Floods Don't Follow Me

Three floods in three years reminds a North Carolina writer that what happens to one of us happens to us all.

Words by Meredith McCarroll | Photos by Jack Sorokin

December 5, 2024

“It’s like floods follow you,” a friend says to me. 

First, in 2022, I watched my car float away in the historic 1,000-year flood in Hindman, Kentucky. Forty-three people died. Unimaginable loss. The next year, while hiking the Long Trail in Vermont with my son, we were forced by the governor to leave the trail due to unprecedented flooding. Unimaginable loss. And now, in my hometown of Waynesville, North Carolina, flooding and landslides and community members are still missing. Unimaginable loss. 

I had never seen a flood before 2022 and now I haven’t gone a year without one. The unimaginable is becoming easier to imagine. 

My first 1,000-year flood shocked me with its speed. I was teaching nonfiction at the week-long Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School, nestled on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Kentucky. On my drive there from Knoxville, I had pulled over on the side of the road just to play in the creek. I took my shoes off and hopped across the rocks. The water barely covered the stones and the sun shone through the trees, making the current twinkle up at me, and I thought, “How am I so lucky to be alive in this world?”

I gave my public reading at the end of a rainy day. I read from new work and was exhilarated as the evening winded down. Up in one of the houses, we gathered. Robert Gipe, a writer I’d admired who was becoming a friend, created a special recipe consisting of every flavor of Grippos brand snacks tossed in a bowl. It was messy. There was laughter. We drank some bourbon. There were fiddles and guitars and banjos and open-throated singing. One writer read my Tarot cards. I shared with this new group some truths that I hadn’t even said to myself as I looked at those cards on the table. The way I was held by this community stunned me, and I thought, “How am I so lucky to be alive in this world?” 

When news of the rising water reached us around midnight, it was too late. I dashed through the rain to my rental car, which I had parked fifty yards from a creek tiny enough to step across in some sections. Now that creek was something else entirely, as it had risen to the steering wheel of my car. That creek became a force that swept away cars. It swept away houses. It swept away families. That flood came fast and left me in the nearly speechless awe of a bystander, though my feet were muddied and I could hear the shattering glass and I could see the trees holding cars in their branches and I could smell the gasoline in the air. None of my senses made any sense. And as the sun rose the next day on this chaotic rearranged landscape floating by, I thought, “How am I so lucky to be alive in this world?”

A year later, in Vermont, we might have anticipated what was coming. My son and I were hiking across Vermont during the rainiest season since 1927. I didn’t know that then, of course. I just knew that we quickly learned to line our packs with garbage bags and not even to bother with rain gear and to give up on the idea of dry feet. It had rained for days. We were making a 273-mile trek on the Long Trail and we had settled into being soaked. We were twenty-one days in and had grown accustomed to being wet. It was almost never not raining. 

Still, it was a surprise to wake one morning and see a rushing river where a trail had been. We could see blazes on trees that marked the way, but we had a steep climb up above the treeline and heard warnings of rockslides that might turn our already challenging route into a dangerous one. As we stayed at camp deciding what to do, stories found us. We heard of a mudslide that nearly killed a ranger. We heard that a state of emergency had been declared and that everyone had been called off the trail. 

When we made our way into the nearest town, we found a bed and breakfast still open, just barely above the waterline. We rinsed our filthy clothes in the bathroom sink and restocked food in our packs for our final leg. But as we started looking closely at maps to see where we could get back on the trail, we found that roads were closed. We were marooned. All around us, amid the sounds of shop vacs and sirens, communities were shutting down. Property was lost. Over nine inches of rain had fallen in 48 hours, breaking all records.  

At breakfast, we shared a table with a hiker we had met weeks earlier in our first days. An Eagle Scout living in Brooklyn, he had decided to give up the hike. The trail will still be there later, he said. He had to get dry. My son and I found a safer section of the trail while the rest of the state recovered. We had grown accustomed to rain, but a flood is disorienting even to those who spend weeks walking outside. For nature, it feels awfully unnatural. 

And then, the next year, floods came to my hometown in Western North Carolina.

Scenes from the post-Helene clean-up effort in Asheville, North Carolina. Photos by Jack Sorokin

The weekend before, my high school class had gathered at a friend’s barn and event space for our 30th reunion. I saw many people I’ve kept up with, but also many I hadn’t seen since graduation. What struck me at this reunion was how, despite all of our growing and changing and moving away, I felt a kinship with this group of people. As we talked further, many of us made connections and realized we shared ancestors four or five generations back. It turns out that many of us are kin, but it was the love of this place that created true kinship. One classmate and I talked about the way that our bodies shift when we get in sight of the mountains. Someone else overheard and shared the exact spot where he feels it driving in from the East. Another stepped toward the circle and shared the part of the county that does it for her.

Days after our reunion, warnings were issued predicting that Hurricane Helene was aimed shockingly inland. But how does a mountaineer brace for a hurricane? When the map shows a predicted storm that covers a third of the country, it’s hard to know what action to take. It’s hard to know what to do other than hold fast. And when trees uproot and crash through houses, when dams give way and entire towns are drowned, when mudslides come rushing from the top of a mountain, there is nothing left to do but watch. Or run.

I live now in Maine, and so it is from Maine that I watch images of my home that fail to make any sense to me. Cars floating. Commercial areas entirely underwater. My son is there and I hear from him intermittently. He is high and dry. But my hometown is flooded.

“Is there anything we can do?” a neighbor in Maine asks kindly as he walks by and sees me on the porch.

I tell him, “No, I don’t think so.” 

He nods and goes into his house.

But then I think, “Yes. There is something that you can do.”

Don’t look away. Don’t think you are immune. Don’t say to yourself “I don’t live in a place where this happens.” Because neither did I. 

Waynesville, North Carolina sits right at 2,750 feet above sea level in the Smoky Mountains. Unlike Eastern Kentucky, whose floods are impacted by mountaintop removal and strip mining, there is no coal mining in Western North Carolina. The area’s biggest industry is tourism. And while clearcutting for new construction might be a contributing factor, this is historically a region relatively free from man-made environmental risks. The part of Western Vermont that was most devastated by the flooding of 2023 has neither strip mining nor mountaintop removal. But here is where we must broaden our lens and understand our interconnectedness. You may live far from the ocean and still experience a tropical storm, as residents of Western North Carolina can now attest. You may build your house far from the creek and find it underwater, as those in Kentucky now know. You may live in the greenest state with the most liberal politics and you are still not safe from extreme weather conditions, as Vermonters can tell you. 

I did not grow up in a place that floods. That place is underwater now. 

We all live in a flood zone because we all live on a planet in crisis. 

Until we reckon with our climate crisis, we will continue to see more “unprecedented” disasters. More “unimaginable” destruction. There is precedent. We must imagine it. And we cannot pretend that floods only happen in a certain kind of place or that hurricanes can’t come to the mountains. In this new time, we must understand that what happens to one of us happens to us all. 

Five days after Hurricane Helene — as temporary morgues were being built and thousands were still missing—the vice-presidential debate took place. I thought it might feel like a change of pace as I stepped away from texting missing friends and staring at videos of mudslides crashing across interstates and tracking my son’s location. But then I remembered that the personal is political and floods like this — the second thousand-year flood for me in three years — have context. So when one candidate could only discuss climate change “for the sake of argument,” in part because his running mate has called it a “hoax,” I did not feel distracted from the rising death toll. I felt that now-familiar combination of fury that makes me want to step into the ring and sorrow that makes me want to crawl under the covers. 

“Is there anything we can do?” That has become the question. 

You can donate to organizations in Western North Carolina. You can give to Brother Wolf Animal Rescue, which lost their building and was forced to evacuate their rescued animals. Donate to BeLoved Asheville, an organization “rooted in community and working to create Home, Health, Equity, and Opportunity for all in our mountain home.” Manna Food Bank, which also lost their physical space and assets, is rebuilding and continuing their getting food to 16 counties in Western North Carolina. You can give to Mountain Projects, a broad-reaching organization helping advocate for and empower neighbors –from support for Head Start through housing rental supplements to in-home Senior Services. Organizations like these have long been committed to helping the region thrive and are focused now on helping these mountain towns recover and rebuild. 

You can continue to support candidates — at the local, state, and national level — who trust science, which may help us mitigate future disasters like this. And as this flood is forgotten and the election shifts from center stage, you can keep looking at Appalachia as a complicated place that deserves continued attention. Not just when it is underwater. 

Because floods don’t follow me, but I know this will not be my last flood.