“Wheelbarrows of mud,” he says, illustrating his day’s efforts to help his friends reclaim their farmhouse. “Tomorrow it will start to mold,” he says, explaining the urgency to remove the clay dumped by the flood into their living room, kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms. A group of people have circled him after the open mic readings, and I join them. We are gathered at a coffeehouse to collect donations for Hurricane Helene victims. He read a poem about living like kings, made poignant by his friends’ ravaged kingdom.
“Every load I hauled down the steps,” he says, demonstrating the “thud, ud, ud, ud, ud, ud, ud” of its descending flight, “I looked around for other volunteers to take turns, but no one wanted that job. Firefighters twice my size were like, ‘Naw, that’s all you.’” Still burning adrenalin, he grins at his willingness to make that effort, to salvage something from disaster. It is why we are here, we whose homes remain standing in Johnson City, Tennessee, with power, water, and internet, while around us people have lost everything, including loved ones.
Had I lived here longer, I might have friends in need, like him. But I moved here only months before to take a job closer to my parents who are cleaning up storm litter and mending fences on their own farm.
I tell the wheelbarrow wielder I grew up on a farm and offer to help clean up his friends’ property the next day. He says that job is finished—but he plans to deliver firewood he and a friend chopped for a widow who has lost her regular fuel supply—if I want to help with that.
“Sure,” I tell him. “We burned wood growing up.” We meet at a gas station near the exit where he checks the tire pressure in his four-wheel drive. He has seen the roads pitted and wrecked by what he calls “the new Nolichucky,” so let’s call him Nole.
The cab of Nole’s pickup is nice and quiet enough for conversation. A song is playing softly, which he says he has been listening to on repeat. Although I can’t make out the lyrics, he says it’s about revolution, which we need. I agree, thinking of the escalating climate disasters.
He explains that his family owns property on Ripshin Mountain not far from the woman we are going to help: “We should be able to get there, but I want to see what condition the roads are in.”
When we leave the outskirts of the city, I gawk at uprooted trees, thickets of furniture deposited in lowlands, and fallen slabs of asphalt where the banks have been sheared beneath roadways. One lane remains passable until we arrive at a group of men and dogs who have blocked the road with their trucks parked beside them. Nole explains our mission, and they let us by. “Hoo, know what that was about,” he says. “What?” I ask. “Looking for bodies.”
We are silent for a while. Then, he asks, “What’s your method for firewood stacking?”
“Oh, my dad didn’t worry much about method as long as it got the job done,” I say.
When we pull up to the widow’s house, Nole tells me to sit tight. He knocks on the door and calls out several times, but there is no answer. There is also no car in the drive, but he walks around back and calls toward the barn. He doesn’t have her cell number, because he is responding to a plea she sent her son on Facebook. He opens the cover of his truck bed. There is a small stack of wood on her front porch, so we add to it. Nole fusses over the pieces to present them nicely like a wrapped gift, although the warmth is in the wood itself. We stack half there and place the rest on another pile under a tree in her front yard. Working together, it takes us less than an hour. “It’ll be a surprise,” Nole says, climbing back in the cab.
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As we leave, he drives further up the road wanting to check it because he has been considering a property there. It is also damaged but passable, and the roadside dam has held. At one point, Nole gets out to talk with a neighbor, gesturing for me to stay in his truck. I grew up with private people, so I understand, but I feel left out here, an outsider not yet trusted even if my hometown is on the Virginia side of this Blue Ridge.
On the drive down the mountain, we talk about poetry and the challenges of finding an audience for creative work. I think we are bonding until he elaborates on his recent book, which clarifies his interest in revolution.
“People call it conspiracy theory, if you look it up,” he says, before describing what can only be called a conspiracy theory.
I cannot follow him into this conversation, but I consider his words. We have spent our morning helping someone neither of us know well. In the process, we have gotten to know more about each other than most acquaintances get a chance to learn, but a gulf between us has appeared as abruptly as a fallen roadway.
When the host of the open mic opened the stage the night before, she said, “If you can’t give service or money, you can invite people to share their stories.” I came here to listen to the stories of these mountains where I was raised, and the people who come from them. Their stories underlay mine. I try to think of a question to get us talking about this land we both love, but it hangs in the air out of reach. Instead, I wonder why the word for radical change is the same as the one for cyclical orbits. If revolution had a word all its own, could we agree on what it means?
Nole keeps driving. We pass a field where dozens of community members are fanned out to pick up storm litter and scattered belongings. We pass an antique store with the door open and a fan blowing on the owner who is shoveling out the entrance. We cross bridges that have held—as if we’re testing them—and pass others where people have been stranded, and we let our conversation lie.
Amy Wright joined the faculty at East Tennessee State University after serving as their 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Science. She has authored three poetry books, six chapbooks, and her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert (Sarabande Books), received a Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose. She has also received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
**Featured Image: Erik Mclean, Unsplash