By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday,
October 07, 2024
ASHEVILLE,
North Carolina—So, the traffic is definitely a little weird in Asheville right
now: a brace of black helicopters overhead, straight out of your favorite
conspiracy theory; tight little pelotons of law-enforcement and emergency
vehicles rushing down the Billy Graham Freeway with flashing blue lights; a
phalanx of black SUVs for the FEMA guys strutting around in their pressed polo
shirts; big silver tanker trucks with “POTABLE WATER” emblazoned on them;
flatbed trucks packed with diesel generators and ATVs for bringing supplies to
hard-to-reach places; trailer loads of bottled drinks and construction
supplies, the trucks throwing up dust from highways covered with a thin pink
sediment from having recently been underwater.
The
sidewalks are pretty crowded, too.
Mindy
Belz points out the World Central Kitchen operation, a long line out front
feeding Asheville residents who don’t have food to cook or power or water to
cook with. She’s seen scenes like this before—in Beirut, in Baghdad, in other
unhappy places she worked as a longtime correspondent for World magazine,
a widely read Christian periodical based in the North Carolina town. “I never
expected to see them in Asheville,” she says. But after the weather reports
started using words such as “unprecedented” and “catastrophic,” Belz started
storing water and preparing for a rough time. Still, this isn’t what she
expected.
This
isn’t what anybody expected.
You
don’t spend a lot of time planning for hurricanes when you’re up in the
mountains at 2,134 feet above sea level and hundreds of miles from the coast.
But Asheville was inundated, with two days of heavy rain before the remains of
Hurricane Helene came rampaging across the Blue Ridge Mountains and turned the
little trickle of the Swannanoa River into a mini-Mississippi, washing out
bridges, sweeping away buildings, and submerging houses and other buildings far
from the river’s edge.
Except
for one section of downtown spared thanks to buried power lines, there’s no
electricity—which means no functioning gas and diesel pumps in most of the
city. There’s no running water, which means no water for drinking or cooking,
for showers or for toilets. Cellular service was out for days, leaving people
unable to call for help or to check on family and friends (though connectivity
has been intermittently restored). “As technology has become more part of our
ordinary lives, the farther you have to fall,” Belz says. “I’ve covered
earthquakes. I’ve covered the Beirut port explosion. But to have all of those
things at one time …”
She
trails off, before adding: “We were completely cut off.”
But
Belz came up with a canny workaround. In the past year, she’d spent time at the
hospital about a mile away from her house, and she assumed it would have a
generator and working Wi-Fi—and that her password would still work, which it
did. “That was the only way I got word out to people,” she says, “sitting in
the lobby of the hospital.” What the hospital didn’t have was access to usable
running water, a problem that it got around with the most old-school solution
possible: Workers dug a well, practically overnight.
Wells,
printed signs, moving goods on handcarts: There’s a lot of old-fashioned
technology that has come back into vogue in Asheville since the storm. Up in
the mountains, resourceful volunteers are using pack mules to bring insulin to
patients in remote homesteads.
Weird
thing is: You can still get a cold beer.
***
And
with sunny skies and temperatures in the upper 80s late last week, a cold beer
was a pretty attractive proposition. At the Burial Beer Company, one of those
excruciatingly hip little places with which downtown Asheville is positively
thick, the owners have been bringing in ice along with the food and other
supplies being provided at no charge to anybody who asks. Today, they’re making
catfish and BLTs, and by the look of the bacon, they aren’t holding back the
good stuff. (Which—why would they? It’s not like the refrigerators are
working.) There’s a tip jar out with a fair number of twenties and at least one
fifty in it, but no talk of money otherwise. (They are charging for the cold
beers.) Down the street at Well Played, a board-game café—like I said:
Asheville—they’re open, if not exactly open for business. They don’t have a lot
of anything to sell, but they’re keeping the doors open to give people a place
to go and something to do while they wait for … not normalcy, because that’s
going to be a long wait, but whatever comes next.
People
are cheerful and talkative, cooperative, and very scrupulously polite at
intersections with dark traffic lights. It isn’t exactly a festival atmosphere,
and people are already anxious about the prospects for the city’s
tourism-driven economy. Drawn by the famous Biltmore Estate and the city’s
proximity to the natural beauty and recreational destinations in the nearby
mountains, nearly
14 million people visited Asheville (population:
95,056) in 2023. Nobody knows if they’ll come back.
All
that anxiety comes out in other ways, too. Social media and the old-fashioned
face-to-face rumor mill have produced thousands of imbecilic tall tales about
FEMA refusing supplies or roving gangs pillaging them. There are reports of
shooting sprees in the streets and gunfights at the gas stations, none of which
are, as far as anybody can document, actually true. State Sen. Kevin Corbin, a
Republican whose district includes much of the affected area, wrote
on Facebook that elected officials are being swamped by phone calls from
constituents terrified about things that are not actually happening:
The state is working non-stop. DOT has
deployed workers from all over the state. Duke power has 10,000 workers on
this. FEMA is here. The National Guard is here in large numbers. My Senate
district is eight counties, and it takes 3 hours to drive across it in good
weather. And this disaster is 25 counties in N.C.
The
Donald Trump
campaign, Fox
News, and other opportunistic
amoralists are working hard to make Helene the Democrats’ Katrina.
The
contrast between the people sweating on the ground in Asheville and comfortable
Manhattan media rage-merchants like Jesse Watters could not be more pronounced.
In Asheville, which is about 147 percent Democratic, you have bartenders from
trendy restaurants and owners of fashionable boutiques—most of them no doubt to
the left of Bernie Sanders—all pulling in the same direction with cheerful and
capable men whose straw hats and Shenandoah beards announce them as members of
some Anabaptist sect or another. Visiting out-of-town police are helping to
keep the peace at reopening grocery stores and aid distribution points. It is,
by and large, a scene of Americans for once showing their better selves, from
urban liberal creative types to evangelicals with one foot still on the farm.
***
The
first person I speak to in Asheville is carrying a big sign reading: “GIVING
AWAY FREE WATER + FOOD” with an arrow pointing down the street to the downtown
office of City Church of Asheville, an outpost of the Associate Reformed
Presbyterian (ARP) Church, a denomination with which I have some personal
familiarity.
They’re
an interesting bunch. Though their official history in the United States goes
back only (“only”) to 1782, they trace their roots back to 17th-century
“Covenanters” in Scotland. Theirs is a very, very Scottish church, one whose
largest national branch is in … Pakistan. Duff James, the pastor of the City
Church of Asheville, embodies something of the contradictions of the
contemporary evangelical moment: He is a fit, bearded Gen-Xer with tattooed
forearms (a barn swallow and a stylized depiction of the Burning Bush) and an
office full of serious books who notes with evident relief that his
denomination is one of the few that “went to the edge of theological liberalism
but found its way back.” He looks like a man who is at home in a place such as
Asheville, but his message—and his presence—haven’t always been welcome. In the
early days of planting the church here, he was subjected to a profane and
screaming denunciation at a local café where he had been working off and on,
hammering away on his laptop among secular-minded Asheville creative types who
had wrongly assumed that he was a screenwriter.
“He
wanted to know why we would start a church in Asheville. He said, ‘We have a
church on every corner, already.’ And I said: ‘Well, which one do you go to?’
He said, ‘None of them,’ and I said that I was here to start one that he might
think about going to.”
James
describes the church’s mission as the “free offer of the Gospel,” but, at the
moment, there’s the free offer of food, water, diapers, and much more to think
about. Supplies have been coming in from church members and from others, and
there’s a 26-foot-long truck on the way from Columbia, South Carolina, loaded
with supplies by a sister ARP congregation there. Potable water remains hard to
come by: A woman approaches a church volunteer on the sidewalk and is offered a
bottle of water, which she gratefully accepts before asking if she can have
some to take with her. They offer her a case and someone to carry it home for
her. There’s no sermon except the one St. Francis had in mind when he
supposedly (the quotation is apocryphal) advised his friends: “Proclaim the
Gospel at all times—when necessary, use words.”
City
Church wasn’t ready for this, either, but they figured out a few things pretty
quickly. Once it became clear that this was going to be a genuine catastrophe,
they started working to account for all of the members of the church: Who was
home, and who had left town? Who has a chainsaw? Who has a generator? Who has
gasoline or diesel on hand? Who has extra food or water to offer? Who needs
something?
Paper
charts are taped up on the office walls with the relevant information noted in
marker, with a legend explaining the abbreviations. For church services, City
Church shares space with a Seventh-Day Adventist congregation who, owing to
their doctrine, don’t need it on Sundays. But it also had a downtown office,
which put them right in the middle of Asheville’s urban core. The ARP
nationally has a heavily rural character—somebody brings in fresh eggs, because
of course between the mountain hipsters and the hardcore Presbyterians, somebody
has chickens—but in Asheville, it is very much what its name says: a city
church.
There
are public housing projects nearby, whose residents complain the local housing
authority has neglected. And maybe hurricane-response isn’t the housing
authority’s job—but, then, hurricane-response isn’t really anybody’s job in
Asheville, or wasn’t until Helene landed in the city. And so there is one more
little chapter added to the great big book of Western Civilization since the
fall of Rome, with the City of God picking things up after the City of Man has
dropped the ball and the church showing why it remains the one genuinely
indispensable institution.
“Our
presbytery was mobilized,” James says. “Other churches I had worked with, too,
started getting in touch. I’d been at First Pres in Columbia, South Carolina,
and they’re coming up with a truck tomorrow. We have others bringing up
diapers, wipes, baby products. We’re one of the only places that has diapers
and baby stuff.” The nested failures of our material supports—digital
communication, electricity, water, diesel and gasoline, transportation—are not
lost on a minister who is inclined to see in all things the work of
Providence.
“Whether
it was the pandemic or Hurricane Helene, it unmoors you from the daily lie
that you are self-sufficient,” James says. “These moments are an unadulterated
opportunity to trust God, daily, moment by moment. We’re a church that
understands that we have been shown grace and mercy by God, and we want to be a
conduit of that to the people of Asheville.”
Ross
Meyer, an associate pastor at the church, recently returned from mission work
in London but originally hails from Tampa—hurricane country. “I’ve seen a lot
of hurricanes,” he says, “but I’ve never personally witnessed this level of
destruction. We’ve lost power before, but never lost power and water and
cell service all at the same time. I’ve been encouraged. Every time we start to
run low on supplies and start to wonder about how we’re going to replenish,
somebody will pull up in a truck and start unloading pallets of food or more
diapers. People are hooking up their own tractor-trailers, driving up here,
bringing whatever they can, contributing whatever they have. People want to
help. And as people see churches reaching out and helping and loving their
neighbors, I hope that people see that as a demonstration of the love of
Christ. For people outside of the church, sure, but also for people in our
church. It’s been a beautiful thing to see, and we want that to stick around
after the power and the water comes back on.”
***
In
1965, Tom Wolfe and Günter Grass were involved in a discussion at Princeton in
which some fashionable radicals insisted that the United States was on the
verge of slipping into fascism. Grass, a German social democrat and no fool,
was having none of it, and set the students straight. Wolfe tells the story:
“For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on
the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In
Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they
must be very slow.”
… He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a
French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena
of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always
descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
If
you want to know why that shadow that sometimes falls across this wobbly
republic has not yet deepened into the real darkness that Günter Grass knew too
well, go get yourself a cold beer with the hipsters and Presbyterians in
Asheville. It’s not pretty, and it’s not perfect, but they’re doing the best
they can, and that is really what holds this all together, what makes this
country the real and vital power it is rather than a mere parchment republic.
Go have a look around and you can see both history and Providence at work, if
you have the right kind of eyes. By all means, stay for the sermon.
And
bring diapers.
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