When Hurricane Helene roared through the Southeast in September, Athens, Georgia, where I live, sustained minor damage — some toppled trees and brief power outages. None of my friends, loved ones or acquaintances died or suffered injury.
I was distressed by the storm’s human toll. But I wept when I learned flash floods devastated Hot Springs, North Carolina, destroying businesses and cloaking what remained of its downtown in mud and debris. The Appalachian Trail ran right through the town of about 500 near the Tennessee border.
Credit: Courtesy of Allison Salerno
Credit: Courtesy of Allison Salerno
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
As an avid AT backpacker, I’ve spent so much time there over the past two years — solo backpacking, introducing friends to the AT, with a longtime backpacking friend and a new one from Denmark, and as a freelance reporter covering a nearby environmental conservation issue.
Last year, I met a jewelry artist at Big Pillow Brewing in Hot Springs. The next day, I bought one of her necklaces at Sara Jo’s Gas Station before heading out of town.
Among the few pieces of jewelry I own is that necklace, made of a green river stone gathered from the banks of the French Broad River, which flows north through Hot Springs and is one of the world’s oldest rivers — at least 260 million years old. That necklace reminds me what backpacking the AT means to me: strengthening my body and mind, enjoying a vista of blue mountains after a strenuous incline, encouraging friends and discovering a community of backpackers, shuttle drivers, small town merchants and hostel owners.
A few weeks after Helene hit, I interviewed Franklin Tate, an associate director with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, for a story. Tate described the trail damage, emphasizing the loss of tree canopy. He said it would take years for the forests to recover. When we got off Zoom, I sobbed.
I wept for hours off and on all that day. For weeks, even after I’d stop crying, I would awaken with a veil of grayness I couldn’t shake. A treasured friend had been badly hurt. Yes, this was a natural disaster, but how much was natural and how much was caused by humans burning fossil fuels? I felt as if humans had betrayed Southern Appalachia — its red spruce and rhododendron, the red salamanders and the chanterelles. I felt so much sorrow.
I talked to my husband, who on Sept. 11, 2001, had escaped from the 68th floor of the Twin Towers’ Tower One within 11 minutes of collapse. He lost 84 colleagues at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 25 of whom he had worked with directly.
He understood my grief. That his colleagues perished is a pain he will always carry. But he told me he also still mourns the loss of towers that had stayed up long enough for him to live. “I view it almost as another being that protected me and my colleagues who survived,” he said.
My husband was fond of the towers, describing their cool engineering features — like motorized window-washing machines and the water towers on the top. He told me he would watch storms come up from the Atlantic. Wherever he was in the New York metro area, he’d look back at the World Trade Center. “It was so omnipresent,” he said. The more than 40,000 people who worked there comprised a small city. He often thought about how he’d started his career in a rural North Carolina county that had slightly more than half as many residents as those buildings employed. The World Trade Center was his work home. And it was gone.
I’m still traversing my grief. I called Jennifer Elkins, a professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Social Work and a trauma researcher. She wasn’t surprised at the depth of our grief. Disasters can trigger trauma and grief by the destruction of places that hold personal meaning, she said, “Fundamentally, grief and loss and trauma [are] about personal connections to things,” Elkins told me, “the places that physically hold memories for you.”
This is why, Elkins said, on every anniversary of Sept. 11, twin beams of light soar four miles into the sky.
“One of the reasons why disasters can be especially problematic and trauma inducing is because you think you have control over things that then suddenly the ground physically moves from under you,” she said.
The Appalachian Trail is my Twin Towers. Towns like Hot Springs struggle to rebuild. The trail will be forever changed by Helene’s brutal winds and unrelenting rain. Rubbing my little green river stone between my fingers, formed by millions of years of weathering, collision and the wearing down of sharp edges, reminds me of the beauty of places lost and the healing that will come one day.
Allison Salerno is an Athens-based freelance writer and audio producer whose work has appeared in the AJC and Atlanta magazine, among other places. Her audio news features, aired on WUGA in Athens, have earned her two Georgia AP awards and a Gabby from the Georgia Association of Broadcasters.
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