Hurricane Helene: An Initiation (Part 1)

Surviving a 100-Year Flood... by stepping into True Power

I moved to Asheville, NC in May of this year to escape (for lack of a better word) my vampire mother and our co-owned house that legally bound me to her. Driving away from my forfeited home in Tennessee with 2 friends and only 2 trunk-fulls of belongings, I felt liberated — and, paradoxically, deeply heartbroken. But there was no time to dwell on my complicated feelings towards this strange woman I had finally succeeded in cutting cords with, after a lifetime of emotional warfare and psychological abuse. I needed to get my life in order. A life of my own.

So I spent a month in an AirBnB, looking for housing, while also working whatever gigs I could find. Had a brief (and racist?) stint as a maid, one god-awful shift at an Ingles grocery store, and a few genuinely awesome security shifts at Rabbit Rabbit, an outdoor music venue that paid us in the form of $20/hr, New York-style pizza for dinner, and really awesome live shows.

When my month-long reservation at the AirBnB was about to end and I still hadn’t found a place, I tried something I’d never tried before: I prayed. I trusted God. I relaxed and believed it would work out, somehow.

That’s when a man reached out to me from the Asheville Housing Search Telegram.

Let’s call him Will.*

(*Names will be changed throughout this story to protect privacy.)

Will was a blond man a few years younger than me, a sincere spiritual devotee, and had the air of a gentle but strong leader. He was the owner of a communal land named “Clarity” on a forested mountain in Swannanoa, just 15 minutes from Asheville.
He was renting out a stationary airstream — one of 7 bohemian structures on the land, which also included things like a tiny home and a renovated school bus, placed in a sort-of ring around a central 1-bedroom home. 

When I went to see the airstream in person, I was stunned to find that there was a night sky painted on the ceiling over the bed. “This is so synchronistic!” I told him. “I’ve been manifesting a van with stars painted on the ceiling!”

“How serendipitous!” he agreed.

Little did we know.

It was clearly meant to be. So I signed the lease, moved in on June 11th, and adopted a cat (Jupiter!) soon after.

I never really got to know my landmates beyond our occasional meetings, where we would discuss practical things, hold ritualistic sharing circles, and also share our visions for what the Clarity commune could become.

Despite my being emotionally guarded, there was a genuine sweetness in our acquaintanceships. For instance, some mornings I might find a bouquet of wild flowers in a repurposed olive oil bottle, waiting on my doorstep. If someone was going to the local spring to fill up their own jug, they’d fill up our jugs as well. Some nights, we might hang out around the fire pit, where they patiently taught me — city-slicker that I am — how to build a fire. Sweet gestures like that.

But I was so wrapped up in healing from my maternal estrangement that I mostly kept to myself. The fact that we all got along with each other just seemed like a nice bonus to living at Clarity, but not something I really thought to invest in.

Little did I know: my life would be in their hands soon, and theirs in mine.

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Day 1: Friday, September 27th

The non-profit job I’d landed in mid-August was draining the fuck out of me, with its demanding schedule and unclear responsibilities.

So when they sent us home early on Thursday and canceled work for the following day, I was initially excited. Finally: a day off from work! Now I could catch up on all my creative endeavors: a new multimedia project, writing, music, and most importantly: the launching of my immortalist church.

But when I woke up on Friday, after a night of extremely forceful winds and rain, the power had gone out. Every single thing I wanted to do, would have required my laptop.

Honestly, I felt kind of victimized at first.
But that selfish perspective quickly got reframed when my landmates started sending these photos to the group chat:

The tiny home had fallen into the back of the central house overnight.

A river of water was gushing down our mountain and creating mudslicks everywhere, pushing a thick wall of mud water against the side of the central house where Sally lived.

A tree had fallen and destroyed our community shed. The gushing water had also eroded the edge of our land on that side.

Realizing that there was a chance that my airstream — which sat at the edge of the land right next to a slope — could potentially slide down our water-logged mountain, I braved the violent storm to bring myself and my cat Jupiter to the central house, feeling that its foundation would make us safer there.

After the peak of the storm passed and it was safer to walk outside, our other landmates — Will, Valentina, and Jude — soon joined us, trudging barefoot through ankle-deep mud.
When I asked Will how he felt about all this damage, he quipped with a wily smile, “First you’re like ‘Fuck!’ and then you surrender.”

It was a joke when he said it, but it wouldn’t be for long.

Being the millennials that we are, we curiously roamed our new muddy landscape with a morbid sense of amusement.

After cracking some dark jokes and taking selfies together, we gathered indoors to continue talking…

... and then we got the knock on the door that changed everything.

The Hanged Man

It was our neighbor Terry, an older man who lived in the house up the road from ours.

"There's a man who's stuck in the trees," he said. "He's in bad shape. His back might be broken."

Our whimsical mood shifted instantly to one of foreboding. In sobering silence, we put ourselves together and followed Terry down the road, where we found a horror beyond our expectations:

A landslide had picked up our neighbor’s mobile home and obliterated it into a massive pile of debris, which blocked the road so no cars could drive on it now. The dangerous smell of gas leaked heavily into the air around us, burning my throat.

The neighbor was Jacob, a 70-year-old man, who was now hanging upside down, his back crushed into a steep slope of soil that ran alongside the dirt road. We presumed that when the house went sliding down the mountain, the man got dragged and crushed on its way down. He might’ve been there for hours by this point, because his face was already gray like imminent death.

The atmosphere felt liminal, dark, as if Jacob’s suspension between life and death had collapsed reality into a portal that lead to the Land of the Dead… and we were all teetering on the edge of that portal now.

Will stood over Jacob, and he wrapped his arms around Will’s back for support, but his grip was weak, and his arms and wrists were bent at painfully odd angles. He was in agony, barely breathing, and his consciousness was beginning to flicker in and out of this realm…

Will was calm but firm as he organized us into action: "We need to get him onto a flat surface so the blood isn't rushing to his head. I need help pulling him out, but carefully, because I'm certain he has broken bones.”

We all knew we weren’t supposed to move a body that might have a broken spine. But with the road blocked by a decimated house, and no cell service to call 911, he would definitely die soon if we didn’t at least try to do something on our own.

While Will stayed with Jacob, the rest of us rushed in different directions to find help, having to navigate the steep, muddy mountain now that the road was destroyed.

In a panic, I saw a white house down the mountain from us and started making my way towards it, slipping down slick mud and getting tangled in brambles and thorns as I descended, praying all the while: “Please God send an angel, send an angel out of nowhere to help this man! Please God, send an angel, send an angel.…”

I finally reached the white house and knocked. When a lady answered, I couldn’t get my words straight.

“I’m sorry to bother you — there’s a man — there was a landslide — his house got — he’s hanging upside down — we think his back might be broken — we can’t call 911 — do you have cell service? — we’re trying to find help — the road is blocked — he might die!”

She stayed impressively calm in contrast to my panic. She wasn’t able to call 911, but she could text them. When she’d sent the text, she reassured me that if 911 came to her address, she’d direct them up the slope to us.

But damn it, the road was a mudslide trench now. Even if 911 came in time, how would the emergency vehicle reach us?!

Defeated, I returned to the spot, where 6 neighbors had showed up to help us, mostly men. Sally and Valentina were far down the mountain, finding people and pointing them up to our road. So now, of the 5 Clarity residents, only Will, Jude and myself were there to witness what happened next.

The men formed two lines, one on either side of Jacob, and carefully, gently, firmly, pulled him off of the wet earth. Somebody found a wooden board, and they carefully placed him on it, face up, his half-closed eyes entranced upon the post-storm sky.

They had the idea that if we could walk him back to our land and over the dirt mound that led to our downhill neighbor’s backyard (which still had access to an intact road), we could drive him down in the neighbor’s truck to the main street and find help from there.

Call it optimism, call it denial.
But we had to at least try.

And so the men carried Jacob’s body board on their shoulders, their youthful, masculine strength contrasting with Jacob’s contorted form and pallid complexion.
The women including myself went ahead of them, clearing parts of fallen trees so they could walk the dirt road in a straight line.

We made a strategic stop at Sally’s house to lay Jacob down in the living room while the neighbor’s truck was being prepared. He was barely holding on.

The men encouraged Jacob, their voices powerful and deep.
“Come on, Jacob!”
“You didn’t make it this far to give up now!”
“You’ve got this!”
“We’re with you!”

When the truck was ready, we lifted him again and walked the remainder of the road to the neighbor’s yard. But as we got closer to the getaway truck that awaited us — so near, and yet so far — Jacob’s pulse faded; his agonized breathing became a mere whisper; his skin felt colder by the second.

They made the snap decision to try CPR. I’m sure we all knew it would be dangerous given that his spine was crushed, but no one dared say it.
I’m sure we also knew we were about to watch a man die.
I didn’t want to watch.
But I couldn’t look away. 

Solemnly, they lowered Jacob’s body board to the ground. One of the men, Oliver, knelt over him and attempted to stimulate his breath, gently pumping Jacob’s chest and then exhaling air into his slack mouth.

After a few rounds of this, Oliver checked Jacob’s pulse again.
Then he looked up at us and, without a word, said all that needed to be said. 

💔

Jacob’s irises, once-blue, now seemed impossibly gray.
His mouth gaped open, frozen in permanent awe of whatever mysteries he saw on his way through the death portal.

Immediately, an ayahuasca medicine song tumbled out of Oliver’s mouth, his volume reverently low amidst our disturbed silence. Then he put his palm on Jacob’s forehead and said a prayer under his breath, sending Jacob on, with love, to The Other Side.

“Dying” by Alex Grey

I’d always thought that if I encountered a dead body, I'd be too scared or disgusted to touch it. But I felt absolutely neutral as I helped the others lift Jacob’s body board once again, climb over the dirt mound, and place him into the bed of the pickup truck that would now serve a very different purpose: transporting a corpse.

Normally soft-spoken and reserved, Jude shouted, “Talk to him!" as the truck slowly crept down the gravel road, with Jacob’s stiff body all alone in the back of it, respectfully covered with a blanket.

We all looked at each other in awkward glimpses. We had all been varying degrees of “stranger” and “acquaintance” to each other before this moment… and now we had shared the experience of trying to save a man’s life but watching him die in agony. What do you even say?

Will immediately left to begin excavating the fallen tree on our land.
The neighbors solemnly returned to their homes.
Jude went back to his camper to be alone.

In shock, I went back into the central house…
laid on Sally’s couch…
stared at the ceiling, despondent and hollow…
and quickly shut down into a deep, dark sleep.

•••

They later found Jacob’s wife, Jolene, amidst the rubble of their house, and brought her body to the same detention center as his.
Even death did not do them part.

•••

We would later learn that this landslide had actually swallowed 4 entire houses on our mountain.

A Clearing

When Sally and Jude returned, and it was just the 3 of us, we ritually chanted and danced and breathed in our own unique ways, to clear the energy of Jacob’s death from the living room, lovingly sweeping his spirit out the open door, into the eery daylight.

In the evening, with all landmates present, we did some preliminary strategizing around our shared resources. We pooled all our food, water, and survival-related gear (flashlights, propane stoves, etc.). I warmed up some Jamaican jerk lentils that had been in my freezer, now thawed from the power outage, and we ate that together over some quinoa prepared by Sally.

Will and Valentina slept safely in their own spaces that night, but Jude and I still worried that our structures were landslide-prone, so we hung out in Sally’s house, sitting in a triangle on her living room floor.

In the darkness, a few candles underlit their faces with a mysterious, high-contrast glow. We talked and talked, and eventually, I confessed:

“Guys, I need to get high.”

Normally, I hate getting high and only smoke ceremoniously, about once per year. But right now, I wanted to feel anything but this.

“I got you.” Jude retrieved ‘the good shit’ from his camper, rolled us a joint, and we passed it around.
As the high kicked in, we stared at a candle flame in front of us and tried to figure out what Fire is, metaphysically. Where does Fire come from? Is it a substance? A force? An idea? And where does it go when it isn’t burning something?

As I watched them discuss the metaphysics of Fire, suddenly, a veil was lifted from reality,
and I could see that Sally and Jude were gods.
Literal, actual gods.
Gods, pretending to be humans, in plain sight!

Jude was so clearly Yama, the keeper of the gate between life and death!
Sally was obviously Agni, the god of fire!

“Uh, guys?” I ventured. “I suddenly see you as gods.”

“I see it, too!” said Sally.

“Me, too,” said Jude.

Something shifted radically. Now, instead of being poor little humans stranded on a mountain, we were gods, fully aware that this was all some dramatic cosmic game we were playing. We proceeded to discuss the day’s events with the kind of bemused detachment you can only get from having a god’s sky-eye view, marveling at the mystical machinations behind it all. 

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

- C.S. Lewis

And as we talked, completely unafraid, we kept remarking on how we felt like we were seeing through each other’s eyes. This was a glimpse into omniscience — a taste of our true state of oneness.
Sally was looking at me looking at her looking at me…
and Jude was looking at us looking at him looking at us…
Our little triangle was a trinity of sorts, self-informing and inter-reflective.

The cogs that keep the Cosmic Clock in motion — the genius, conscious, purposeful complexities beneath the surface-level of this reality — were never more visible than now.

Will would later describe the atmosphere of our beloved Swannanoa in this hauntingly succinct statement: “The veil is thin.”

Even after the high wore off, and I went to sleep for 12 hours straight, sleeping harder and more dreamlessly than ever before, and I woke up… the God-vision was still there.

I could see God in all of my landmates now — and it wasn’t going away, as if some shamanic vision had been permanently activated, and now we were along for the ride.

Something broke, maybe. A part of my brain. Or the illusion of separation itself. Who knows.

All I did know, was that the Great Spiral-Shaped Dimension-Sorting Machine known as “Hurricane Helene” had picked us up and hurled us, abruptly, violently, into this warped, strange parallel dimension…

…that was about to get much, much stranger.

This was our initiation.

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Read Part 2 here:

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