Desecration and beauty all mixed together
Early October, and these mountains are already beginning to put on their glorious garments of autumn. A splash of red here or orange there, the green sleeves of many trees shading to yellow. In just a few weeks, we will be treated to that familiar splendor that beckons tens of thousands of people to get in their cars every year and drive for hours or even days just to get a glimpse of it.
How can we comprehend that this particular year, this beauty will become a canvas upon which the ravages of nature and fortune have carved and gouged out enormous pieces of the picture? Entire communities are gone, leveled or swept away, homes destroyed, countless people displaced, the death toll continuing to rise as rescue workers are able to forge a path into the remotest places hoping to find survivors.
The desecration and the beauty, side by side. The tension between the two is nearly unbearable, but this consideration of opposites only begins there.
Our spirits are uplifted and our hope rekindled one moment by specific tales of selflessness and heroism, or by the footage of volunteers banding together to help, swarming into devastated neighborhoods to clean, or to feed, or to offer hugs and solace to victims searching through rubble for keepsakes or whatever fragments of their lives can be salvaged from the mud and the debris.
We are heartened by all the businesses giving away food, or offering shelter, or donating proceeds from their sales to dozens of different charities. The number of people who lost everything and have nothing, including flood insurance, is staggering, their need too vast to contemplate. And yet, here are other people, doing what they can, an hour at a time or a dollar at a time.
Even so, these stories sit on one side of this tragedy, while on the other are stories of people fighting over gas in line at the Shell station, or people hoarding more resources than they need while others have little or nothing, or of people using their energy to complain bitterly about how unfair it is that their area is being ignored, while others are receiving too much attention.
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If ever there was a time to put politics aside and grab a shovel, this is it. In working shoulder to shoulder with another person to help someone, is it truly pertinent to know whether that person is a Democrat or a Republican, an immigrant or a local? If your friend’s life is saved by an illegal immigrant, is this grace somehow compromised?
And yet, there are stories all over social media, then repeated and spread in gyms and barber shops and grocery stores, conspiracy theories that the government is “in on it,” somehow creating the storm in order to destroy these towns so that they can buy up all the ruined land and control the lithium mines, which will be worked by illegals, who will then be granted citizenship while anyone who protests this nefarious plot will be executed or deported.
I am sure I got some of these details wrong, but I’ve paid as much attention to this nonsense as I am willing to in order to convey the gist of it. I am sure it is much more intricate and “dark” than that, but I’ll leave that work and obsession to the people who need it and the creeps who promote it.
We are just over a month away from selecting a new President. One of the candidates is spreading falsehoods about the government’s response to the hurricane, using an incomprehensible tragedy in an attempt to make political hay, accusing the current administration of using relief funds to aid illegal immigrants.
None of this is true, but it is consumed by his followers and then widely disseminated to compete with real stories of actual relief efforts, the progress as well as the remaining challenges.
Again, the tension between two things.
Finally, there is the unimaginable personal toll, the grieving of those who lost everything and have no idea what comes next, or when, or how. Or the grieving of those who were spared and are experiencing “survivor’s guilt”—why them, and not us?
Drive down any road — the ones you still can drive down — in Western North Carolina, and you see giant trees blown over every quarter mile or so while their neighbors remaining standing. Why this tree, and not that one? This is exactly how it feels regarding our friends and neighbors. The suffering feels so random, so unfair, and the future feels so uncertain, so remote.
The grieving, the anger, the anxiety, all too real and pervasive. And yet the people come, not to see the beauty but to be the beauty. That is just as real.
And those autumn leaves and brilliant blue mountain skies. They are coming, too, so beautiful and astonishing that it hurts. It has never hurt more.
(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
