Here's a photo taken in 2017 on Barnett Reservoir just outside Jackson, Mississippi. I'm sitting in my boat either just before starting a race or just after finishing. It doesn't look like I'm breathing hard, so it's probably before the race.
That race down there is just one of a number that we used to have here in my part of the country, but don't anymore. I miss it.
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The frigid air that moved in last weekend hung around through the middle of this past week. I responded with some workouts on dry land. On Monday I stayed indoors and did a routine that included lunges with dumbbells, a couple of core balance drills on stability balls, and some lying-down leg kicks.
On Tuesday I went down to the Greenbelt Park on a sunny but frigid and windy day. I did some running both on flat ground and up hills, some oblique abdominal exercises, and some torso twists with the medicine ball.
By Thursday the Arctic blast was finally relenting, and I went back to the riverfront and got in the boat. It wasn't exactly warm--I think it was just a little over 40 degrees Fahrenheit when I paddled. But that's warmer than some of the weather I was paddling in down in Florida earlier this month.
Friday was colder and I did another round of the indoor routine. Yesterday, with the temperature rising toward 50 degrees, I was back on the water. Having done a rather grinding, low-stroke-rate technique session on Friday, I was keen to do something faster yesterday. After a long warmup I did a piece that was a little over 400 meters, followed by two pieces on my 450-meter course from the monorail bridge to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. My time for the first piece was just under two minutes, and around 2:10 for the two bridge-to-bridge pieces. I had a pretty strong tailwind for all three pieces, but having to paddle over the resultant chop offset that advantage somewhat. My recovery time between the pieces was between five and ten minutes.
The wind was from the south, and that's better than a north wind, but at this time of year no wind is particularly welcome. The wind forecast is definitely something I look at when deciding when to paddle, when to work out outdoors, and when to work out indoors.
My jury duty starts a week from tomorrow. Just how much of my time that's going to occupy, I won't know until I report to the federal courthouse downtown. This coming week looks significantly warmer than last week was, albeit wet in the second half. I hope to get in some good work before I venture into the unknown world of my civic obligation.
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Joe Royer shot this photo of me out on the Mississippi River fifteen years ago. I'm pretty sure I've shared this photo before, but it seems suitable today as the Arctic blast that currently grips much of the nation is keeping the Fahrenheit temperature in the mid 20s here in the Mid South.
I don't think I've seen ice floes out on the Mississippi since this picture was taken. Today's national weather map shows highs in the teens in Missouri and Illinois and even colder highs farther upriver, and you would think that should create some floes that would come drifting down by Memphis. But such temperatures happen upstream of here every winter, and yet the floes are pretty rare. I reckon ice formation must require some other atmospheric conditions that I just don't understand very well.
Oh well... ice or no ice, it's cold today. Fifteen years ago both Joe and I were hardcore, but we seem to be getting too old for such foolishness now.
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I finally got around to looking at the video footage I shot on January 8 at Silver Springs State Park near Ocala, Florida. What we have here is a short clip that I edited from that footage:
Since my return home from Florida last Sunday, training activities have been largely on pause. The main reason is a big pile of nuisance chores that were waiting for me, a couple of which got drawn out longer than expected and caused me more than a little bit of grief and anger.
I'll spare you the grisly details of all that, but I will mention that one of the week's chores was to visit my doctor's office for my annual physical, and it seems that I'm in pretty good health these days (bloodwork results are still pending and I should hear about them sometime after this holiday weekend). I'm still coughing a lot, but I think the frequency of my fits is decreasing ever so gradually. The doctor thinks it's one of those "hundred-day coughs."
I finally got back in the boat on Friday, and again yesterday. Frigid weather is now descending on the Mid South, and I wanted to get some paddling in before it arrived. The sessions were generally calm, steady paddling, but I paid a lot of attention to stroke mechanics.
As for my plans for the immediate future, they're a little uncertain because starting two weeks from tomorrow I have jury duty in federal court, and at least according to the letter I received, it could last the entire month of February. I hope that won't actually be the case, but the main thing I don't know yet is how "on call" the court will want me to be.
Part of me is frustrated because I feel like I ought to be building on what I got started down in Florida, but another part of me is aware that I might not have any sort of competitions in the foreseeable future. The race at Ocean Springs that I have attended each March for many years is not going to happen this year. Right now the earliest race that I might attend is one over in Chattanooga in May that Terry Smith told me about last week. At the moment I don't know whether it will conflict with the college graduation of my niece and nephew, who both attend the same school over in Texas.
Anyway, for now I think my best bet is to re-start some kind of general fitness routine like I was doing back in the late fall--some paddling combined with some indoor and outdoor dry-land work that I can schedule around the weather forecast. The very latest information will be available right here.
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A manatee noses up to the surface of the Silver River for a breath of air. I shot this photo during our visit to Silver Springs State Park last Wednesday. I actually got a good hour or so of video footage, and when I find time I'll edit that into something I can share on this blog and on social media and stuff. When will I find time? I have no idea. Right now I'm feeling pretty swamped with real-world matters here at home after ten days away.
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For most of the past week I've had an itchy rash from my ankles halfway up to my knees. That's because the access we use on the Rainbow River is a ramp, meaning that we have to wade at least shin-deep into the water every time we put in and take out. As a result, that part of all my paddling pants has stayed wet all week. I didn't bring enough paddling clothes with me, and getting the clothes I have dry in between workouts has been more or less impossible.
The camp finally came to a close yesterday morning. Mercifully, the weather relented and gave us a temperature in the high 50s. There were some gusty winds blowing, though. Chris Hipgrave, Terry Smith, and I did a pair of time trials, each just shy of 600 meters long. The first was downstream on the Rainbow River starting at the highway 484 bridge, and the second was down on the Withlacoochee River, starting next to a dock and finishing at the bike trail bridge. My times were 3 minutes, 11 seconds for the first one, and 2:59 for the second. The second one was done on the same course we'd timed ourselves on the previous Saturday; I was about 10 seconds slower yesterday than I'd been a week before, and I chalk that up mainly to the swirling winds.
And now I'm back home, with a mountain of ancillary chores to catch up on. I'm not sure what's next for me in terms of canoe and kayak training, but that'll become clear over the next few days as I recover from camp.
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The weather has turned nippy down here in Florida. To full-time Floridians, I reckon it's downright frigid. To me, these daytime Fahrenheit highs in the 50s fit into the "nuisance" category: such days are at the mild end of the winter weather spectrum back home, but are not what I come to Florida for.
The worst part has been the morning sessions, during which the temperature has been in the 30s. As the week has gone on it's gotten harder and harder to get myself going in the morning. But so far I've done it each time.
And what, exactly, have we been doing? Well, Monday morning we did some technique work at stroke rates ranging from 60 to 72 spm, and that afternoon we did some longer pieces with short recovery at low-70s stroke rates. Tuesday morning (the first cold morning) we did a "calm" 75-minute paddle, and in the afternoon we did some pieces with resistance on the boat. Yesterday we traveled to the Silver River near Ocala for a relaxed 2-hour paddle with a lot of wildlife around, including birds, alligators, turtles, and manatees. And this morning we did some more technique work at mostly-low stroke rates, while this afternoon we did three 9-minute pieces at a stroke rate in the mid 80s with 6 minutes recovery in between.
That last workout was definitely our most intense of the camp. There were four of us--Chris Hipgrave, Royal McDonnell, Terry Smith, and me--and we started at 30-second intervals, with me going first, then Terry, then Chris, then Royal. That meant that I did each piece with Terry in hot pursuit. I think he gained some ten seconds on me in the first piece, but our times were close to dead even in the second and third. I was pleased with my stamina: early in the third piece I thought maybe I had nothing left after the first two, but then I settled into a good rhythm and finished strong.
All good work, but again, I'm having a hard time savoring it because of the cold weather. Yes, I know it's not as cold here as it is up north (in Memphis a winter storm is expected to move in tonight and continue through tomorrow), but it's as cold as I ever care to paddle in.
I swiped a shot from Steph Schell's social media for this week's photo feature. She and my other housemates arrived in Florida a week before I did, and she took this picture of the lovely Rainbow River from her boat on New Year's Day.
It does indeed look pretty idyllic. But this coming week we won't be spared entirely from the national cold snap here in Florida. This week the temperatures here will be warmer than the rest of the nation, but still quite brisk by Florida standards.
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I arrived in the town of Dunellon, Florida, on Friday. Since then I've been making the adjustment to an increased volume of in-the-boat workouts.
My fellow paddlers include Chris Norbury of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania; Royal McDonnell of Lake Placid, New York; Steph Schell of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania; Terry Smith of Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Peter Wottowa of Crystal River, Florida.
So far we've done some distance at low to medium stroke rates, some power drills, some short sprints, and a time trial of just under 600 meters down slow-moving current. The weather has been cool for Florida--Fahrenheit highs in the low to mid 60s. Today is supposed to be our last balmy day; then the Arctic blast that's been moving across the rest of the nation will arrive here and lower the daily highs to un-Florida-like 50s. That's still a lot warmer than the 20s and 30s back home in Memphis, but it'll most likely be in the 30s for our morning sessions, so we'll be sharing in the misery at least a little bit.
Anyway... that's about all to report for now. At least it's been nice to have a break from the routine at home and catch up with a few friends.
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Well, it's been more than a month since my last post here. Sorry for the radio silence, for those of you who have been checking in.
I said in my last post that my plan for the remainder of the year was to mix paddling with a couple of dry-land routines, one indoor and one outdoor, that I would do depending on the weather conditions. And that's what I did. I got in the boat a couple of times a week, and I also did some running and some body-weight exercises and some work on a stability ball and some work with a medicine ball.
My goal was to get myself to a decent level of fitness for the next phase of winter training: I plan to leave tomorrow for the state of Florida, where I will participate in an informal training camp with a few other racers. Long-time readers of this blog know that we've been having this camp for the last few years.
I took a few days off last week while traveling to North Carolina to spend the Christmas holiday with my sister's family. Once back home I wanted to spend my time in the boat getting ready for the increased work load I can expect down in Florida. For the first time in months, I did a couple of workouts with resistance on the boat. On Saturday I did two sets of two (5 minutes at 60 strokes per minute/3 minutes at 65 spm/2 minutes at 70 spm). For the rest of the day I felt tired and sore in my legs, and I guess at least that's a sign that I'm doing an okay job with my leg drive and pelvic rotation.
The fatigue was severe enough that I spent Sunday just doing a recovery paddle. Then yesterday I did another workout with resistance on the boat: three times (5 minutes on, 3 minutes off) at 70 spm, and three times (3 minutes on, 3 minutes off) at 80 spm. The session was pretty taxing, but in the aftermath I haven't felt nearly as beat-up as I felt after Saturday.
I've had a cold since Sunday. It's not the worst I've ever had--it's mostly just a stuffed-up nose. My energy level seems to be holding up pretty well. All the same, I sure hope to be on the downhill side of it as I depart for Florida.
I plan to leave home tomorrow and arrive in the town of Dunnellon, Florida, on Friday. The weather forecast is saying that my first several days down there will be quite pleasant for this time of year, with daily highs above 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But most of next week looks not so Florida-like: the highs will be in the 50s, and we'll likely be dealing with temperatures in the 30s during our morning sessions. But it'll still be better than up here in Memphis, where the temperature isn't expected to rise above the 30s during the same period.
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Winter is fast approaching here where I live, but the opposite is true in the southern hemisphere.
As the people on the planet's underside savor the warming temperatures of late spring, there are a number of places down there from which I could have drawn today's photo. One is the province of Western Australia, where the annual WA Race Week is currently underway at Perth. This event culminates in a race known as The Doctor, one of the most coveted titles for elite-level ocean racers. ("The Doctor" is the name of the wind that blows off the Indian Ocean onto the west coast of Australia.)
But for this week's photo feature I think I'll pick a photo from another southern hemisphere nation: Chile. Native Memphian Boyd Ruppelt is down there right now, enjoying all the Andean whitewater he can stand. He posted the photo above on his Facebook page: it shows Boyd and friends cruising over one waterfall after another on the Rio Claro.
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It's been the better part of a month since my last post, but I haven't been in hibernation.
The unseasonably warm weather we had in October bled into the first week or so of November. But the temperature has surely enough been trending downward. I'm pretty certain we've seen our last day above 80 degrees Fahrenheit for this year. This month has treated us to a lot of days in the 60s and 70s, but the last several days have stayed below 60 degrees, and the forecast is showing some highs in the 40s in the next couple of weeks.
In the last couple of years I've come to the decision that I've paid my dues when it comes to paddling in cold weather. And so at this time of year I transition into some dry-land fitness activities. Because of the above-normal temperatures this fall, I've continued to paddle quite a bit; but with the water temperature dropping on the Mississippi River, I think I've done my last barge-wake surfing until next spring. I've been staying in the harbor or at least close to it, and working hard on my rotation from the hips.
Meanwhile, I've worked up a couple of dry-land routines for those days when the weather isn't something I want to paddle in. My main focus in these is to work on my legs and core. One is an indoor routine, for when it's pouring down rain outside: I do a couple of core exercises on the stability ball, some Hindu squats, and some abdominal crunches while hanging from the pullup bar.
When it's dry outside, but too cold and windy for paddling to be desirable, I go out and do some running and some medicine ball drills.
So, to borrow a phrase I heard Greg Barton use several years ago, I'm "letting the weather be my coach." This past week has been a perfect example of that. The early part of the week was warm, and I paddled both Sunday and Tuesday. By Wednesday morning colder air had moved in and I stayed out of the boat for several days, doing the indoor routine Wednesday and Saturday and the outdoor routine in the Greenbelt Park on the riverfront on Thursday.
The weather warmed up a bit yesterday: by mid-morning the temperature was in the 50s on its way to a high in the mid 60s. So I returned to the riverfront and got in the boat. I did a lot more work on rotation, did a couple of surges, and in general tried to maintain a cruising pace a touch above my comfort zone.
I don't normally paddle on Monday, but with the forecast showing another warm day today followed by much cooler weather the rest of the week, I went on back down to the river this morning. In a 60-minute session I did some stroke-power drills.
That's how it'll be for at least the next few weeks: a mix of in-the-boat and out-of-the-boat stuff, with the weather dictating how much of each I do. Our winters aren't too terrible in this part of the country, and I hope that once I come out on the other end of the cold-weather season I'll have a strong platform of general fitness to build on.
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The father-daughter team of Mike Herbert and Savanna Wright finish up a race on the Tennessee River at Hales Bar Marina near Haletown, Tennessee, on Saturday. Mike and Savanna, long-time friends of My Training Blog by Elmore, usually look a lot crisper and in-sync than this, but seeing as how they've just paddled almost 32 miles with very little help from any current, they can be forgiven if their form looks a bit frayed here. They paddled well enough to claim first place in the mixed tandem surfski class. Photo by Deb Boyles Glover.
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I'd almost forgotten what a cloudy day looked like, but yesterday refreshed my memory. In addition to overcast skies we had a brisk north wind and a much cooler temperature. So I wasn't in the mood for any surfing as I embarked on yesterday's paddle, and it turned out there was no barge traffic on the Mississippi anyway. It was just as well, because I felt tired and achy in the boat and I needed a steady session to work those feelings out. My quest for better rotation from the hips continues: such mechanics harness more power from the legs and take stress off the arms and shoulders, and I can tell my arms feel a lot better when I'm doing it well.
This morning the temperature was even a few degrees lower, but the sun was out and the wind was calm. I didn't feel like a world-beater but I did at least feel better than yesterday. I had a good 60-minute paddle on a river that was again mostly deserted.
About two-thirds of my dock is now on the ground. I'm having to carry my boat around to another dock that still has access to the water. The river level continues to hang out just above -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge, and the forecast says it will more or less stay there. That's a very, very low level, but not quite as low as the record -12 feet we saw last year. So far I haven't seen any mention in the local or national news about the situation on the lower Mississippi. The floodwaters from Hurricane Helene didn't prevent low water here, but they at least bought us some time, and I'm hoping wetter weather will settle into the watershed soon so we can avoid another record-setting year.
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This week we've had plentiful sunshine and near-record-high temperatures for late October. I've had ideas floating around in my head about moving to some dry-land training for a while--lots of leg and core exercises, mainly--but as long as it's as warm as it's been it seems to make sense to stay in the boat a little longer.
I paddled for 60 minutes both Tuesday and yesterday. Both days I found conveniently-placed barge traffic out on the Mississippi and tried to do some surfing. The waves weren't especially easy to catch, and I wonder if the low water level has something to do with that--it's currently -9.2 feet on the Memphis gauge. And the towboat pilot I tried to surf behind yesterday was a real grump who apparently doesn't like anybody having fun while he has to work. He gave me five (5) angry blasts on his horn. If I could have talked to him, I would have made the same point I made here a couple of months ago: as long as it's okay for him to churn up waves on our river, it's okay for me to go out and try to surf them.
Anyway, I probably won't have many more days of favorable conditions for surfing out there. This warm weather won't last forever, and the Mississippi's water gets very cold in the winter and I won't have much desire to get wet out there until late next spring.
I also prefer warm weather for bike riding. I planned to ride Wednesday morning, but I discovered my bike had a flat tire and all the spare tubes I had required patching before they'd be usable. Yes, I know a lot of riders just throw out punctured tubes and replace them with brand-new ones, but I have a hard time throwing a tube in the garbage when one pin-prick hole is the only thing wrong with it. Anyway... instead of riding, I spent Wednesday morning patching all my spare tubes. That pushed the riding back to this morning, when I took advantage of another lovely warm day to take the Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.
It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be some ten degrees cooler than it's been the last several days. But it'll still be nice for paddling.
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The last time I posted here I mentioned I was trying to get a response from my doctor's office about an X-ray I'd had taken. They finally got back to me, a full seven days after the X-ray was shot, to tell me there was no sign of a fracture. That was nice to know, though I sure would have appreciated getting the information in a more timely fashion. I asked them if the image shed any light on my continued coughing, and they said no. It's now been more than a month since I first got sick, and while I think the coughing is getting ever-so-gradually less frequent, I'm still having some occasional fits of it. It's at its worst when I get up in the morning, when I'm expelling all the gunk that had collected overnight. My friend Rob who rents the little studio apartment in the rear of my building told me that he's been praying for me because he's heard me coughing so much. I genuinely found that touching.
Since learning that I had no broken bones in my chest area I've been easing myself back into some physical exercise. I did a couple of 50-minute paddles toward the end of the week before last, week and paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday and Friday of this past week. My stamina was probably down a tad, but in all I felt reasonably good in the boat.
I woke up this morning with an inexplicable sharp pain in my left wrist--I don't recall doing anything yesterday that might have caused such an ailment. I went on down to the river hoping for the best, and was relieved to find that I could paddle with no real pain. I did another 60 minutes, and even got to do some barge-wake surfing. The waves had a long wavelength and a small amplitude and seemed to require a bit more speed than I could generate, but I did get a couple of okay rides. The best thing was that I felt good after doing some hard sprints--a sign that maybe I'm getting some stamina back. By the time I finished paddling my wrist seemed to feel somewhat better, so maybe it just needed some exercise to loosen it up.
Wednesday morning I did a 75-minute bike ride. I went out the Greater Memphis Greenline to its junction with the Wolf River Greenway, and then rode down the Greenway to where it makes a loop just south of where it passes under Walnut Grove Road. I traversed the loop and retraced my path back home. I felt like I'd lost a bit of fitness on the bike too, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so when I had almost nothing left in my legs. At least there's plenty of time to get that back.
How is the Mississippi River doing these days? Well, in a post several weeks ago I said that the catastrophic floodwaters in the North Carolina mountains "might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row." And might is the key word here. The lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded is -12.04 feet on October 17 of last year. This fall the level had been below -10 feet before the floodwaters brought it up to about 6.5 feet a little over two weeks ago. That's almost a 17-foot rise, coming mostly from a small area in North Carolina. Now that surge of water has moved through, and the level is back down below -8 feet. By the time I got down to the river on Friday my dock was starting to run aground:
The current forecast has the level holding steady for the next couple of weeks, and the hope is that it will stay above super-low levels until the wetter season settles into the Midwest. "Super-low" water makes things tough for the barge-shipping industry, and its struggles can eventually ripple through the greater economy; it also causes damage to our marinas and other infrastructure that local river users depend on.
The weather has been just plain gorgeous lately, with plenty of sunshine. We had our first cool spell of the season in the middle of last week, with the temperature just barely reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. But it's warming back up now and we're expected to have highs in the 80s for the next week.
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Yes, it's "photos" plural this week because I've got a number of them to share.
The photo above, a screen-grab from WVLT-Knoxville footage, shows Interstate 40 where the eastbound lanes collapsed into the Pigeon River. The North Carolina Department of Transportation is currently saying that this part of I-40 will be closed until September 2025. I won't be surprised if that date gets pushed back as time goes on.
I understand that this destruction is located at about Mile 4 in North Carolina. The putin for the main dam-controlled section of the Pigeon is right at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line. So that means this damage is about four miles upstream of that putin.
Back in the mid-1990s several slalom races were held on the Pigeon right at the state line, including an installment of the old Champion International Whitewater Series in 1996. I shot this photo of the C2 team of David Hepp and Barry Kennon in that race. That's David in the stern and Barry in the bow:
I competed in that race too, and I've also run the section of the Pigeon from the state line to Hartford, Tennessee, a number of times. In this photo, taken by Mike Davis in 1993, I'm on a camp trip paddling with a camper named Billy Treadway:
On another Pigeon run, I'm in my old Gyramax C1 practicing my roll:
Another river that flooded last week was the French Broad. The French Broad has its headwaters in the vicinity of Rosman, North Carolina, and flows north through Asheville; it crosses the state line into Tennessee north of where the Pigeon does. Communities along the French Broad that received significant damage include the towns of Hot Springs, Marshall, and Asheville, and the Biltmore Estate just outside Asheville. Rion Smith took this photo of me during a 1992 trip on the French Broad where it flows by the Biltmore Estate. I'm putting on the sort of stern expression that befits such an important man as the head of a summer camp canoeing program:
In the summer of 1994, Clay Barbee shot this photo of me as I tried to get enders in Frank Bell's Rapid. This rapid is on the French Broad a couple of miles upstream of Hot Springs:
A couple of miles above Frank Bell's Rapid, Big Laurel Creek flows into the French Broad. My friend Amelia drove by the putin for Big Laurel last week, and she told me it didn't look like it got quite the amount of flooding that the French Broad did. Here's a shot of me running Stairsteps rapid on Big Laurel in the spring of 1994. Alfred Thompson took the photo:
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I decided to go back to the doctor on Wednesday because of both the injury to my chest area and my continued coughing and chest congestion. My regular doctor is out of the office on leave right now, so I've been seeing other doctors in the practice. The one I saw Wednesday was upbeat about my coughing situation, saying he thought it should run its course in a few more days. He ordered a chest X-ray to determine whether something's broken in my ribcage/sternum area. My doctor's office has its own X-ray lab, so getting an X-ray is usually a quick and simple process there. Unfortunately, the office's in-house X-ray technician had left for the day (even though it wasn't even noon yet), so the doctor had to send me up the street to the minor emergency diagnostic center that's owned by the same corporation that owns his practice. When I got there I found myself in line behind a couple of people, so I ended up sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour. Finally they got me in and out of the lab, and so all that was left was for them to send the image back to the doctor I had seen, and for him to call me to discuss the results.
Thursday came and went with no call from the doctor. So Friday morning I called his office, and when I got their voice mail I left a message asking them to remind him that he owed me a call. By mid afternoon Friday I hadn't heard a word, so I called again and got a person on the phone this time. The person told me that because it was after 3 PM, the doctor would most likely not call me until Monday.
And so I'm pretty angry with my doctor's office right now. The nicest thing I can say about this doctor is that he's not the first I've met for whom customer service is not a high priority. The upshot is that I'm refraining from paddling this weekend because I still don't know if something is broken in my chest area. It's frustrating, but maybe it's not the worst thing for me at this moment. Seeing as how I'm still not entirely recovered from that illness I had, maybe I just need to chill out for a few more days and give my body a chance to get right again.
My friend Amelia, with whom I paddled up at the Gauley last month, paid me a visit Thursday because she was in this area as part of a job. The main reason I bring this up is that she lives in east Tennessee and works for one of the rafting companies on the Pigeon River, one of the rivers that flooded catastrophically a week ago, and she shared some first-hand information on what's happening over there. Her raft company is located on the bank of the Pigeon in the town of Hartford, pretty much all of which was badly flooded. Flood-driven debris knocked a hole in a wall of her company's building, and a lot of the gear was washed away. The whole place was filled with mud, and the building was destabilized and will need structural repair. The good news, said Amelia, is that the entire community--neighbors, church groups, raft guides, everybody--came out and started helping one another as soon as the floodwaters had receded. She said it took just a few hours to get all the mud scraped out of the building, and the company even recovered some of its rafts from a little ways downstream.
Hartford is just one of the towns that experienced major flooding. A few towns were all but washed off the map. If I'm interpreting what I've seen in photos correctly, the entire business district of Chimney Rock collapsed into the Rocky Broad River, and many buildings in the town of Marshall were completely destroyed by the flooding French Broad. The common thread in every town that got flooded appears to be mud: a thick layer of mud contaminated with a whole cocktail of pollutants including petroleum products and raw sewage. Every street must be scraped of that stuff to be passable for cars like my little Toyota Corolla.
Water and electricity are out all over the region, and it's going to take a long time to get them up and running again because the roads must be rebuilt/repaired before the utility trucks can get in to replace damaged lines.
So it's a mess over there. I'm grateful for all the organizations, from FEMA to local governments to nonprofits to individuals with skills and equipment, who are over there helping with the cleanup. If you can't offer help in person, I hope you'll consider donating some money as long as you're smart about it. So far I've donated to several people or entities who are known to me first- or second-hand.
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