Residents of Barnardsville continue their long journey to recovery

The morning is cold and clear when I meet Gina Elrod and Chloe Lieberman in an empty parking lot in Barnardsville, an unincorporated community about 30 minutes north of Asheville. They are the first of several local residents who’ve agreed to show me around the ongoing recovery efforts in this small rural section of Buncombe County, which like many areas in Western North Carolina was devastated by Tropical Storm Helene.

Elrod looks down at my muddy boots and says, “Good, you’re wearing the right thing.”

She then leads us on a meandering walk through muck and grass, heading in the direction of the Big Ivy Community Center, which Elrod manages. Despite being several months out from Tropical Storm Helene, the debris in Barnardsville is relentless — crushed cars, piles of insulation, a white wooden house set askew beside the road where there clearly hadn’t been a house before.

Along the way, Elrod explains that the Big Ivy Community Center has been operating since 1974, offering at various points child care, a playground, walking trails, a swimming pool, a thrift store and a food bank. Before the storm, they served 100 people a week; now, their traffic has increased eightfold.

Inevitably, our conversation turns to the day of the storm and the immediate aftermath. Because there is just one main road running along the river, sections of Barnardsville were completely cut off from one another. But nobody sat around waiting for outside help, the two women tell me.

Lieberman — co-director and Wild Abundance’s Online Gardening School (and a fellow Xpress contributor) — worked with volunteers to set up a mutual aid hub in the former fire station downtown, which the ad hoc group operated out of through November. “So many people wanted to help,” she says. “People started coming with loads of food from their freezers, which were going to go bad without electricity.”

Meanwhile, Elrod adds, other residents sprang into action clearing roads. “And then there was a team of medics riding around on four-wheelers too,” she notes.

We’ve walked much of the park and stop along the creek.

“There used to be a great swimming hole right here,” Lieberman  says, pointing just upstream from where we stand. “I came here every year for my birthday. I tell all my friends to bring flowers from their gardens, and we give the flowers to the river.”

We look to where the swimming hole used to be, where there had once been a beach. It’s just a fast-flowing river now, brown banks, fallen trees. The river has fundamentally changed shape. “It’s hard to see,” Lieberman says.

“This is what our lives are going to be now,” she continues. “And our kids’ lives, their kids’ lives. This isn’t a thousand-year flood. It will happen again. That’s what motivates me to keep up the recovery work, to make sure we’re as prepared as can be for next time. To build the community for that.”

The Walmart of Barnardsville

One thing the storm did, Elrod explains, is reveal needs that had already been present in this community — dental care, mental health assistance, access to fresh produce. In the storm’s aftermath, some of these resources were more readily available.

Meanwhile, the Big Ivy Community Center also pivoted to address the unique and specific repair needs brought on by Helene — connecting muckers, carpenters and arborists with community members. The center’s command station, which they call the Pod Palace — since it’s a large collection of metal storage sheds and containers — is also affectionately referred to as “the Walmart of Barnardsville.” It’s a huge operation, well-organized, with a crew of volunteers moving quickly to unload a big box truck filled with supplies.

Along with these services, Elrod has observed an uptick in people wanting to learn old skills and others who are excited to teach them. The desire, Lieberman adds, comes from wanting to know how to take care of yourself and your community for the next time. There’s a sense, with everyone I talk to in Barnardsville, of the inevitability of this — or something like it — happening again.

Granted, it isn’t just the storm that has inspired this movement of self-sufficiency. Lieberman’s colleague Natalie Bogwalker founded Wild Abundance in 2009. Long before the storm’s devastation, the organization has offered building and gardening classes, including its Tiny House Workshops and Women’s Woodworking Classes, among others.

In the past, Bogwalker tells me, the tiny homes that Wild Abundance constructed were sold at-cost to community members to address the ongoing housing crisis. Since the storm, however, they have been using donations to pay for materials and offering the homes to flood victims at no cost.

Additionally, the organization has set up a number of initiatives, including the Wild Abundance Disaster Relief Fund, raising over $120,000 for its Tiny House Workshops and pledging $22,500 to Mutual Aid Barnardsville to further assist with ongoing recovery efforts. Among other things, these funds have helped purchase a community sawmill to turn downed trees into lumber.

“I’m pretty good at putting people to work,” Bogwalker says, noting the growing list of community needs she organized on white boards at the mutual aid hub at the onset of the recovery. The idea, she explains, was to avoid delays, duplicated efforts and confusion.

The system also gave community members an outlet, Elrod adds. “There was as much intensity around people needing to help as there was around people who needed help.”

‘Playing flood’

Among the community’s many residents impacted by the storm is painter Melanie Norris, who lives across the street from Barnardsville Elementary School. As I drive up, enormous piles of debris line the road. There are swarms of kids out in the playground, yelling and running. The wreckage is all around.

Norris, her husband and their two young girls were at their house during the storm. Just down the hill from their home was Norris’ 336-square-foot art studio. The four of them watched Ivy Creek rise, eventually surrounding the studio. “It looked like maybe [the studio] just tilted a little bit at first,” she says, “and then suddenly, whoosh, the whole thing was gone.”

Norris also had original pieces on display at the Tyger Tyger Gallery in the River Arts District — also destroyed by the storm.

As we talk, we’re shivering out on her deck, where she’s set up a temporary studio. She’s working on a beautiful portrait of two children’s faces. But winter has barely begun, and it is hard to imagine how long this can work. “I’m having a hard time focusing,” she says. “It’s like my lens is constantly shifting focus” between caring for her family and then the people who lost everything and are living in tents.

One of the things Norris can’t stop thinking about is all the trash surrounding her community. Her art is already incorporating it. She shows me a painting in progress of what looks like a self-portrait, her neck rising out of blue-gray water covered by layers of sticks and debris.

“My 3-year-old and her friends have been playing ‘flood,’” she tells me. “They run from the water, climbing things, being chased. ‘Here, quick, hand me the baby!’ one of them will yell. It’s the way for them to process what’s happened, just like we all have to. And they’re doing it together, safely. They’re doing it with friends.”

And it was friends who helped Norris retrieve her art studio downstream; friends who cleared it out and are readying it for use again, this time, situated much further from the creek.

Thinking it through

My final stop is with Mary Rich, who recently purchased a home in lower Dillingham Creek. She tells me to hop into her truck, Ernest. Rich has called Western North Carolina home for 22 years, and she and her husband had saved for a long time to fulfill their dream of owning a small house and lavender farm in the area.

We drive a few hundred feet and then, without warning, she turns onto a dirt road leading straight into the creek. “Hold on,” she says, and suddenly we are driving through the water.

I realize, halfway across, that it’s shallow, maybe a foot or two deep. She keeps us at a steady pace to get across. “All four bridges that connected the main road to these families were wiped out,” she tells me. Meaning there remains no access point to enter or leave this segment of the community. “But there’s a farmer over here who is letting all 14 families use this ford to get across.” We bump up the bank, through his yard and over to Rich’s property.

Surrounding her house are massive piles of debris and mud, downed trees and muck and rocks. Rich points to the bank of the creek, where there was once rows of oak and linden trees shading the area and a big sandy field beside it, where she had intended to plant her lavender. Echoing what I’d heard Elrod and Lieberman say, Rich talks about how much the shape of the creek has changed.

Rich has been consulting with environmental specialists to help restore the creek in a sustainable way. There are massive boulders and new rock beds, and they can’t be moved just anywhere, she notes. The specialist is helping her think through drainage and erosion, as well as which plants to replant and how to think about the future. “We need to have healthy respect for what the river needs,” Rich says. “Because she’ll take it either way.”

In addition to regular insurance, Rich also had FEMA flood insurance and a homeowners policy with a special provision for short-term rental coverage. But none of that will pay to replace the bridge or to restore the surrounding landscape. “It feels like we tried to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, but we are still left with minimal coverage by the agencies we paid into. I’m just not sure we could’ve done any more.”

Two weeks after the storm, the flowers that survived in her yard were going gangbusters. In recent years, Rich has been making flower headdresses. So she cut a few storm flowers on her property and made crowns. Something to share. Something beautiful.