Field Notes:
If you are a first responder, displaced person, or experiencing grief as a result of Hurricane Helene in South Carolina, Canterbury Counseling is offering six free sessions. Contact their office for more information.
If you are a mental health professional and want to provide services to people in the path of Helene’s destruction, North Carolina has waived its licensing requirements for mental health specialists who are licensed in other states. Visit NCBLC for instructions.
Beth Trigg is a powerhouse of a human who immediately went into action after Helene destroyed her community in Western North Carolina. She daily updates ways for people to provide direct aid to individuals and families, many living in tents, waiting for help to flow through from larger aid organizations that understandably move at a glacial pace. Follow her on Facebook and tell others who want to help how to find her there.
My resource list of numerous organizations that need your cash donations to provide immediate aid is updated often and changes by the day to reflect the ever-shifting needs of Hurricane Helene victims. Bookmark it or reach out to me directly if you’re seeking vetted, hands-on organizations to trust with your donations.
From Tamar Reno of Bear Creek Farm in WNC:
People want us to be okay. It's only natural. It's instinctual to want to right wrongs. To offer food, hugs, and comfort. Words of encouragement or sympathy. It’s not that it’s unappreciated. Your thoughts, prayers, encouragement, gifts, and donations leave us humbled and grateful. It’s that being “okay” here and now is unnatural, and the natural world is all we have left. I've said we're different than before, but I don't know yet how to show you what that means. How to tell you what that means. It's a little like trying to explain childbirth to someone who's never experienced it. Just like I will never be the person I was before giving birth, I will never be the same as I was the night before Helene. None of us will be, not unless we're delusional. We can’t even hold up the roof, let alone hold up delusions.
False Fall
I’ve had a lot of breakthroughs sitting on the tractor every Monday afternoon as I drag the riding arenas. Dragging, like cleaning stalls, is a zen rock garden action that clears out the brain and makes room for breakthroughs and inspiration. But recently I’ve been looping the big circle of the drag chains over the ball hitch of the tractor and pulling the hooked tines across the ground as an act of defiance, as if the furrowed river sand all spread out and tidy and wiped clean, is a sign of life, of normalcy. It’s the one clear thing that I can do no matter how my body feels that day.
After the eyewall of Hurricane Helene passed over upstate South Carolina, we turned the horses out in the riding arena in familiar batches of twos and threes. Many of the old oaks near the horses’ fields fell across fence lines and we needed to engineer fixes to regain turnout access in the paddocks again. I skipped a few weeks of dragging the sand this past month as the arena pulled double duty.
I regretted befriending the trees when the eerily quiet air was filled with the scent of their cracked and splintered wood after the storm. The world smelled like a sawmill and I wanted to go back to the person I was when a tree was just a tree and not an entity, like me, that was wholly dependent on her environment.
Water oaks and hickories, pecans and beeches all suffered in the storm, but it was the white oaks that unearthed like they had been strip-mined when Helene’s winds tore through. Their roots peeled back from the earth and their dizzying straight trunks fell hard and fast, taking out neighboring trees and structures.
The morning of the storm I gathered everyone into the inner room of the farmhouse because the house and barn are surrounded in century-old white oaks. I adore them and I’m terrified of them like I am with anything that matters, the things I have no control over.
A nearby family who lost a beloved person during the storm after a tree fell on a house put out a plea for someone to move the tree from the roof because they could not stand to look at it or touch it.
In our lower field, we incorporated the tree graveyard into the farm’s Halloween event, because the fallen trunks were too significant to be ignored. We chopped pathways through the fallen oaks in the field and taped them off with temporary fencing. We filled the root holes with fallen limbs and sawed branches. The holes were big enough to fit a horse.
It’s hard to tell the full story of something when you’re living it. I planned to just send you all an apology this week and skip my personal Thursday writing deadline. I planned to spend the day writing in my notebook, zooming my focus in from the larger story to the tiny story. My story. The one I’ve been living for a while. I planned to talk about dragging the riding arena because that Monday chore is a metronome that I have used to count out my life. Lately when my body hasn’t allowed me to do much of anything, I can still do this.
I can still tell my story.
After the storm, we turned the horses out in the riding arena in little familiar groups to keep the infighting to a minimum. We needed to get the horses out of the standing water in the barn. I watched the first group nose the fallen leaves and branches in the ring as I formulated a crude plan. We carted water by the wheelbarrow out of the barn, tires sinking and sliding, but the thick of it needed to be absorbed back into the earth with time.
Application and restoration, what came in receding out, an island ocean of geologic waves that our little farm was only barely touched by, comparatively.
Which brings me to the cherry trees.
Cherry is the easiest wood to give away to dudes to use in their smokers, but cherry leaves are the most toxic to livestock when they drop and shrivel early before the natural release that happens in autumn. Storms are notorious for releasing toxic cherry leaves. It has to do with the cyanide content, like the poison in a cherry pit.
Wild cherry, like poison ivy and kudzu, is prolific and unstoppable. Birds eat the fruit and drop the seeds along fence lines when they stop to rest, digest, and poop.
A few wilted leaves of cherry can kill a cow. It’s believed that more is needed to stop a horse, but as I stood at the edge of the arena and watched the horses clearing the land of fallen debris with their mouths along the leaf-carpeted plane of rain-carved river sand, I had two options. I could continue micro-managing my life like an anointed wizard who controls fate with superstition and preparation — or I could give up control.
Habit has taught me the sight, feel, and weight of a cherry leaf. I’ve walked the driveway after trimming the branches that twine and grow through the old, locust-post fence line and picked up thousands of cherry leaves in the fear that a breeze might blow one into a neighboring paddock. I’ve watched horses pull green cherry leaves from the trees and I’ve preached the warning for so long that people routinely ask me to identify leaves so they can also commit the dangerous ones to memory.
As the horses ate their way through the storm’s epilogue on the ground, I chose to give up control.
“They have smart mouths,” I said to the others as we hauled branches and tacked up temporary fencing. Every day I watched the leaves of every sort shrivel. “The skin on their legs will slough off. They’ll have cellulitis and their hooves may bleed. But all the things we tried to prevent before this storm don’t matter much anymore.”
Feet did bleed and legs swelled up. I watched the storm-bruised upright trees bloom in a false-fall of dangling branches and crumbling leaves. Entire mountain faces in the hardest hit areas of Western North Carolina were stripped of leaves while the opposing slopes erupted in the rich madness of October’s colors — the haunting, slanting light of nature’s afternoon.
As I gave up control of my mind, my body followed.
Because all the contingency plans I’d made amounted to little in this farm that faired rather well, all considering, in a 1000-year storm. I’d spent my whole career terrified of being caught alone in the aftermath of a storm with all the horses and no water flowing from the well. But I wasn’t alone when Helene blew through. I married the other half of this farm six days before and he went into the action as the winds calmed. I literally, could not have done this without him.
We’re ninety acres in the middle of a metro area tucked between housing developments. There isn’t a single day that I don’t say a prayer of thanksgiving for the ability to live and work in this protected forest.
After the storm, so much of the landscape was changed and altered. The gas stations were closed, the grocery stores barren, but what many don’t understand as I continue to write about this storm is how scary it is tending to livestock on a good day. But when the world is shut down and the feed store doesn’t know when it will open again, and the farm staff can’t find a cleared road to get to work — it’s not like we could clock out and check into a hotel until the power was restored.
And a relatively minor problem overall was the farm produced no income until the world opened back up.
My body had already been giving me warning signs that years of surviving off adrenaline and quick thinking had done some damage to my nervous system. But a week after the storm when the power was restored and the water started flowing again, my body put her pitchfork down and decided that I needed to rest.
The flares were spaced out in the months prior. I’ve written here about going to the ER. A cardiologist cleared my heart and the doctors moved on to monitoring glucose spikes and crashes.
The day after the power was restored, I woke and did my normal morning things, everything seemed normal — and then I crashed into a wall of brain fog, disorientation, and fatigue that terrified me. And the same thing happened the next day. And the next.
I haven’t found an answer, a fix, or a diagnosis. Some days are bearable — I can function. Other days slam me to my knees. Today has been rough. I’ve written this in between forcing myself to eat and taking micro-naps that reboot me for a bit.
Sometimes when every muscle in my body aches like a phantom flu with no fever, I’ll walk across the back porch past the huge, twin fallen white oaks that have been split to pieces so the trucks and tractor can move hay from the sheds, and I’ll sit on a log and turn my face up to the sun like one of the flowers in the front bed of the farmhouse, the ones that are still blooming in their weird, late-October warmth.
The trees scare me now, but they also comfort me.
Because the things I worried about before don’t matter much anymore. The horses had the wily sense to not eat the fallen cherry leaves with their smart mouths.
I think about how animals know a tsunami is happening before the warning sirens start. How the migratory patterns of the birds shifted three days before Helene hit the southeastern mountains. How Tamar Reno reminds us as if she’s giving us permission, “Irrational fears are no longer irrational,” and, “our ability to entertain small talk was washed downstream. We haven’t gone looking for it.”
And so the many clients I’ve had over the years who were battling autoimmune issues and medical mysteries — the number of times I’ve told them to listen to their bodies. Here I am. Because like a hungry animal, our bodies whisper and we drown it to keep our schedules going. The whisper builds to a hoarse scream and then we’re forced to stop what we’re doing and listen.
The hurricane didn’t cause my body to shut down, it had been on that course for a very long time. But when the well was running again and the streets were lined with the split remains of fallen trees, I’d reached the last of my reserves.
What else have I ignored that truly matters?
As I continue searching for answers to my body conundrum, I’m listing to the hyper-sensitivity of my senses for what it’s telling me. Like the forest reaching into the dormant sleep of winter, it’s time to withdraw and rest. I’m pared down to the essentials. I have spent more time alone with myself in the past three weeks than I have since I was a hypersensitive, achy child with phantom symptoms who only felt comfortable on a horse farm.
What are you doing to listen to your body, the trees, and the birds today?
Love,
Kim
Now I understand the title. And what a riveting post. Shock is what I feel reading this and maybe that's exactly what it portrays. It was unthinkable, but now it's not. I follow a guy on FB who does a 'don't panic' weather forecast. He was in the n Florida area and tracking Milton. Well...he relocated and Milton moves slightly south. But still. Unimaginable things happened on both coasts. The storm this weather maven is tracking now is a gulf tropical storm that seems like it will go due north. Forgive me all other areas, but I was so glad to see it is way east of us in that track. As I commented, we just can't take anymore here. I have been using Bach Flower Remedies...Rescue with Mimulus (known fears), Sweet Chestnut (I can't take any more). Gentian (dealing with what seem like setbacks) are part of my formula. It helps me when the vulnerability and negativity gets noticeable. Knowing this now, I will include you and yours in my prayers.
I feel all of this Kimberly…ALL OF THIS. I’ve always loved the woods but this past year, really getting to know my place has now broken my heart with the losses of Hellene (sorry that’s the only way I will spell it). But no one in my immediate vicinity understands my grief. Everyone continues on with their shallow lives & mindless chit-chat and I just want to sit silently among those fallen giants.
We’ll get there Kimberly, one day at a time. We’ll write our way through it. 💜