The Fire after the Flood

Since I moved in last summer, I have observed an elderly German lady with cropped gray hair patrolling my neighborhood with a walking stick every morning. Helga – her name, I would later learn – moved to the blue house on the hill behind mine in Old Fort, North Carolina, half a century ago after marrying an American soldier. I’ve always been a little shy of Helga because of her stern appearance and, I admit, her stick. When out on my jogs before Hurricane Helene, I waved to her from barest politeness.

Why was stick lady in my driveway today? She appeared to be quizzing the delivery guys from Lowe’s who were hauling away my maggoty fridge.

My family had fled Hurricane Helene two weeks before in a panic. Though our house survived the storm, we didn’t think to remove the spinach, cottage cheese, chicken broth, leftovers, and egg whites from the fridge before siphoning all our gas into one car and jamming out of there as soon as the highway opened. As linemen scrambled to repair every downed line in the western half of the state, our power blinked off for thirteen days. Upon return, one glance in my putrid fridge revealed why the scientists of old supposed insect life generated spontaneously. My mom scrubbed it with a respirator mask on. My dad hauled the pieces out in the yard and power washed them.

Still, the fridge smelled like death. When I tried unscrewing the ice maker to clean the insides, more flies floated out. I didn’t know how to screw it back together. This was the last straw.

We had already tipped the delivery guy from the cash we withdrew on our exodus north. So why was he back at the door?

He looked at me helplessly. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”

I peered past him into my driveway. Oh dear. It was Helga. Or as I knew her at this point, stick lady.

She held up a sheet of paper, which contained words I had written myself:

Hey Neighbor!

Please join us for a campfire tomorrow, Sunday, October 13.

Bring: A chair (if you have one), a musical instrument (if you play one), and yourself! Kids are welcome! Grandmas too.

We just want to spend some time together as neighbors during this very unusual time.

“I got this yesterday,” she said in a thick accent. “So I thought I’d come down here and see what these people are about.”

The campfire had been my mother’s idea. She and my dad had moved from my childhood home in New York five months before to help my husband and me raise our girls. And, it turned out, to help us through a hurricane the likes of which the mountains of North Carolina had never seen. Just when life started to feel normal again, my mother called.

“We need to start working on care packages for our neighbors. We can bake bread. Divide up all this food we brought back. Make a flyer inviting them to a campfire to burn up some of this brush.”

After living as vagrants in the homes of relatives and friends, we needed a regular day so badly. Yet the missionary zeal of a Baptist lady with a truckload of canned goods at her disposal who can resist?

I took a long sip of coffee. “OK.”

Two of my daughter’s friends came over to help build care packages. One girl brought nine overripe bananas, enough for each kid to make a batch of banana bread. The fourth-graders stood side by side at my mother’s kitchen island and followed her directions. They watched grandma measure, then carefully observed one another. It was like watching a row of dominos: one cup, two cups, three cups, plop, plop, plop.

My mother said later, “I was surprised how much they didn’t know. Like how to put shortening in a cup then get it out of a cup. I forgot how hard that is.”

My dad said, “It was great therapy.”

My mother looked indignant. “For who?”

“For the kids! Where else are they gonna get that? And there’s no better place than from a grandma.”

When the baking and packaging were done, my mom and the kids took to the streets – parading up to each doorway like a troop of confused Christmas carolers. The girls carried their treasures: flyers, banana bread, white bread, peanut butter balls, and a huge pitcher of lemonade. They waved and shouted “thank you!” to every electrical repair truck that drove by.

We had only a faint idea of who lived in our neighborhood. Our mechanic. An older lady named Christine. The mysterious stick walker. Right before we fled post-hurricane we had also met Glenn and Nicole from the house on the corner. Glenn told us he owned the pizza truck from downtown Old Fort.

I was agog. “The pizza truck? The pizza truck by Whaley’s Brewery?”

My husband and I had eaten the gourmet pizza of a lifetime there last fall – a concoction involving squash and sage that we still think about. We evangelized about this pizza truck and took people there when they visited us from out of state.

The campfire with neighbors. Photograph by Danielle Builta. Used by permission.

“It’s gone,” Glenn said. “I went down to try to get it, but the National Guard is there. I asked and they said it’s gone.”

This was our first hint that the storm that had spared our homes had decimated our town. Glenn said his truck held an astronomically heavy and expensive oven whose warranty had just expired.

My dad offered to help haul it out and clean it if the truck was recovered.

“Yes,” I agreed. “We’re invested.”

Glenn laughed grimly. “Me too.”

After my mom and the kids completed their delivery route, they returned with good news: The pizza truck was parked beside Glenn and Nicole’s house.

The evening of the campfire I met neighbors in my driveway in the half-dark. First came Christine, whom I recognized. Two men trailed behind her whom I had never seen before. We made small talk for a few minutes before I asked, “Are you related?”

The older man looked at me drolly. “I’m Ken. Her husband.”

“Oh, you’re related by marriage! I met Christine while she was out walking, but I didn’t know she had a husband!”

“Was she … acting unmarried?”

I dissolved into laughter. “No, she was walking the little white dog.”

“That’s why I wasn’t with her. I don’t like the dog.”

Ken, I learned later, has an artificial heart that relies on a charge, so the days without power were especially risky for him. But he did have the foresight to replace his roof before Helene hit, “six nails per shingle.” Ken introduced their son, Andrew, who hauled a wagonload of firewood. Andrew’s line of work? Refrigerator repair.

The gift of hurricanes is that you discover your neighbors. Sometimes a few days late.

This is what my husband, Jonathan, remembers about the campfire: Christine brought pimento cheese sandwiches she had made with the bread my mom gave out. Our oldest daughter made him devise a candy hunt for the kids. He played the guitar softly and sat with his feet resting on the stones of the firepit until his Timberlands smoked, and it felt so good.

Christine goaded Jonathan and me to sing a duet. Whenever people ask me to sing I feel like a pastor’s wife asked if she can play the piano. Yes, I can carry a tune. But my husband’s musical gifting outstrips mine so far that I’m embarrassed to share his spotlight. After giving in, I realized: Christine wanted us to sing to make way for her and Ken to duet “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Ken strummed his guitar and Christine opened a songbook. She sang every verse in a confident alto. It was a gift. We all watched in delight.

By now the fire was completely ringed with neighbors: Brittany, who was just coming out of two weeks of grueling work at the morgue. Cole from up the hill, who in the early days of power loss used rototiller gas to power his generator, which he had nearly sold a few months back. Cole’s family consolidated all the food into one freezer, built a fire, and ate steaks, macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti. Beside Cole sat his sister Krissie, who watched over my chickens, ducks, and rabbits after I evacuated. She even climbed through a window in my locked house and flipped my breaker off to protect from power surge. In the early days after Helene, I asked Krissie if she was planning to evacuate too. She told me no – all her other family was in Florida, which Helene and Milton had leveled in a one-two punch. Their mom, Jackie, lives at the top of our hill and works as a dietician for the inundated Asheville hospital. She brought smores, popsicles, and chili to the campfire. She loves to feed people. Looking around the circle, I realized: If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, this is not a bad basket to choose. Which brought up another thought: What if you could make a family of your neighbors instead of avoiding them?

At the end of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” we all applauded. Christine pointed at this stunning black and white photo of Loretta Lynn in her songbook and asked my daughter, “Do you want to see the person who wrote this song?”

Jonathan and Ken started playing “The House of the Rising Sun” together as Glenn and Nicole arrived. I loaded my little one into my lap and flopped into a camp chair beside the newcomers.

“So,” I asked Glenn of the Pizza Truck, “have you ever worked in one of those really toxic, intense culinary environments?"

He laughed. “Yeah, all of them.”

Glenn, it turned out, was just two years older than me but had worked in several Michelin-starred restaurants. He bought the pizza truck so he could get away from that hectic life to serve one community instead of working endless hours for people he didn’t know. He told us about restaurants where cod swam in tanks in the kitchen. He would draw them out to cook and their flesh stayed blue. He said he loved to make smoked fish with a little maple syrup.

My father, a maple sugar farmer for thirty years, pulled up a chair.

Nicole is a wedding florist, and she explained to me the basic principles of designing a bouquet. “It’s all geometry. There are the fillers, the focals, the floaters …”

Glenn said he loves it when the house is full of the smell of her flowers. And she loves eating his experimental pizzas, so it works out. Glenn said maybe he would bring his pizza truck to our next campfire – since, by a series of miracles it had not only survived but could be rehabilitated to its prior glory: Helene’s floodwaters had pushed the truck up against a light pole which held it in place. Glenn is tall, so he built the truck with all the equipment lifted a little off the floor. This decision saved all the important hardware from the flood.

The kids flew up and down in the darkness on the swing set, occasionally rotating into our circle to roast a marshmallow or listen to the guitars or peek over the fence at our ducks. The elderly people – Helga, Christine, Ken, and a lady named Mary who lives at the top of the hill with her gorgeous porch plants – seemed ecstatic to be together. “I have lived here since 1975,” Helga pronounced from a corner. “And the neighborhood has never met like this.”

The morning after the campfire, I was startled awake at 5:00 a.m. by screams. My little one.

I scrambled out of bed and flicked the light switch. Nothing. A windy night had knocked the power out again. She’s afraid of the dark. Jonathan went for the candles and I took her in my arms. She clung to me like I was a tree.

It feels ridiculous to write, but that morning without power was the worst Jonathan and I had felt during all the hurricane aftermath. It felt like the dread in your gut between bouts of nausea. Everything was better for a minute. But then it wasn’t anymore. Mingled into this dread was a memory of hope – a certainty that last night we had been with our neighbors around a fire, doing what we were made for.

Later that morning at the YMCA one town over, a lady handed my daughter a big pink stuffed unicorn. She asked me, “What do you need?”

I said, “Pray our power comes back.”

She took my hands and prayed for that right there on the YMCA doorstep in front of God and everybody.

When I got back to my driveway, I could see the lights on.

Helga now walks daily down the driveway I share with my parents, something she never did before. My parents invite her in to chat. My mother says, “Helga told us that every day she wakes up and opens her blinds to let her neighbors know she’s still alive.” When asked the purpose of her stick, Helga says it’s to keep away the dogs. When asked if the dogs bother her, she says “no.” And I can see why they don’t.

There will be more campfires. Now that I habitually chat with Helga in the road, I’ve learned what she is doing on those long walks. Behind her serious expression, she is praying for her children.