OCT 10, 2024 | FEATURES | By Lilly Asano
Before Colorado, there was the Appalachian Mountains. They’re the oldest mountains in the world, standing for 480 million years, time-smoothing once towering peaks. They stood before me and will stand long after I’m gone. They don’t need me. They’ve never needed me.
Until now.
I spent the end of my childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains, buried in the ancient mountains. In 2015, my parents purchased a cabin 45 minutes east of Boone, North Carolina, in Peoria, a small village on the Carolina-Tennessee border. When it wasn’t rented out, my sister and I roamed miles of pastures, woods, and gravel roads, making the small valley our own. We’d sled down hills our neighbors let us use, hike to the next ridge or down to the creekbed in the woods, and swim in the Watauga River in the summer.
We were young enough that our imagination filled the mountains with magic, and a little valley in North Carolina seemed to belong to only us. No one knew those roads, rocks, or porch swings like we did. Those mountains were my first love, and they loved me back.
We moved to our cabin in the spring of 2020, desperate to get out of our tight neighborhood and into our own space. We could walk for miles without seeing someone else, and the valley became even more our own. I was freshly 16, my sister was 14 and the mountains were changing for us. I longed to be home, finishing my freshman year of high school with my friends. I was homesick for our small rental house and homesick for my hometown.
My parents sold the cabin in July 2020, but I continued to find myself in the Blue Ridge. I started working at my sleep-away camp as a counselor a year later, spending almost eight weeks a summer on a mountaintop. I traveled to Asheville several times a year, but the mountains I loved felt explored and known. The South was too small, and I yearned for bigger mountains and unfamiliar roads.
Two weeks ago, I called my best friend while in line for Dutch Bros. We covered our usual topics and the details of our lives apart before switching to our weekend plans when Emma asked if I thought she should go home or stay in Athens, Ga. Her classes had been canceled for Thursday and Friday due to the incoming Hurricane Helene, and the University of Georgia was urging students to seek safety or go home.
We talked for an hour and by the time we’d hung up, the severity of the incoming storm had lodged a pit in my stomach. As a North Carolinian, I’ve experienced outer bands of hurricanes, flooding and dangerous rain. In high school, our administrators had sent us home early when hurricanes had approached, nervous about letting new drivers navigate the storms by themselves. But this, this felt different.
On Thursday, Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene barreled through western North Carolina, including Boone and our old valley. Power across the state went down, and my parents sent videos of the rain pooling at the base of our driveway.
The next morning, I woke up to photos of devastating damage in the Blue Ridge and Appalachians. Complete towns were underwater and washed away. Helene dropped 42 trillion gallons of water on the Southeast, enough to drain California’s Lake Tahoe, and broke records of flooding across the region, according to Protect Our Winters.
Thousands of people were missing or unaccounted for, and the hurricane’s death toll was steadily rising. I felt helpless looking through photos as major news outlets moved into the places I’d called home. My friends at Appalachian State University in Boone had lost their apartments, cars and belongings, and classes were canceled through Oct. 16. Our neighbors were without power, and some had suffered catastrophic damage.
My last stop as I head west, regardless of my final destination, in North Carolina is a little cafe in Asheville called Well-Bred Bakery. It’s my marker of home. After 20 hours of driving from Colorado, it’s my first stop back in North Carolina and my last stop as I head back to school.
When I saw a photo of Biltmore Village, where my beloved Well-Bred was, the 1,600 miles between Colorado College and home sunk into me. Chunks of major highways, including I40, were washed away from mudslides and flooding. The distance felt stark and confining. There was no way home.
Last week, my dad announced on our family group chat that he would spend the weekend in Boone, assisting with relief and supply distribution efforts in our old mountain community. He took to social media, asking for help gathering various materials. He traveled up to our old valley and places dear to our heart, running into dispatched Marines, Army, and National Guard relief teams.
He shared with us that the most complex parts of relief efforts were miscommunication and the scale of destruction. Residents struggled to accept help, others were lost in knowing where to start, and even his work was the tip of the iceberg.
When I moved to Colorado College last August, I was confident I would find my way in the Rocky Mountains, but they felt intimidating compared to my beloved Blue Ridge. I’ve felt lost in the towering, rocky mountains and have been homesick for the mountains at home but homesick for the mountains as they existed.
Now, Western North Carolina faces catastrophic losses of life, land, resources, and soul. According to Southern Living, I40’s North Carolina-Tennessee border, my way into my beloved home state, is predicted to be closed through 2025. The rural parts of the state, which historically trend under the state’s average income levels, face impossible decisions on what to rebuild and leave behind.
Carolina is in my mind. Now and always.