My heart is breaking for my Hurricane Helene-ravaged North Carolina hometown
“'Helpless' is the word my friends and family have been using these past few days"
BY MONICA BIDDIX
GUEST COLUMNIST
I was born and raised in Marion, North Carolina. It’s a small, beautiful town with a population of around 10,000 people nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and located about 35 miles east of Asheville.
It’s home to Bigfoot and the annual Livermush Festival. It’s about an hour drive from Grandfather Mountain and Boone, North Carolina. There’s a historical marker on main street near the birthplace of legendary hall of fame basketball coach Roy Williams. Or at least it was there when I last visited two weeks ago. I haven’t a clue if it is still there.
I have a complicated relationship with my hometown. We don’t agree on a lot of things, and I left as soon as I could to attend college in Chapel Hill and rarely looked back. Despite our disagreements, my heart is breaking right now.
Just like Iowa, Charleston, Chapel Hill, Baltimore, and Sayulita, Marion is a part of me.
Just over two weeks ago, I ate dinner at a Marion restaurant that had about six feet of standing water inside of it on this past Saturday. In 1989, Marion was also in the path of Hurricane Hugo. It knocked over a tree in my parents’ yard. It wasn’t a big deal. It is not unusual for western North Carolina to be in the path of a hurricane’s bands, but we have never seen anything near the destruction of Helene’s magnitude ever. Marion is not a coastal community, and the nearest beach is over a four-hour drive away in South Carolina.
My parents live on a hill off Hankins Road above the Catawba River. Any time my father is asked to evacuate, including last Thursday, he tells them that if our house floods that half of the state would flood as well. Well, dad . . .
Because of my parents’ proximity to a river and the trees surrounding their home, I get anxious about storms. I called them last Thursday to check on things. I was told that the roads were fine and that nothing was out of the ordinary. I didn’t think much of it because again everything coming out of western North Carolina is unprecedented.
That was Thursday.
Then I woke up Friday morning. I texted my brother around 8:30 am and asked him about the weather. No response. I tried calling my parents’ house, and it went straight to a message from Verizon. I tried to text my cousin when I could not reach my brother. Again, no response.
By Friday afternoon, I started to get word from social media that things were catastrophic.
It is Asheville’s Katrina. People just think a bunch of hillbillies lost power for a few days. The death toll won’t be known for a while.
It is Asheville’s Katrina. People just think a bunch of hillbillies lost power for a few days. The death toll won’t be known for a while.
By Friday evening, I was incredibly worried as I still had not heard from anyone. Finally, my brother called me from his fiancé’s phone on Friday night to let me know everyone was unharmed, and our house was safe.
It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I started to grasp the gravity of this natural disaster.
Interstate 40 is a major interstate in North Carolina. It runs from Wilmington, NC across the country and ends in California. One of the sections of I-40 connecting eastern Tennessee to western North Carolina is gone. It’s just gone. There are so many things that are just gone, including the greenspace where I walked my dog nearly every day during the pandemic. It’s just gone. I’m glad my little buddy didn’t live to see his favorite place in the world washed away.
One of my cousins is a nurse in Black Mountain. Black Mountain is a picturesque town between Marion and Asheville. She had cell service because she works at a treatment center but was unable to get home to Marion this past Saturday because the roads were impassable. She couldn’t reach her two brothers who attend college at Western Carolina University. So, she did what many in WNC have been doing the past few days, she posted on social media asking for updates in the area and their well-being.
Sporadic texting and social media. That’s how I have been getting reports from friends and family in western North Carolina.
“Helpless” is the word my friends and family have been using these past few days. The father of my best friend from high school lives across the river from my parents. Her husband tried to travel to reach him on Saturday, but he couldn’t get there because many, many roads had been destroyed. Her dad has friends checking on him, and she was finally able to hear from him yesterday. The storm may have passed, but other storms are forming at sea and that terrifies me at the thought of a double whammy.
My cousin texted me this morning that they are pulling bodies from places that have been completely obliterated. I’m hearing on social media that towns like Chimney Rock and Swannanoa were wiped off the face of the Earth.
It’s unsettling. The mountains are not equipped to deal with a storm of that magnitude. In my 18 years growing up in Marion, the worst thing I lived through was a three-foot blizzard in 1993 that cut power for a few days. This is a million times worse.
Marion is in McDowell County. And like many WNC counties, McDowell County is not a wealthy county. Rural poverty is rampant outside of the city limits of Asheville. And although, my parents are fortunate and relatively ok, I know that so many have lost loved ones and everything including their homes. And I am writing this plea for them to help amplify the imminent need.
I want to thank everyone who has reached out the past few days to ask about my family. It’s in times of crisis that you find out who your friends are. I want to especially thank my “Cedar Rapids family” as they have been through this before and understand what we are experiencing.
I want to thank everyone who has reached out the past few days to ask about my family. It’s in times of crisis that you find out who your friends are. I want to especially thank my “Cedar Rapids family” as they have been through this before and understand what we are experiencing.
I am sitting in Baltimore City, and I do feel helpless. It’s one thing to look at the destruction on television and social media, but personalizing it was the only thing I could think to do to communicate the gravity of the situation. The McDowell High School Class of 2000 organized a Gofundme link to help with the relief efforts. Please consider a donation. You could literally save someone’s life.
(Monica Biddix is the founding principal of Workhorse Strategies, a boutique political consulting firm with wins across the country. She spent almost a decade traversing the state of Iowa, living and working in Cresco, Riceville, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines while managing campaigns at every level, from state legislative to presidential campaigns.
Monica first moved to Iowa in 2012, where she spearheaded incumbent State Senator Mary Jo Wilhelm’s re-election campaign - a 126-vote-win margin that secured the Democratic majority in the Iowa State Senate.
As Communications Director for the Iowa Democratic Party in 2016, Monica fielded state and national press inquiries as the primary on-the-record spokesperson. She served as a communications consultant for Admiral Mike Franken’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
In 2019, she was featured in the Des Moines Register as one of the unprecedented number of female state directors leading presidential campaigns.)
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
Strength is the operative word for the disaster that hit your hometown. The strength of the rain, wind and flooding. Now strength needs to be the operative word for those facing the terrible toil of trying to recover. I send thoughts for strength. Thank you for writing about the reality facing your hometown.