When Roads Are Washed Away

Today, on my drive home from church, I was forced to stop and wait in a long line of cars as road workers paved the right lane of Highway 194. It’s a road with many twists and turns, built on the banks of Howard’s Creek before curving north and intersecting with Meat Camp Creek. At least, that’s the section of highway I drive every day in my little corner of northwest North Carolina.

It is a wait I now know well. I know the beeping of heavy equipment backing up and the awkward eye contact with the poor soul who was given the unfortunate task of holding the stop sign. I know the dust of recently dumped gravel, the smell of new pavement.

Roadwork in southern Appalachia has never been easy. The terrain here has a way of complicating efficiency, insisting on circuitousness. Most of our roads twist and turn because mountains don’t move, no matter your faith in modern-day infrastructure. You must go around, and I’m fairly certain even crows don’t fly in a straight line here.

My ancestors settled in this region during the Revolutionary War. Back then, the only way to traverse the topography was to follow rugged pathways hewn through the forests by migrating deer, elk, and buffalo. Some pioneers learned of old hunting trails forged by the Catawba and Cherokee people, western North Carolina’s original inhabitants. Others simply followed one of the region’s seemingly infinite waterways, trusting that the rivers and creeks themselves had done the hard work of carving a way through the mountains.

Engineers assess damage caused by Hurricane Helene to roads in North Carolina. Photograph by Charles Delano/USACE Photo/Alamy Live News.

As time went on, roads were constructed along these creeks. Muddy and rutted, they were not for the faint of heart. The mountains had harsh winters, wild animals, and rocky soil; travel woes were simply one of the challenges of living here. It takes a certain kind of grit to make a home in these hills. As families grew in isolated coves and hollers, they learned that survival often depended on the ability to pave a path to their neighbors the next holler over or into town on the other side of the mountain. Sturdy bridges and reliable roads were eventually constructed, connecting mountain communities with each other and the outside world. These are the roads my family and I enjoy today.

On September 27, Hurricane Helene tore through the southeastern United States, bringing devastating winds and nearly thirty-one inches of rain in some parts of southern Appalachia. Every peaceful river became a raging deluge, every babbling creek became a torrent, and every hidden spring exploded from the mountainsides.

Three or four days after the storm, I started having nightmares. I’m not sure what types of dreams I expected in the aftermath of a hurricane: perhaps howling winds, pouring rain, and rising waters.

But I didn’t dream of those things.

Instead, I dreamed of roads. Crumbling roads. Breached bridges and gutted-out highways. I dreamed of pavement broken to pieces and flying up into the air before my eyes. I dreamed of asphalt buckling beneath my feet and falling out from underneath me.

What the water took from us was incalculable: human lives, homes, entire downtowns. So many lost much more than I did as our house is situated uphill and a safe distance from any waterway.

But I learned of one of Helene’s distinct severities as my husband and I, along with our two small children, attempted to leave our neighborhood. Our power was out, and because we have a well with an electric pump, we had no water. In a phone conversation, broken and halting due to poor cell service, my parents told me they’d miraculously gotten power back several hours after the storm. So, we thought we’d stay with them for the night. It was an easy seventeen-minute drive.

Or so we thought.

As we navigated our car down the hill on a road littered with fallen limbs, we came to the small bridge that connects our neighborhood to Highway 194. My husband slowed to a stop. A small chunk of the bridge was missing, the asphalt and parts of the girder and header having been swept into the creek. I got out of the car to get a better look and assess the situation. Before long a few neighbors pulled up and did the same thing. There we stood, none of us structural engineers, weighing the risks, wondering if the right side of the bridge was sturdy enough to hold a vehicle … especially one with two little girls in it.

We were not alone in this calculation. At that very moment, across Appalachia people were emerging from their homes (or what was left of them) and, in their effort to travel to family, friends, and resources, finding themselves bereft of the one thing needed to get from the awful here to the hope-filled there. We had, quite literally, lost our way.

Helene had taken our roads.

“It’ll hold,” one neighbor said with a confidence that sounded more like wishful thinking than certainty. He said he’d seen a vehicle bigger than ours go across just a few minutes before. “Just don’t go too slow,” he said.

“Or too fast,” another neighbor piped in.

I had never thought about that bridge before, had only ever seen it as part of the scenery. It was a humble bridge, low and short in length, seemingly inconsequential. But as I climbed back into the car and my husband pressed the gas pedal, every fiber of my being postured itself in prayer toward that bridge, the remaining slabs and bearings, the pier posts and railings. “Lord,” I prayed, “hold this bridge together.”

In the coming days, I would pray that same prayer more times than I can tell. As the bridge deteriorated further, our hopes of power trucks coming to restore our electricity faded. That little stretch of suspended road stood between me and home as I knew it. I’d put my faith in it countless times before. But now the path was broken, and safety was not certain.

That moment was the beginning of my newfound obsession with roads.

It’s an obsession shared by most residents of western North Carolina these days. My family and I made it across the bridge that day, but what remained of our journey to my parent’s house was equally harrowing. Much of the ground beneath Highway 194 had slid into Meat Camp Creek and Howard’s Creek. Pavement had buckled where water bulged above culverts. We bumped along, white-knuckled and unsure of what hazards lay ahead. When we finally made it to my parents and found enough cellphone signal to check social media, we learned that our bridge and our highway were in good shape compared to many roads in the region.

Roads are something I had taken for granted, unlike my Appalachian ancestors, who knew the vital significance of a way in and out. I never really thought about who mapped them or made them, never wondered what life would be like without them. They had always been there. And I assumed they always would be.

The value of a road has long been articulated in poetry and song, in metaphor and meaning-filled motifs. Robert Frost took the road less traveled by, and apparently it made quite a bit of difference for him. In Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, The Road is a symbolic pursuit of hope against all hope. “Country Roads” took John Denver home to a place he truly belonged, and we all know that home he referenced had to be so much more than a house.

It turns out, roads are life. Without roads, you do not have a home, do not have community, do not have a future or a way forward.

Roads appear throughout scripture and have a way of enlarging our imaginations toward both the virtues and vices that beckon us. There are broad ways that lead to destruction and narrow ways that lead to life. Epiphanies are had on highways and byways by wise men from the East seeking a Savior and by an angst-filled Saul, blinded by his own self-righteousness. It is on the road that we meet warriors (1 Sam. 13:17) and robbers (Luke 10:30), prophets (1 Kings 11:29), priests (Luke, 10:31), and kings (1 Sam. 26:3). Sometimes we meet the Angel of the Lord (Num. 22:22) on a road, or even the resurrected Savior himself (Luke 24:15). Roads are paved with peril and with possibility.

No matter the story, what seems clear is that roads are places of liminality – the space between here and there, before and after. Because we know the ups and downs of walking (or driving) on an actual road, we have a capacity to understand the undulating nature of any spiritual or relational trek. Put simply, life is a journey, and roads help us understand the nature of that journey.

And while roads can act as a symbol for life, I’ve begun to see roads less as metaphor and more as material evidence of what it means to be human.

Roads are the ultimate emblem of civilization. The existence of roads is an indication that we cannot and should not live in isolation. Roads prove that we need to move toward something, and that something is usually community. Were we as self-sufficient and individualistic as we fancy ourselves, we would need no movement, require no paved way from house to house, or house to town. We need each other – need culture, friendship, common resources, shared economies, and the belonging that comes with togetherness. Roads tell the story of our mutual dependence.

Never have I been more aware of that shared need than during the flood and the weeks that followed. Due to the mountainous topography, many neighborhoods in western North Carolina have only one way in and one way out, and that way often crosses or abuts a creek. After the water swallowed our roads large and small, many residents were marooned, unable to get out or be reached by others. The mountains were suddenly dotted with hundreds of tiny islands, cut-off communities with no communication and dwindling food, water, and medicine.

People found ways to get out – to get to each other. For mountaineers in the wake of Helene, the “road less traveled by” became a fallen log across a creek, or a pile of gravel haphazardly dumped in a sinkhole. Folks took ATVs or rode horseback on new paths carved through the soggy woods. And while the need for food, water, and housing was great, nearly every relief effort following Helene depended on the one thing so many of us didn’t have: a reliable road.

It turns out, roads are life. Without roads, you do not have a home, do not have community, do not have a future or a way forward. I’ve come to understand why so many scriptures implore us to watch our paths, to be careful about the way in which we walk. Roads are enormously consequential, the difference sometimes between survival and an untimely and solitary end.

This is why I no longer bemoan being stopped for road construction. I relish the wait, rejoice in the “inconvenience.”

In those uncertain days after Helene blew through, road workers from all over the Northern Hemisphere rolled into southern Appalachia. Roads that were spared by the storm were crawling with excavators, graders, bulldozers, concrete mixers, and pavers. We watched as miracles were performed on our highways and byways, grace in the form of gravel and asphalt. Bridges were mended, rough places made smooth, and riverbanks reinforced.

We waited, we prayed, we cheered the road workers as they rolled in and out. And then, quite suddenly, we were able to get to one another.

They say the streets of paradise are paved with gold. But right now, I’d say heaven is Appalachia, where the roads are paved with fresh blacktop – the finest thing I’ve ever seen.

I understand now why, when God speaks comfort to Jerusalem in Isaiah 40, he speaks of a way in the wilderness:

Every valley shall be raised up,
    every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
    the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
    and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
(Isa. 40:4–5)

Life without a road is indeed a wilderness – barren and void of hope. Home, without a road, is no home at all. Without a way, our mutual affections, our needs, and our relational longings have nowhere to go. But love is the removal of barriers, the restoration of the path, the possibility of togetherness. Love is the circumvention of impediments, of catastrophes. Love makes a way where there seems to be no way. Love is connection, the ability to move toward one another.

And in southern Appalachia these days, love is a dump truck, a paver. Love is a hard hat and orange vest, the fine dust of new gravel and the smell of fresh pavement.

Love is a road.