Times are tough for a part of the world that's near and dear to me. The mountains of western North Carolina are where I fell in love with paddlesports at summer camp some 43 years ago, and were also home to a crafts school (no longer in operation since the retirement of its director) that was the foundation of my development as a woodworker. That region was positively walloped late last week by Hurricane Helene, which had already perpetrated significant damage as it moved north through Florida and Georgia.
Central characters in the story were rivers I have spent untold hours paddling and exploring: the French Broad, the Green, the Pigeon, the Tuckasegee, the Chattooga, and the Nolichucky, along with various tributary creeks. Floodwaters did horrific damage to familiar towns like Asheville, Marshall, Hot Springs, Erwin, Chimney Rock, Bryson City, Hartford, Boone, and Greeneville.
The storm exposed just how tenuous the access to many of those communities can be. If a street is closed here in my grid-patterned city, all you have to do is go around the block to get to a house on that street. That's not how it works in the narrow valleys and hollers of the Appalachians, where there's typically just one road in. In some cases bridges or culverts were washed out, leaving entire communities utterly isolated. Right now even the big city of Asheville is all but impossible to drive to because all of the major interstates and U.S. highways suffered damage. I learned just this morning that a friend of mine managed to drive from Asheville to her home near Gatlinburg via a convoluted network of state roads in Madison County (NC) and Greene County (TN), probably taking hours longer than normal.
I expect my camp will have limited choices on where it can take canoe trips next summer. As of now I know that at least two of its bread-and-butter rivers, the Green and the Pigeon, have suffered major damage to their access roads that will probably take many months to repair. I'm just glad this catastrophe took place early in the camp's offseason; if it had happened in, say, April or May, the camp might have had to cancel its summer sessions because the region's infrastructure, on which it relies for everything from transporting campers to bringing in food and other goods and services, was in ruins.
If there's a bright side to this whole episode, it's that it might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row. Just a week ago the river was more than ten feet below zero on the Memphis gauge; the record low of -12.04 feet was set just a year ago. Since then the water has come up to three and a half feet above zero, and is predicted to keep rising to a little over six feet by late this week. That's not really a high level at all, but it's high enough that the commercial shipping companies can operate comfortably, and that's the main reason those record-low levels have made the national news for the last couple of years.
And yes, much of that water is coming from western North Carolina. The French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers all flow into east Tennessee and eventually form the Tennessee River. The Tuckasegee, meanwhile, is a tributary of the Little Tennessee, which also flows across the state line and feeds into the Tennessee. The Tennessee, of course, flows past Knoxville and Chattanooga, dips down into northern Alabama and Mississippi, re-enters Tennessee and flows northward into Kentucky, and finally confluences with the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi a short while later at Cairo, Illinois. So my river right here at Memphis includes water from some of those rivers I grew to love as a camper in North Carolina.
Speaking of that river here at Memphis... this morning I went down to the riverfront to paddle my surfski for the first time in almost a month. If you've been following this blog lately, then you know that during that month I made a trip to the Gauley River, then came home and got sick for a while, then did my annual demonstration at the crafts fair here. I definitely wasn't planning a serious training session today: as much as anything, I just wanted to check on my boat and make sure all was well down at the dock. The truth is that my physical health is not entirely back to normal. I don't really feel sick anymore, but I've got a lot of chest congestion and I'm having some fairly frequent coughing fits. And there's still some swelling in that injured area of my chest (courtesy of my tablesaw).
Once I was in the boat this morning, I started out gingerly, and the session ended up being even briefer than I'd planned. There was discomfort and stuff moving around in my chest--whether there are actual broken bones in there, or just soft tissue moving weirdly, I'm not sure. I might have to make another trip to my doctor, especially if this coughing still hasn't run its course in another day or two. I expect she'll want to take an X-ray, both to look for broken ribs/sternum and to gain some insight into what the deal is with all this coughing.
So I was in the boat for just 20 minutes today. I ended up doing a litter pick-up, by way of keeping the paddling intensity low. And there was plenty of litter out there in the harbor, both because of the rising water level and because Hurricane Helene sent a good bit of rain to this region, too. There was much more trash than I could ever fit into my surfski's footwell, so I focused on aluminum cans, which seem to be the most viably recyclable items these days. I collected a bucketful, and that didn't make even the slightest noticeable dent in the floating trash, but at least I can say I'm a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.
Whether I get back in the boat anytime soon remains to be seen. If in fact something is broken, I'll have to take some more weeks off to let it heal. I hope to do some bike riding and other general-fitness activity to tide myself over in the meantime.
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