Sherri Wheeler-Hughes couldn’t go home. Hurricane Helene had flooded her apartment in Old Fort, North Carolina, filling it with mud and mold. For several weeks, she had been bouncing between the homeless shelter and staying with friends.
At God’s Way Baptist Church in Swannanoa, fifty-one-year-old Wheeler-Hughes co-founded the van ministry in 2007 to help young people from troubled homes. She knew about the struggle: She had overcome addiction, and her son had been hit and killed by a train. She doesn’t believe in climate change, but she believes that the Mexican immigrants in town are Appalachians, too, and that their lives matter. Others were calling them “illegals” and didn’t want to help them. “I don’t care two shits,” she thought. “They’re still from Swannanoa. They will get help.”
Wheeler-Hughes was running on rage and a sense of moral clarity. The church’s sanctuary was piled wall-to-wall with donations. Like many Appalachians, she was resourceful and had been repurposing things all her life. So Wheeler-Hughes and her seventy-three-year-old aunt, Juanita Brown (better known as Punky), found a Spanish interpreter, pulled the seats out of the church van, filled it with supplies, and drove out to trailer parks to find them. Their needs were great, but Wheeler-Hughes was moved by the fact that many just wanted things that made them feel normal for a moment, like sandwich meat or ice cream.
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Juanita Brown unloads food in a mobile home park in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on October 10, 2024.
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Cynthia Cragg, with her back to the camera, reunites with her aunt Juanita Brown—known affectionately as Punky—and her aunt Sherri Wheeler-Hughes, left, near a mobile home park destroyed by Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on October 10, 2024.
Hurricane Helene was a climate-change-fueled superstorm that held record moisture from hotter-than-normal water in the Gulf of Mexico. In about seventy-two hours, it dropped three to five times the average September rainfall over Western North Carolina, according to The Washington Post.In Swannanoa, entire neighborhoods were reduced to splinters and mud slicks. Black Hawk helicopters thumped overhead. Cellphones screamed with emergency alerts. Cars and homes where people and their pets were rescued—and some where others died—were marked with the letter “X” in spray paint. Displaced locals lived at the gas station on the main drag in tents draped with American flags. Even black bear mothers and their cubs roamed as refugees, their habitats damaged by Helene.
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Justice Treadway retrieves his friend Bonnie O’Neil’s belongings from her parents’ destroyed mobile home in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on October 3, 2024.
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Flooding from Hurricane Helene smashed cars and left a trail of mud and debris in a holler on Flat Creek south of Asheville, North Carolina, on November 1, 2024.
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Katie Case had lived above Mal’s, a bar in downtown Marshall, North Carolina, while she and her husband renovated a house nearby. They evacuated before Hurricane Helene and came home to a mess of fine silty mud that had dried to dust. Here she wears a respirator to help clean up a local business, on October 9, 2024.
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Specialist Bodie Dubos, left, and Private Cesar Lopez from the 101st Airborne Division dump excavated mud from the Madison County Arts Council basement into a wheelbarrow in Marshall, North Carolina, on October 9, 2024.
Twenty miles away in a holler on Flat Creek, the trees were October red and gold. The creek had swelled into a torrent that swept away the gravel roads, and tumbled and flattened cars. A mobile home was wrapped around a tree. The green meadow was gone, reduced to a jagged red-clay Martian landscape of smoldering debris piles, tree limbs, and twisted metal. Everything was caked in dust from the creek’s muddy baptism. Homes that many worked their entire lives to build were gone in an instant. Just down the road in Craigtown, eleven people from the same family were buried alive or drowned. Over the hill, Gerren Creek looked like a cratered war zone.
This destruction was repeated across a hundred hollers.
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Martha Calderon in October 2024. Her Swannanoa, North Carolina, home was severely damaged by flooding from Hurricane Helene. Calderon says she hopes that whoever is elected President will do more to help Latinx people like her and her family.
But in the weeks between Helene and the presidential election, political differences evaporated. Only the basics mattered—Wheeler-Hughes in Swannanoa didn’t have a place to live; Martha Calderón from Mexico, like many others, didn’t have power; nobody in Buncombe County could drink the water. In the first weeks, liberals and conservatives alike feared the rescue workers would not reach them. Roads were washed out by mudslides, hampering relief efforts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could only do so much, and rampant disinformation about FEMA’s role and conditions placed on basic relief payments left many hesitant to sign up for assistance. Cell and Internet service were scant. Communities were cut off from each other and from vital information. Aid was a trickle. Boone-based Samaritan’s Purse, an international humanitarian aid organization led by Franklin Graham, son of Christian evangelist Billy Graham, provided relief. The National Guard and active-duty Army units were quick to the scene. The American Red Cross showed up eventually.
But when the rain stopped, neighbors turned to neighbors and found one another in the towns and tiny hollers to organize and rebuild largely on their own. New relationships based on need and care formed. Many expressed that they were eager to recover but didn’t want to return to the old “normal.”
In Asheville, Claire Siegel and Sydney O’Haire and their friends started a mutual aid fund, which they shared on social media. In the first forty-eight hours, they raised about $5,000 from an existing WhatsApp group they had used to coordinate kayaking and DJing. Siegel was in Richmond, Virginia, when Helene hit, so she packed a van with supplies and headed back to Asheville. O’Haire was in Florida and grabbed as many supplies as they could. They centralized their supply headquarters on O’Haire’s porch in the historically Black Burton Street neighborhood. O’Haire is a river person, and knows how to live off the grid, so they used their existing skills to help folks survive without power and water. Their WhatsApp group, “828 is Great,” brought more than $10,000 worth of supplies into Asheville, and helped distribute aid door-to-door in their neighborhood and in nearby towns. Siegel is a nurse, so she and O’Haire helped set up a medical station, and performed targeted door-to-door wellness and medical checks.
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Claire Siegel at the mutual aid station on her friend Sydney O’Haire’s porch in Asheville, North Carolina, on November 5, 2024. After Hurricane Helene, O’Haire, Siegel, and dozens of their friends used a WhatsApp group to start a mutual aid fund and raised thousands of dollars for recovery efforts in Western North Carolina.
Siegel is not originally from Appalachia, but she quickly realized that mutual aid is “deeply Appalachian” in a rural region where taking care of your neighbors is part of the culture.
She says she learned from their WhatsApp group—which ballooned from sixty people to more than 150—that what matters most is not how much stuff you have but what kind of networked community you are in already. Diversity of ideas and skills matter; politics don’t. You don’t have to like or get along with everyone in your community.
“Helene was a geological event,” O’Haire says. “It moved boulders that haven’t moved in thousands of years. It reshaped the rivers. Now they are all polluted. Many of the hiking trails and quintessential Asheville things are gone.”
The first week felt like a month. Strangers bonded quickly, and said “I love you” to one another when they parted. O’Haire always felt a close kinship with their queer transgender community, but it quickly expanded to include anyone and everyone in Appalachia.
“It’s no longer us versus them; it’s all of us versus Mother Nature,” they say.
“It takes radical anarchists, just as much as it takes a good ol’ boy up the road who knows how to drive a bulldozer, and when those people are working together, that’s really powerful.” Siegel says.
“It turns out climate resilience is just each other,” she adds.
Climate experts agree. Interdependence is better than independence. Building intentional communities and sharing resources and mutual aid with neighbors is a crucial foundation for thriving in the age of climate change. Christine Nieves is a Puerto Rican organizer and climate thinker who survived Hurricane Maria in 2017. In the book of essays, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, she writes:
“When everything collapses, the life-saving infrastructure is our knowledge of one another’s skills, our trust of one another, our capacity to forgive our neighbor, work with our neighbor, and mobilize . . . . When disasters happen, the person right in front of you is your best chance at survival. That’s when we understood: The times we will be facing are going to require us to recognize that the most important thing around us is community.”
Community can be broad, and include people who live far away but who can organize resources and show up to help. Wheeler-Hughes says those volunteers who drove from out of town or out of state on their own have been crucial to the ongoing recovery.
People like Cindi Gardner, her husband Lee, and their grandchildren from Durham drove up in three 18-wheelers full of supplies. In Weaverville, National Guard Sergeant Rachel Bigbee helped unload their pallets, which locals sorted into kits in a middle school parking lot.
In Marshall, the water from the French Broad River had risen to twenty-seven feet. In the dark, flooded basement of the Madison County Arts Council, young soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, shoveled mud that resembled cake frosting into buckets, and passed them along a human chain into the daylight, where Private Cesar Lopez and others dumped them into wheelbarrows.
Mason Jarr of St. Augustine, Florida, stood on Main Street in a Tyvek biohazard suit covered in mud, which many worried was filled with toxic chemicals. He had evacuated from Hurricane Milton, coming to check on his summer home in Marshall, where he got involved in cleaning up after Helene.
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Mike Precord drove down from West Branch, Michigan, with a trailer loaded with supplies including winter clothing, water, pet supplies, and hay to feed local livestock in need after Hurricane Helene. “I can’t be up here [in Michigan] with them people [in North Carolina] in that bad of shape. My mind won’t let this happen,” Precord says. Precord had already been in North Carolina for twenty-three days when this photo was taken in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on November 5, 2024.
Back in Swannanoa, Mike Precord, sixty-one, had driven from West Branch, Michigan, and was living in a camper behind God’s Way Baptist Church. Precord pumps cow manure onto farmland as fertilizer for a living. His friends call him “Poopin’ Mike.” He first learned about the destruction in North Carolina via social media. So he hauled a flat trailer stacked with supplies and hay bales 870 miles to Appalachia. Each day at sunrise, he fired up his giant pickup truck and struck out into the hills to drop off hay at farms with starving livestock. One woman on a mountaintop had four horses and only four bales left so he gave her thirty-six more to last through the winter.
Precord couldn’t believe the scale of the destruction. He met elderly residents who couldn’t get down their driveways, and a young couple with a newborn baby and no power or roof. He was angered by the disinformation that had spread. He says people back in Michigan told him the social media photos of Helene’s destruction weren’t real, that it couldn’t be that bad down there.
“The fuck it is, I told them,” Precord says.
He was sick of politics and was moved by the way folks came together after Helene. The old normal felt “vicious.” He didn’t want to go back.
O’Haire agrees. They hope the spirit lasts, and they plan to keep up their mutual aid efforts: “Maybe we will look back on [Helene] a few years from now, as tragic as it was, realize it forced us to create a new way of living that we would have never created otherwise.”
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Sherri Wheeler-Hughes in her new RV home in Old Fort, North Carolina, on November 4, 2024.
During the last weeks of October, Wheeler-Hughes was struck by grief. She had been going and going for weeks. She wanted to return to work, to feel normal again. Mostly, she needed a place to go where she didn’t have to be brave all the time. A family from Texas donated a recreational vehicle to the church, and the church gave it to Wheeler-Hughes. The RV was parked down a wooded dirt road in Old Fort so she could have a tiny holler to herself.
“I’ve never owned my own place before,” she says, staring at the RV for the first time. It had a coffee maker and a door she could close.
Wheeler-Hughes sat down on the steps and put her head in her hands in disbelief. She lit a cigarette and took a drag. Tears streamed down her cheek.
She was finally home.