Before-and-after pictures of my cousins’ cabin near Cattail Creek, Burnsville, NC: Their cabin, car and many of their belongings were destroyed by mudslides. Their family has owned vacation property here since 1970.
The third picture is the remains of their car.
On Friday, my cousin Molly Secrest and her husband Larry Katz gave, over the phone, a harrowing account of their five-day saga to survive the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
Helene by Saturday night was blamed for at least 228 deaths, and counting — making it now “the deadliest storm to hit the mainland US since Katrina in 2005,” Scripps News reported. More of the national overview here.
“The search for the missing hits snags at every corner,” the Associated Press reported from Pensacola, in Yancey County, NC near my cousins’ cabin. Click.
Molly and Larry know of at least two neighbors who died. They themselves survived through the kindness of strangers. Though they are practicing Jews and political liberals from Massachusetts and New York, they were taken in for three days by neighbors, William and Mary Meehan who are devout Christians and political conservatives from South Carolina. They all knew better than to bring up politics. In the context of actual physical survival, political differences prove trivial.
They celebrated Shabbat, the Jewish Day of rest, together.
Another neighbor, who just the day before was a stranger, hiked two hours up the mountain on Saturday, Sept. 28th, to connect with the only clear cell phone tower signal. He spent hours alerting the families, close friends and employers of his neighbors on Cattail Creek that they were still alive.
On Monday, Molly and Larry hiked, forded a creek, and hitched a ride on an all-terrain vehicle — with dogs on their laps, through half-destroyed, treacherous roads — into Burnsville, where they settled into rocking chairs on the porch of the historic Nu Wray Inn, expecting to spend the night on the porch. They struck up a conversation with a woman who was secretary of the Yancey County Democratic Party, among a minority of Democrats in the county (35% of the population voted for Biden in 2020). This is the congressional district that elected Madison Cawthorn, the young Republican congressman who in 2021 called for a second civil war. Fortunately, he was ousted in the 2022 primary by a less radical Republican.
Feeling simpatico, the local Democratic Party secretary offered my cousins a bedroom in her home for the night.
Finally, on Tuesday, Molly and Larry’s adult children in Durham were able to maneuver through six hours of chaos from road closures, detours, round-abouts and switchbacks (from what is normally a four-hour drive) to rescue their parents, as well as the family dog. Abe and Marion delivered a car-and-trunk-full of essential supplies to the many in Yancey County still struggling to survive. They then turned around for another s-l-o-w six-hour drive back to Durham that night.
“I'm definitely believing in miracles right now,” daughter Marion said. “I can’t believe they are physically o.k.”
A Workshop on Depolarization
Not coincidentally, this week I attended an introductory Braver Angels workshop on overcoming toxic political divisions. From the initial questionnaire, I discovered my “inner polarizer.”
Do you (often, sometimes, never)
Think of “those people” on the other political side without regard for the variation among them?
Assign mainly self-serving or negative motives to the other group, and mainly positive motives to your group?
Focus on the most extreme or outrageous ideas and people on the other side, making it hard to see how a reasonable person could remain in that group?
Compare the worst people on the other side with the best people on your side?
Which of the following is closest to your overall emotional attitude towards the majority of people who support the other side?
Hate. Disdain. Pity. Basic respect. Or respect and appreciation?
Recalling Hurricane Hazel that Killed 634 People in 1954
All my life I’ve heard stories from my parents, siblings and cousins about how Hurricane Hazel, a Category 4 storm, destroyed our family beach cottage in 1954. My sister Kathy brought it up again this week as we watched reports of the terrible catastrophes caused by another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Helene. It has wreaked havoc and caused devastation in at least six states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia.
This fall marks Hazel’s 70th anniversary. It ran rampage through Haiti, killing at least 469 people, then struck the border between North and South Carolina, clearing the coastline of cottages and killing 95 people as it moved up the coastline. It then hit Toronto, CA, where another 81 people died.
My mother wrote of Hazel in her diary:
1954: As the children and I approached Garden City, our anticipation for seeing the ocean and our beach cottage always grew and grew. The children and I would start singing, “Who can see the Seabouy?” as we entered the bridge leading to the beach, each eager to change the “not I” chorus to “I can!” When the radio announced at noon that October 15 that not a single cottage remained in Garden City, we stared at each other, speechless and unbelieving. At school, Johnny Memory teased Kathy about the loss of her cottage, and my gentle little girl slapped her classmate and chum. When we took the boat out into the marshland of Murrell’s Inlet, where the top floor of our beloved cottage had floated, we found dishes still intact and Ann’s hated peanut oil and iron tonic standing upright, undisturbed in the refrigerator. But we couldn’t salvage Seabouy I. All that were left were happy memories swept away in a Land of Oz-like dream or nightmare.
My sister Kathy Buie Vance also wrote about the hurricane in her memoir:
Hurricane Hazel and Witch Hazel
When I was six in 1950, Mother and her sister-in-law, Aunt Ann, both inherited some money and impulsively bought an ocean-front beach cottage at Garden City, SC for $10,000. It was fully furnished with four bedrooms and on stilts with space underneath. For the next four years we spent a month at the Seabuoy in the summers and rented it out when we weren’t there. One summer, Janet Zeigler (Watson then) and cousin Mary Becca, who were teenagers, went with us to help out. Ann’s friend Carolyn was there too and they got caught by the undertow and were swept out. Janet and Mary Becca tried to rescue them to no avail. I don’t remember how they were finally saved, but I remember the panic on the beach. I remember oyster beds and how hard it was to walk out into the water and I also remember wonderful times.
In October of 1954, Hurricane Hazel came and wiped out the Grand Strand. We drove down the next day and found a vacant lot. Somebody took us out in the salt marsh and we found our Seabuoy, a total loss and a devastating blow. Back home, Wagram was not spared Hazel’s wrath. There was a huge chinaberry tree in our backyard that for Ann and me was a castle, a fort, a hotel, a mansion, anything our imagination let it be, and we played in that tree every day. We were horrified when Hazel pulled it over and it had to be sawed up and dragged away.
There was a neighbor on our street whose name was Hazeline. Celeste, who was three, accused her of taking away our beach cottage.
For the next 20 years, we rented various cottages for a week or two, and in 1974, Mother and Aunt Ann bought Seabuoy II which the family enjoyed for nearly 30 more years.
Twenty years ago, Hazel’s 50th anniversary, there were the horrifying tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. The death toll from the combined disasters of storms, earthquakes, fires, disease and famine killed an incomprehensible number, 228,000.
No single disaster the least bit comparable has occurred in U.S. history, at least not yet.
It may be difficult, at time like this, to realize how blessed we as Americans are by the combination of natural resources, geography and technology, but it’s important to remain mindful of it. Technology — our early warning system tracking the paths of large-scale storms, hurricanes, tsunamis and our evacuation systems — generally protect us from the kind of incomprehensible devastation the people of India and other countries experienced.
The deadliest Atlantic Ocean hurricane on record was the Great Hurricane of 1780, during the American Revolution, which killed between 22,000 and 27,000 people. Mitch, the second deadliest on record, in 1988 killed more than 11,374. Fifi, in 1974, killed over 8,000.
The final death toll from Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005, was 1,392 fatalities. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo was the most intense storm to strike Georgia and the Carolinas in more than 100 years, but it killed “just” 107.
In September of 1900, a great storm killed 6,000 on the gulf coast of Texas. Unpleasant questions arose as to what happened to all the relief donations, leading to municipalities creating professional commissions to address disaster response. Historian Heather Cox Richardson recalled:
In Asheville, NC in 1916, there was a great flood that killed 80 people. A documentary illuminates:
Related:
Thanks, Jim. The great majority of North Carolinians have enjoyed the cool of the mountains during extreme heat and fun in snow during the winter. Many of us have vacation homes that were damaged or completely lost and many have even lost friends and family.
As you have noted with so much insight, those of us who have lost someone or something we love are not ready to speak in specifics. Even sharing photos is difficult.
This is not a time for hate. Like you, I hope there will be a great good that comes from the tragedy: that we will put aside resentments and anger to come together and help each other.
Perhaps we can relearn how to be a community again.
Thank you for this, Jim, and condolences to your cousins who went through such a frightening experience. But they and those they love survived and that’s a blessing! My dad was a director for Red Cross disaster services for 30 years in Western NY and the national office sent him to the aftermath of many hurricanes to help out. He said often that things can be replaced- lives can’t. Blessings for their recovery.