Jacqueline Maloney

We in the South Toe Valley, at the foot of the Black Mountains in Southern Appalachia, are together changed. And, exhausted, day-by-day, we are learning how to be with uncertainty, the breakdown of our expectations and routines, and with more needs around us than can be addressed in a day or a year. We’re learning about our individual capacities and our relationships with neighbors and  water. Days and weeks after Helene came through and took away our bridges, bored beneath our roads, swept houses downstream, drowned, buried or stranded us, toppled powerlines, carved away entire faces of mountainsides, shut off our internet and grid-power, erased schedules and deadlines and business-as-usual, most of us are still showing up to help some neighbor or  local loved-one reclaim or repair some essential part of their world. 

 

Everyone’s everyone is still not yet accounted for. Time is warped and our days are strange unruly things. We’re still understanding  layers of repercussions, still identifying our needs. There’s a collective worry that once we finally come out of the adrenaline and shock to rest and digest what took place, and take the necessary time to understand what support to even ask for, the news cycle will be over and the offers of support will be gone. 

 

The community around me pulled together immediately the morning of the flooding. Across every imaginable social division, we took care of each other, shared  our last available resources and kept each other dry and fed. Those whose houses were dry went to help those whose weren’t. My landmates and I are off-grid, and became a small hub of solar-powered freezers and relative food security (a shiitake flush on our logs like we’d never seen, kale growing in our garden, frozen meat stores from hunting and husbandry). Neighbors with heavy equipment immediately went to work clearing an old roadbed that runs along the creek. They opened access to one of the few remaining bridges so we could get out to the main road. Those without machines cleared culverts and ditches with shovels and buckets. We compiled information and hearsay any time we crossed paths. Nobody passed someone without stopping to talk, to find out what they needed, to share news. 

 

Did you ever pour water over an anthill? I did, in my parents’ driveway when I was a child. The colony streams out in seeming chaos at first, and then individuals start facing each other, touching antennae, and then they turn and face someone else. As my partner said, running with the metaphor, “Yeah, and you hardly have any clue about what they’re up to until one ant turns away from a conversation and descends back into the hole, then another one emerges driving an excavator.”  

 

Still, weeks into this, you can’t walk more than a few yards without someone stopping on a 4-wheeler or AWD truck to see if you need a ride up the road to where the nearest chasm  opened. And when you get to the chasm, you either scramble down off asphalt lips and into a ruckle of boulders, testing them with a little weight first to see if they’re done tumbling,, or you descend a ladder from road to riverbank and ascend another one up to the bridge that’s now an island above the river.  Or, you just look at the raging water, facing someone looking at you from the bank opposite, unable to hear each other over the sound of the flood. 

 

The water level dropped in the creeks first, and now we can get across in some places. The river, however, takes days to calm into its newly gouged and widened channel. Where trees and plants recently softened and overhung the riverbanks, now boulders and cobble and huge tree trunks and root balls and overturned cars and pieces of houses and plenty of plastic trash lay bleaching and exposed to the autumn sun. I still see the kingfisher, the heron, the songbirds. But I don’t see fish rising in the slanting afternoon light. I don’t see the hatches of caddis or mayfly they loved to eat. I find fish in some places on the road, on the forest path, in the garden. 

 

I stopped trusting the language of road signs, of the painted lines, days ago. Driving happens slowly, slowly, slowly, wherever there is road, in either lane, away from cuts and steep drops, hugging mountainsides, even on blind curves, dodging powerlines that are held up just overhead, or even too low to drive under, by a parked and abandoned tractor, or by a forked dead tree balanced vertically there, or a house that is on its side and halfway into the street. We drive between plowed banks of river silt carved, pushed, piled on either shoulder by bulldozers like it is a snow day in Maine in December in the mid-nineties. We drive holding your breath over rubble packed into deep gaps by your neighbors, hoping it held, hoping it didn’t choose this moment to settle anew.. There are no longer people along the river road mowing their lawns on Saturday, because their lawns are now beaches. We do see clothes, furniture, and all manner of objects hung and stacked in the yard drying in the sun. 

 

We fall asleep to the rasping of cicadas and generators.

 

I learned quickly that I don’t want to live across the river from my people. I learned that it’s impossible to live on the same side of the river as everyone I love. I learned that in a crisis, my people are the first people I see when I leave my house, no matter who they vote for. Even when I still can’t get to a phone to call my partner to see if he’s alive, if the water took his house. (Which he is—which it did.) 

 

We see each other being beautiful in all this. People climbing trees where flotsam is caught eight feet up in the lower branches to rescue stranded hellbenders. Beloved farmers rolling down the dirt road on their tractor, the bucket loaded with flood-spared produce to give away. Another man giving his wife a ride up the steep driveway in the bucket of his tractor. Twenty reclusive friars in their cassocks chainsawing a road clear. Miss Pat and Miss Linda, sisters living together in their seventies, at the edge of their driveway giving away cut dahlias from their garden to passers-by. ATVs loaded up with bands of local teens zooming around to pitch in with the digging, the transport of news, the deliveries of supplies. 

 

We know how to care for each other, this species. The extraordinary capacity to anticipate and meet each other’s needs lives in our marrow. The chainsawing, the lifting of stones and branches and children, the walking up and down hills in muck boots all day, the staying upright in fast currents, the hauling of water, the scrubbing and wringing of silted laundry, stooped over creek or bathtub, the yanking of the generator cable until the machine sputters awake, the anxiety in our jaws and bellies and foreheads and fists and chests…it is all taking its toll on our bodies and our minds. Everyone I know needs a massage now, needs physical therapy, needs to tell their story to someone who will hold it tenderly, needs to sleep more than they are sleeping and eat more than they are eating. 

 

Most people I know don’t have a job for a while yet, or won’t have the same job again. Their place of employment may have washed away with the flood, or their commute may now be impossible, or their body is no longer able to perform the same tasks. Some are already back at work, probing into a strange normalcy that certainly feels, and is, surreal. People hike to the internet and sift through a bureaucratic tangle to try to find disaster relief from FEMA grants, unemployment, gofundmes, tax extension extensions, and all the other money that is rumored to be in circulation. We get texts from the states to our phones, that come in with the inundations from concerned loved ones when we have found the rare bar of cell service, urging us to apply soon, naming the politicians who are thinking of our need.

 

Elections are coming. I hear from one neighbor that FEMA doesn’t have much money left for us because of Mexican immigrants. I hear from another that we’d have more help if the government hadn’t funded Israel’s genocide. So, business as usual in some ways,  the worst ways. People look more harrowed to me as they leave a pop-up internet hub than they do pulling flood-soaked furniture from a neighbor’s house. I wonder: will we learn? Now that we’ve seen how the mud downstream is burning through nitrile gloves, will we rebuild the plastic plant on the bank of the river? Now that an entire town is gone, will we force the river up behind another dam where the old one stood? Will we still build our roads out of asphalt, our bridges of concrete, our infrastructure big and brittle, as if water will one day decide to respect them, as if floods aren’t worsened by impermeable surfaces, as if five-thousand-year floods aren’t now expected every few seasons? Will we forget about our neighbors once the crisis has passed? Will we decide to make less trash, now that we all see that no one has a clue what to do with it all when we can’t get to the dump? Will we remember how good it felt to leave our service-less phones at home for days? Will we continue to casually board airplanes when we know their exhaust amplifies hurricanes? I fully expect more catastrophic weather for the rest of my life.  I will remember where the land can become river, waterfall, and lake. I will find out what to plant in those places to slow and direct the current, to filter the silt and the toxins once the flood has passed. I will learn more about berms and swales and meanders by watching, by making small changes in my landscape, and watching some more. I will investigate how the trout, the freshwater mussels and the crawfish have navigated this storm. I will take cues from them. 

 

My news is that my house is dry and still standing in its place near the spring. I need to find a water test for the springbox. My artist studio was spared, though water ran under its crawlspace and I need to acquire a dehumidifier to run in there for the time being. I will continue to live off-grid. I will have to navigate my holiday art-selling season entirely online, since all my in-person events are now impossible. The photographer who was to digitize my watercolor paintings for the 2025 Beheld calendar was supposed to come the morning the bridges were washed downstream. I will be leaving the region with the paintings in my car to find someone else to photograph them, and then I will send the calendar to print. 

 

The theme of next year’s calendar is rest, care, and belonging. The motif is water. While I was painting it, I was having dreams of tsunamis, of silt-filled houses, of doors off their hinges, of big winds, of post-flood and post-fire landscapes, of a python as long as the mountains I live beneath meandering like a river, of small animals clinging to my throat, head, and chest. I finished the last of the twelve paintings the night it started raining here, before the winds picked up, and I walked home from my studio in the dark.  I am collecting donations through my Venmo account to fund the planting of trees in the places the land slid away in this valley. And to fund the remediation of a beloved willow-ringed pond near my home, which is now filled with floodwater, silt, and trash. My venmo handle is @Jacqueline-Maloney-Art (and the last four digits of my phone number are 0179) if you’d like to contribute to the forest and water here. I’ll put the money away until it’s tree-planting time in the spring, until I’ve researched and listened for the needs of the pond.