can’t fault the many people who will or already have made their exit from the city permanently. Beyond the larger issues at hand, when society inevitably begins to function as normal as it can. What does anyone have to go back to? Many of the businesses and venues with actual value, who were providing quality spaces to the community are gone. Many of the ones that survived the initial destruction do not have the financial overhead to survive the now two weeks of closure. Any of the ways they had to continue bringing in income have been kneecapped by FEMA and the government as a whole.
The primary businesses left standing after all of this are corporate backed and tourist focused entities that locals scarcely engaged with in the first place. While it’s nowhere near as serious as the loss of human life or the destruction of infrastructure, the loss of culture and places that stage the memories of people who have only known this place as their home is still one that completely and radically shifts the day-to-day reality of living here. That is the primary reason I can’t fault people I know for deciding to move away. There were so many DIY, queer, and artistic spaces that are now gone before they ever really had a chance to become something. Each and every one of these dilapidated, washed out buildings had memories attached to them. Experiences that people will never be able to get back to. There is a suffocating weight to the intangible aspects of the loss that exists behind the view of a region in complete ruin. Those things that can’t be seen or fully described are felt and carried through by the people who lived to see the aftermath.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2:26 PM
11 days have passed since Hurricane Helene made landfall. I have been in Ralegh for the past few days, trying to gather supplies to bring back to the city and muster up enough clarity to put together this write-up. Every time I feel like I'm reaching a point of completion, I am stricken with more information that can't be excluded in the overview of this. Or maybe my conscious won't allow me to complete the work until everything around me stops deteriorating. It feels strange trying to find the proper way to tie any of this together when each passing day brings with it more news of death, destruction, and disillusion. I have not felt the presence of survivor's guilt more than while I have been writing all of this out. Being able to tell this story is a privilege within itself. Being able to evacuate (even for a few days) and try and go about my day normally feels like something I should not be allowed to do.
The weather here is nice; brisk air and a cloudless sky like one large hole in the fabric of space. Birds and insects chirp in their best attempts to harmonize with the sultry Jazz music coming in from across the park. The entire ambiance is so naturally curated it feels like I'm on the set for a commercial for some kind of allergy medication, or promotion for some kind of elderly singles cruise. The conditions (under normal circumstances) perfectly set for me to have a pleasant morning of writing. If not for the looming dread hanging over me like a shadow coming from no logical point. These pleasantries only go so far as to remind me of the conditions back home. There are no birds or insects right now, most of them are dead. The option of even going outdoors is limited, due to the caustic air and reek of death winding down the mountains. Unless you have lived through a mass casualty event, you would not be able to even conceptualize such a thing. Death, recent death, has a distinct smell. Death from almost two weeks back, even more so. You can taste the dusty metallic filth at the back of your throat. The bile rises and the taste refuses to leave you. Even if your brain can't discern where or what it's coming from, it's easy to tell. It has tainted the air and seeped into the soil. It is the kind of presence that only comes about when an entire ecosystem goes into post-mortem shock. Even for survivors, existing in a place like this immediately following the destruction feels more like being a lost soul wandering in purgatory than being a living body trying to rebuild.
I have struggled in the past few days to have anything in the way of value to share with my words. I simply don't have any combination of words or sentences to describe or theorize on what recovery looks like beyond the continued support of mutual aid. Which is why I have resigned myself to assisting in any way that I can. It would be wrong for me to sit here and philosophize for thousands of words over the importance of leftist action in a time like this and not actively contribute to that myself. With a massive cold front planned to hit the city next week, I am trying to gather cold weather gear so we don't have people freezing to death on top of everything else going on. I truly cannot quantify the impact that my own personal actions will have, but participating in this in the ways that I can is the only solace I have from the survivors guilt I have carried with me the past two weeks. Moving past something like this, attempting to act even passably normal is something every one of us is going to have to struggle to figure out. I personally don’t believe that there is a “normal” after this. I don’t know if there should be. This is our normal day-to-day now, and we have to work with it.
The months ahead of us are going to be the deciding factor on if Asheville is able to move past this, if there’s going to be a tangible route to being a growing city again. For many of the smaller communities surrounding the city, their fate has already been sealed. There is no recovery, there is no rebuilding. In a few weeks' time (if not already) land investors and mutual capital firms will be swarming the corpses of these already forgotten towns like vultures to roadkill. They will deem the land as “uninhabitable”, and “irreparable” (i.e. impossible to turn a profit from in the next decade) and the history books will close. There is a great irony that lies in living in a part of the country that prides itself on “small-town values” and a tourism board that has whored these communities out to travelers for multiple decades. Quite literally wiping these small communities from existence due to an inability to produce profit.
The tourism conversation within itself is one that spans far too wide to be fully discussed in this writing. Though it should not surprise anyone who has lived here for longer than a few years that the Asheville Board of Tourism is arguably the single most evil entity looming over every aspect of city/county legislature. The overreliance and arguably detrimental obsession with tourism is the direct cause of much of the suffering present in our community before this disaster, and it's that same obsession that very well could lead us into a place of destitution. If the people running our city continue to value non-residents over lifelong citizens, we are heading for a point of collapse. It is not just my fear but the most logical outcome that before the end of the year city management will be desperately trying to get anyone they can to come back to Asheville and dump their money on the same tacky bullshit they’ve been peddling to them for years. In some respects, that choice would be the most effective in keeping our local economy from imploding. Only because the Board of Tourism forced itself into being the most powerful arm of city legislature and strongarmed thousands of people into working for a blatant tourist trap economy. Not just a fiscal but a social economy, by which most available jobs are in service to tourists or to help drive more of them into the region. This creates a dynamic that places workers who actually live within city limits as lesser and subservient to tourists and transplants, even in the eyes of our very own local government. The City of Asheville has been far more concerned with the optics of this disaster and how it reflects on the image they have worked so hard to curate than providing any meaningful messaging or aid. Anything that is too unsightly or casts doubt on the marketability of the region is going to be swept under the rug as quickly as possible and it's going to cost people everything.
I have put specific emphasis on the smaller towns that surround Asheville in this writing, and online you can see these places being talked about almost as much. This is refreshing and reassuring to see but I would still like to cut out a specific section of this to talk about the toll this storm has taken on these smaller communities. All of the wider issues discussed in this, both in the overarching issues and failed recovery efforts, continue to affect these areas even more than the city proper. These places are having to take the brunt of the consequences for the continued failing of county management. If there was ever any chance for Asheville to be able to make a full recovery, the chances of these smaller towns doing the same are net zero. These are places that had already been long forgotten, towns that had not seen any kind of prevalence or marketable value since the era of prospecting. Doomed to be the “quaint, quiet, scenic!” vacation rental spot. In the same predicament as its larger neighbor with a fraction of the ability to fight it. They’re even more isolated from crucial infrastructure and public works programs and now continue to be significantly more separated from tangible aid that isn’t coming from directly within their communities. While the havoc wreaked upon the city is almost unfathomable, Hurricane Helene wiped many of these smaller towns off the map completely. It’s not just lost homes and businesses, there is no town to go back to anymore. Lake Lure, a town that I have spent collective years of my life in, has been reduced to a swampy rubble pit. The one access road into the town is completely gone and has been temporarily replaced with a wooden plank as the sole entry for anybody to go in or out. A single plank of wood is keeping hundreds of people alive almost two weeks after this disaster. Marshall, my roommate Sera’s hometown, which has always carried that picturesque, stereotypical mountain town look, now looks like some piece of abstract artwork. Nothing is in the place it should be, pieces of buildings sitting at impossible angles and the main street morphing into a waterway.
It all just feels… apocalyptic. That’s really the only word that I can conjure up to quantify the things that I have seen and I’m still not fully sure if that covers it. But within that horror, much in the same way I have seen it within the city, I have seen people come together in unprecedented ways. The people from these towns are strong and proud people, I would know living with one. Despite the insurmountable odds against them, they seem to be working harder than anyone else to recover from this and aid their peers. Doing so with less governmental assistance than anyone else. This wouldn’t surprise any of those people because they’ve been making due, largely in part thanks to being abandoned by the state for a long time now. Even if they can make do without it, that doesn’t excuse the lack of aid being sent to these areas when they are by far the most in need of it..
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 10:28 AM
Misinformation is just as commonplace as any actual facts, if not more prominent than the actual facts. The Internet as a whole has been a graveyard of engagement farming bots and conspiracy schitzo posting supplemented for actual news. During one of the largest communications blackouts in recent memory, the prevalence and danger of outright lying online is multiplied tenfold. Every day that passes is another day of conspiratorial bullshit that will be eaten up en masse before it ever has the chance to even begin being debunked. I have heard things ranging from insane statements such as the reason that FEMA has entered the region was to steal our secret lithium deposits (a completely nonsense claim that I will give no more attention to). To much more believable rumors of state police assaulting survivors, and people being kicked out of shelters, the typical actions we have seen state authority take against people as far back as Katrina. Conversations around misinformation are important to have. Thankfully, I have seen many people around me call out blatant lies and push back against conspiratorial narratives. It shows that people in our community do have the ability to point out and break apart narratives that were spun by advantageous grifters on both the left and right. I am greatly concerned, however, by the prevalence of mainstream news and the state and federal governments becoming involved in conversations around misinformation. I can fully get behind my peers identifying and calling out what they see as misinformation, I cannot extend the same charitability to people who do have much to gain from outright lying about the narrative, whatever the context.
The current official death toll for Hurricane Helene sits at over 230, with over half of those being accounted for in Asheville and its surrounding towns. This takes into account that the last official toll released in Buncombe County was at 130 several days ago. This means either no other victims have been added to the count in almost a week, or County officials are obscuring the official numbers. We know all too well which of these options is more probable in this scenario. We still do not have a concrete death toll for Katrina, an event that occurred nearly twenty years ago in what was primarily a walled city with rigid lines and a stagnant search area. Of course, there were always going to be people unaccounted for. Washed away and forgotten with the passage of time. To think there will ever be anything close to an accurate death toll for Appalachia is a pipedream. The land here moves and shifts with even the slightest of flooding, hundreds of miles of riverways and tributaries, and communities that are some of the most remote in the country. They will be finding bodies for months or probably years after this. There are some people moved so far and been so deeply buried under the mud that it’s unlikely they will ever be found. This only further serves the state, which will release a “final” death toll some weeks from now and brush its hands of the situation before it gets any worse in a PR sense. I would assume this process is already underway, given the complete and utter lack of statistics or information coming out of the state. They are already attempting to astroturf over the current and still incredibly dire situation occurring.
There is no “moving forward” as a region until we have a full grasp on the destruction that has occurred. It is very apparent that the state is taking advantage of the lack of information that people still have, and the amount of misinformation being spread around to quell any negative sentiment or press surrounding the city government's hand in why we were so unprepared to handle or recover from such an event. Unsurprisingly, it appears that there will be no accountability, lost jobs, or criminal suits brought against the city and county leaders. There will be no accountability for a water system that was multiple decades past due for a complete reconstruction. A known fact that had been constantly brushed aside and ignored time and time again. No accountability for voracious overdevelopment, gentrification, and displacement in favor of tourism. No accountability for crumbling infrastructure that has left smaller communities living in the proverbial dark ages without any hope of development. No accountability for defunding public and social services and pandering to private interest. All of these, whether they be foundational pieces that have been slowly eroding or new cheaply constructed additions. They all come together to form a dilapidated house of cards that had been waiting for a strong enough gust to make it crumble apart. This has been something many of us had been anticipating for a while, even if the people in charge had been in gleeful denial of it. I’m not sure any of us were expecting a dagger of wind so strong it blew the cards off into the ether.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 11:41 AM
I am finally back in my own home after two weeks. The power suddenly flipped back on yesterday after being down for 14 days. Water, still under boil advisory (really a nonconsumption advisory) has also finally come back. That in combination with slightly functional cell service has provided me the slightest sense of normalcy. Even a few steps outside of my front door are a clear reminder that anything close to normalcy is still far out of sight. Two weeks later, the dead are still being found and people still trapped. City water infrastructure seems to be falling apart with each repair and it feels like FEMA came and went with the turn of the temperature this weekend. Most of the people like myself, located towards the center of town have had their utilities cut back on, but with scarcely anything open they’re forced to wander around the main part of the city like lost souls. If not assisting with clean up they’re damned to walk around looking for anything with signs of life as if they were a survivor in an apocalypse feature. It’s hard to gauge how far along in the recovery we are, given that nothing looks too much different than it did two weeks ago. Trees have been cut and water levels have lowered but this feeling of dismal exhaustion remains looming overhead no matter what part of the county you’re in. There’s this omnipotent burning feeling that underpins any conversation being had about the disaster, really any conversation you have now. I truly don’t believe anyone has an idea of what to do or what comes after. Whether it gets better, or worse, stays like this. Whether people move away, businesses close, or areas get condemned. Nobody is going about their day or making plans for the future right now, because who the fuck knows what that looks like anymore. I have already had my entire life reset back from square one when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, like many of us did. It feels like now just a few years later I and thousands of other people are having another forced reset that we have no way of controlling. I don’t want to lead this writing down a path to nowhere and I don’t particularly want to philosophize over where we go from here. Nobody knows where we go from here. Even two weeks on is too early to make a discernable statement out of anything. We just have to push through in any way we know how, whether that’s doing mutual aid or skipping town.
I have struggled with trying to find a way to close this writing out. I don’t have a grand thesis statement to round it back to and realistically with the formatting style I’ve chosen this could run for as long as there is still a recovery underway. In the two weeks I’ve spent working on this project I have steadily less and less desire to sit with this. Having to concentrate hard on what to say about death and destruction. I don’t know what to say, the past ten thousand words have been a very long-winded way of expressing that. As much as I want this writing to be bigger than me, this is nothing more than the outlet I have had to say something awful that's happened to me. I didn’t really have a choice in writing this, it was the only thing keeping me sane. I wish that I had something deeper to impart to you. But if you lived through this experience like I know a lot of you reading this right now have. Then the only obligation you have is to yourself, and the people around you. Step up, aid them, aid yourself, breathe. Read literature on mutual cooperation, research city budgets, and see where your tax money is going. Do anything and everything you can to keep your head above water and develop a network that lasts beyond this. Literally, just keep surviving, and keep helping others. That's all you can do.
End.
(A NOTE FROM SERA SMITH, EDITOR FOR OPAL KNIVES: This has possibly been the most harrowing and enlightening time of my life. I have never borne witness to such devastation and suffering as that which I have seen over the past two weeks. Both Marshall and Asheville have been warped and damaged in a capacity that I did not think was possible, certainly not in my lifetime. Recovery is hard to conceive, but it has already begun. We, the people, have always been here for one another, and we will continue to do so. I pray that going forward it doesn’t take a fucking hurricane to make us give a fuck about each other. Mutual aid and support is how we reclaim the power we have lost that is rightfully ours.)
Thank you for reading this mess, it truly means everything to me.
Below are links to mutual aid organizations and fundraising initiatives happening in Asheville and the surrounding areas. Please consider donating if you haven't already. If you can't donate, share these links and share what's happening within your communities. This can not be swept under the rug and forgotten. Continue to demand the resignation of the officials who have led us down this path of failure. Continue to work together, and develop systems and networks for aid and information with state involvement. Keep standing up for yourself and standing in opposition to the ongoing Capitalist Genocide happening in our country and across the world.
New opal knives in less than a week.
AID LINKS
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/belovedasheville
https://www.heartswithhands.org/
https://chcmadisoncountync.org/
https://www.bwar.org/
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/mutual-aid-disaster-relief