MOUNTAIN ELEGY

I once lived in the mountains of western North Carolina.

I have this from the North Carolina State Climate Office:

Torrential rainfall from remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our Mountains and southern Foothills.

The Blue Ridge are hurting. I’m hearing — we are all hearing –of the horrible travail there — so much and so many nearly drowned in violent, brown, debris-bearing storm floods. Seems odd to many, I suppose, that a hurricane could climb a mountain and dump all its water there — and cause its considerable river waters to rampage and overflow so catastrophically.

It can, other storms have done so before, it did last week. But never to this degree. 150 plus dead. The toll will likely grow.

An utter and historic horror, according to the State Climate Office.

It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region.

I came and went too soon from that beautiful region where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennesee come together. The time frame was fall to spring, 1997 into 1998. I probably never intended to stay there permanently and — oh, I might as well tell you — left sooner than I wanted largely because I couldn’t make a living there. This was because it was, to a great degree, a resort area. I couldn’t earn money comparble to the cost of living — that being the bane of long-time locals who for generations have grown Christmas trees, worked trades, worked in factories, did what they could, got by, called it home.

To many in New England or around the nation, those patches of the country near Thomas Wolfe’s native Ashville and the region where I once lived 153 miles to the east in little Banner Elk are unknown terrain. They may not have known there are North Carolina mountains.

I lived in a wood hillside chalet-style house next to rows of saplings and partially grown fraser firs destined to be Christmas trees, nurtured by scores of local nurserymen. They rose slowly up beside a steeply sloaping street called Cynthia Lane. That was my street. As I looked out at those trees, I imagined them one day festooned with colorful lights, reflected in the sparkling eyes of a child on Christmas morning. It was good on Christmas morning to see so many trees still standing for Christmases future. They are harvested every seven years.

I’m a New Englander and knew ultimately I would want to go all the way home from Florida where I’d been living– for a second time — from 1990 to 1997. (So, what am I doing back in Florida, five years and, once again, a thousand miles from home? Another long story. I guess some of us have restless hearts, or are capable of seeking the geographic cure.)

In truth, my mountain time, while pleasant, was sometimes, during the winter, trecherous among steep, icy inclines, mountain highways and trails, rocks and pines — always, at a radio station, hearing and being embraced by the antic and narrative and welcome strains of country music.

I don’t know that I was listening to anything the afternoon , heading downhill in traffic, bound for Banner Elk from Boone, when I gently slid right off the road in my old Volvo. I didn’t go far — about ten feet, and to rest, though a bit unnerved.

It all remains wrapped around a place deep in my mind. And on my mind now are the region’s suffering.

One evening walking along Beacon Street in Boston beside the Public Garden and across from the famous “Cheers” bar, the Bull&Finch Pub, a woman called out to me from her van as she was stuck in traffic. She’d seen my t-shirt for the Mast Store in Valle Crucis, near Banner Elk. She knew the region. “I love Blowing Rock,” she said — another of the charming towns in the area.

Yes indeed, she knew the area.

There is, to a limited degree, a ski resort industry there on Beech and Sugar Mountains that attracts non-locals. But they were always having to make snow for the ski trails. I seem to recall some crystals from the snow-making apparatus blowing toward my hillside home on some occasions. That’s quite possibly as much a reverie as a real memory. But, yes, I do recall that you could tell when they were “making snow” which does not always fall naturally in enough abundance in the Blue Ridge to support the skiing public.

But, again, they get by, those ski trail folks.

Beach Mountain. Sugar Mountain and Hawk’s Nest ski areas — they are all there. Hawk’s Nest is where my son, during his first-ever attempt at snowboarding, wiped out on the last run of the night (after they had prematurely taken down the orange plastic protective netting), slid headlong into a trench dug for a downhill pipe line, slammed into the pipe and ruptured his spleen, landing in Wautauga County Hospital in Boone for emergency surgery. It’s where the young members of the ski patrol were so good to him in the wake of his accident, coming to visit him. It’s where I spent a night half-watching Godzilla movies in a waiting room, barely sleeping, waiting for his deeply upset mother to arrive from South Carolina, arriving near dawn. I had walked down a corridor, barely awake, as the elevator door opened and Renee stepped out and said, “where is he?” Poor Renee, she was probably mad at me, but, more than anything, worried about our son — who recovered just fine, thank God.

O yes, that is a memory. A mountain memory.

Currently, The Climate Office is recording that 16.67 inches of rain have fallen on Boone.

Memories are spilling out of me the way water is now still rushing down a mountainside.

Some great, proud and independent people live in Boone and the Banner Elk area. Tiny Lees-McCrea College is located in Banner Elk. Appalachian State University is in Boone. We’ve started to hear about its football program, but I mostly recall time spent in its fine library. I worked for little WECR-AM and FM radio in Newland, which, at that time (and perhaps now) had studios located in a triple-wide trailer down the road from the Great Eastern Divide. I worked the best I could, selling advertising — not my strength –to Boone auto dealers and merchants with Buddy Carpenter, a former Trailways Bus driver who had formerly been road manager for The Marshall Tucker Band. (I learned from Buddy that Marshall Tucker was a blind piano tuner in whose Spartenburg, NC storage area the band, in its formative years, practiced and developed their distinctive country rock repertoire.) Buddy also did the morning show. A young local woman who did the show with Buddy left to work at a local factory where I believe she was offered more money.

This was that kind of place –unglamorous, real, full of native-bred Scotch-Irish folks ekeing out a living around the city of Newland, way above sea level. Sadly I’ve forgotten that young woman’s name as, I’m sure, she’s forgotten mine, and forgotten me. It was, after all, twenty-seven years ago.

But I’m thinking of her and hoping Helene has not upended her life — hers and the lives of her family members. I’ll bet she has children by now and didn’t seem like the kind of person who would move away from native turf. As for Buddy Carpenter, sadly, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I do hope you are well, Buddy. (Maybe the last remnants of the Marshall Tucker Band could locate him for me, tell me of his fate. Buddy once told me how founding band member Toy Caldwell was on board his bus during one tour, working out lyrics of the song, “Heard it in a Love Song” on a paper bag which he gave to Buddy and which Buddy planned to donate to the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame.)

During that North Carolina stay, I owned an old Zenith radio I’d picked up at a yard sale somewhere and I recall hearing that young woman who worked with Buddy speak my name out of it, referring to my reference, the former afternoon, to a program to adopt horses in need of permanent homes. ( The information was on a press release; I was filling time during a newscast in which I had few reliable sources of real news.) I’ll always remember her saying something like, “Yeah, Greg was talking about that program….” It was every bit, if not more special than seeing and hearing myself as a reporter on TV — hearing my name, spoken by a nice young moutain dwelling woman (was her name Karen? Sue? Mary?) and spilling out over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sounds crazy, I know. But every little thing during those mere nine months (or so) had meaning for me.

Now I’m hearing that all roads in Western NC should be considered closed…

And that what has happened there should be considered…

on par with eastern North Carolina’s worst hurricane from six years ago.

There were, in fact, a great deal of Florida license plates on cars that appeared during the summer months in the mountains. There are gated communities nestled in the mountain ridges where well-to-do Florida residents escape Florida’s summer heat. I was told locals had a mild disdain for these transient visitors because “they poke on the roads and complain about the food.”

Of course, the visitors always bring money to the areas they’re accused of despoiling. And many nice folks appear among seasonal visitors the world over.

For instance…

I worshiped at little St. Bernadette’s Church in the town of Linville, North Carolina where one Sunday I saw retired, legendary Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula coming up the aisle from communion. I couldn’t believe my eyes! And his former quarterback and Hall of Famer Bob Griese, who led the Dolphins to three consecutive Super Bowl appearances –winning two of them (the first of which capped off an undefeated, untied season, a feat that has not been duplicted in the NFL) also worshipped at St. Bernadettes.

Griese sat down with his wife in the pew in front of me one Sunday, turned and offered me, at the appropriate moment, the handshake that is called, “the kiss of peace” (which, in my role as a liturgical curmudgeon, I find superfluous and toucy-feely but which I could not wait to exchange that Sunday as Bob G. turned and grasped my hand. It was the hand that had thrown 192 touchdowns. And the legendary quarterback said, “God Bless Y ou.”

Blessed by Bob Griese! One day up in the mountains of western North Carolina.

From the Climate Office:

It’s no exaggeration to liken this to a Florence-level disaster for the Mountains, since the apparent rarity of the rainfall amounts and the impacts they produced – including large stretches of highways underwater and a plea from the NC Department of Transportation…

By a “Florence-level disaster”, I take the climate officials to be referring to the November, 1966 flooding of the raging Arno River which swamped and did horrible damage to the city of Florence and hundreds its art treasures. I had visited Florence — my one and only time so far — the summer before.

In the mountains, the masterpieces are all natural.

Beyond the glass behind the altar and tabernacle at St. Bernadettes is Grandfather Mountain, so named because, as you look at it, you see in the rocky outcroppings the enormous face of an old man turned up toward the sky. You can see God if you choose. You see him for miles as you approach the region.

Yes, for a brief, memorable time, I was part of that western North Carolina community. Coming and going so quickly, being easily identified by my lack of Southern accent as a damned Yankee. I’m sure no one there — and Bob Griese, wherever he is and whether or not he still comes to the region — remembers me. No matter, I’ve kept his blessing.

But I am praying for that region now, so utterly tormented by the rampaging, north-traveling remnants of a huge, millenial hurricane.

The North Carolina State Climate Office has concluded…

While the full extent of this event will take years to document – not to mention, to recover from – we can make an initial assessment of the factors that made for such extreme rainfall, the precipitation totals and other hazards, and how this storm compares with some of the worst for the mountains and for our state as a whole.

Have the young Christmas trees survived in Avery and Wautaga Counties?

It may be a bleak Christmas in the high country. I hope not. I spent a very nice Christmas there.

In fact, the greatest damage may be in neighboring counties and across the state line into Tennessee — death and destruction from raging water.

I pray for them as well.

May there be deliverance for the whole region by the time snow falls over the wide, welcoming beautiful face of that celestial mountain grandfather.