The Days After Tomorrow
I love disaster movies— Twister is my favorite for many reasons but mostly because if someone asked me what being bisexual was like I’d just say have you seen Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in the movie Twister? It’s like that. Sexy storm chasers aside, I’ve wanted to chase tornados since I was little. The second I saw lighting or heard thunder or saw a dark cloud, I’d be running out the door, staring at the sky to see what happened next. I still do this. In the trailer I lived in when I was around the age of ten, I’d sit on the side “porch” and watch the lighting over the surrounding farms until my mom yelled at me to come inside.
Other favorites include: The Day After Tomorrow because they survive due to a gorgeous fireplace and the burning of books?! Ok! Dante’s Peak (also lots of my specific bisexual energy, hello Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton!). In this movie grandma dies on her mountain because she refuses to leave it. Heartbreaking. Familiar. Relatable. Precedent.
I’ve had it in my mind what I would write about next; in many ways the opposite of what this will be. But then the effects of a hurricane hit my home, and this writing arrived via my notes app during a power outage.
I should know by now to have no expectations.
This is not my first natural disaster. Some others of note: a hurricane in Florida with cousin where we drank in the pool until the last possible second, a massive snowstorm with my ex-wife where we spent two days digging out our cars and had a snow block party with our neighbors, the snowstorm when I was a kid, and the snow reached the top of the door. I’ve hunkered down in more basements during a tornado warning than seems humanely possible. In this very state, my beloved North Carolina, the first time I visited on my own, I had to go to my Airbnb’s host’s house twice for a tornado warning.
But I have never been alone, watching solid trees fall like toothpicks, knowing they probably won’t land on my home, but they’ll affect my home, nonetheless. I have never known living in a town that was in a complete shutdown. I haven’t watched my neighbors an hour away, see their entire town obliterated.
My connection with the world outside my apartment is sporadic; a check in text, a post about a business closing, my gym parking lot is under water and a car sits there, the top of it visible like it’s a forgotten bath toy. Every few hours I watch my favorite businesses downtown announce they are closing for the day and my heart constricts as they say “we’re so sorry but…”
They don’t know what I know, which is—I have a limited amount of time here and we’re missing out on time together. I feel an irresistible urge to hug buildings and all their occupants.
I pass the time with my camping lantern, drinking whiskey and reading for as long as I can. I do not sleep well.
This may be controversial to say but humans love the attention of a disaster. We want to make Facebook posts telling you about our impending doom. We want to tell you we are “marked safe” two days later. There are people who exploit this to an unhealthy point, but most people do this to some degree. I’m writing an entire blog, so you listen to the plight of me experiencing a mostly emotional inconvenience during a storm that destroyed the lives of people around me. What does this say about us, this voyeurism, this need. In my most charitable opinion, it is that we all want to belong to something larger. We all want to be seen. Even and perhaps more so, when we are facing something that scares us.
On the flip side of this messy human coin, is the best of what we can be. In her book, A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit argues humanity is its most loving and kind during natural disasters. We do not ask who our neighbor voted for when they are drowning. With few exceptions, people step up. In big ways and small. The way my community has rallied this past week has made my heart swell. It is possible to have a broken heart that is also capable of loving even more, I have learned.
I have decided to travel about two hours North-East to a hotel. I am a displaced person, by choice mostly, although I have no power or water. I could stay at my apartment and brush my teeth using bottled water. I could shit in a bag and dispose of it in my dumpster. I could go days without showering. These are far better options than some people have. That I can reject these and sit in a hotel room with hot water and working plumbing is a privilege.
It is hard to know if this was the right decision. To not feel like I am abandoning my community and running away. I made the best decision with the information I had at the time. I feel incredibly fortunate I was able to make a decision at all.
I came back to Morganton after two days, my water and power restored much sooner than they initially thought. This was only true for a small slice of the areas around me. As of this writing, a week later, there are still people without power and water. I emptied my freezer and fridge, trying not to think about all the money I have lost, grateful my only loss is money. The usual sounds of my birds have been replaced with the constant whir of chain saws and helicopters flying overhead.
I want to honor all of the loss this area that I love so much has experienced, but I have to take breaks from watching all of the devastation. I need to be with people. So, on Tuesday, I did what I have done almost every Tuesday I’ve lived here. I went to Tapa’s Tuesday. I hugged my people. I was given my usual wine order without asking for it. I ate a delicious cucumber salad. I cried openly at the bar and my friend Lara slid a slice of an orange towards me and said, “Here Queen”. I see you, is what she was really saying. There has never been an orange slice more delicious.
All around me the conversations were a low murmur of the same “can you believe…how are you holding up…do you have water yet…it’s so so awful…” We all seem to be in some sort of collective daze.
My grocery store is in an area that was hit hardest with flooding, so I don’t even bother trying to find food there. I go to the specialty grocery store in town, where their freezers are roped off with signs that say “Unsafe”. I get lettuce, carrots, crackers, salad dressing and two apples. I will try again tomorrow.
I spend the rest of the week trying to support as many local businesses as I can. As soon as one opens up, I am buying their food or drinks. I make my favorite comfort food, Arroz Con Gandules (Puerto Rican Rice) for the community table at one of our breweries. When I drop off the food (and cookies of course), they tell me they are putting together To Go meals for a group in a harder hit area, there is a boy there with a broken leg. One of the volunteers said, “Are those homemade cookies?!” and I replied, “They are, and they are excellent” and we all laugh, which feels like a moment of sweet relief in a week where I cannot stop crying. I drop donations off at The Olive and Linda (one of the owners of The Olive) and I hug and start crying simultaneously. I come back later for a benefit concert, and we all stop what we’re doing to clap for the lineman on several electric company trucks when they drive by.
I grew up in a small town, but I have lived in big cities, a beach town and suburbia. There is nothing like living in a small town.
The thing that makes Morganton special, is that we are a town that always wants to be together. The same people are in the same place at the same time, every week. We have themes and events and are the very definition of community. I am sure a lot of people feel the same way about the place they live but everyone that has visited me here, has commented on this energy too. There is something here that makes you feel connected to it, even if you are just visiting. I am not going to write about this now (and honestly, that’s mostly because I am sitting at a brewery writing this and I have cried in public enough this week) but after a divorce and feeling unloved, I cannot imagine a better place for me to have landed on my feet.
Parts of my community had it bad, but we did not have it the worst. There are areas that are destroyed and will never be the same. If you’ve ever spent any time in Western North Carolina, you know it grips you. These mountains etch into your heart and never leave. I felt it the first time I visited nine years ago, I felt it the first time I sat on my friend’s old wrap around porch and I could see the mountains in the distance, I felt it the first time I visited Morganton and couldn’t wait to come back so I visited it again a few days later. I will never be the same person I was when I arrived, and I am grateful for it.
If you are able and want to donate to relief effort, please consider donating to the organizations below. And if you want to help my specific community in any way—there are Go Fund Mes and breweries trying to aid their employees and food banks that need replenishing—please reach out.
“The Place I Want to Get Back To” by Mary Oliver
The place I want to get back to
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.