The U.S. Forest Service has made major progress repairing the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests a year after Hurricane Helene’s devastation. Across the Southeast, forests suffered from flooding, landslides, and wind damage that closed roads, trails, and campsites critical to the region’s outdoor economy. 

I’ll never get that smell out of my memory. The stench of mud and rotting debris. Most of you reading this will immediately know what I’m referring to — the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024. And yet, that stench was already in my stored subconscious, seeing as I first encountered it with the aftermath of Tropical Storm Fred in 2021. 

It was a time and a place, and now that place is gone.

Or is it?

I came across some version of that idiom about time and place a few months ago, just as we at The Smoky Mountain News were beginning to discuss how to cover the one-year anniversary of Helene’s historic and deadly impact on this place we call home.

With billions in damages, limited state aid and considerable uncertainty surrounding federal funding, local officials are still pushing for streamlined disaster response to rebuild their communities months after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina.

(Editor’s Note: Amid the chaos of the recent floods from Hurricane Helene, this column wasn’t able to run in the Oct. 2 issue of The Smoky Mountain News due to space issues in the midst of crisis.)

Hello from Room 13 at the Seabirds Motel in Kure Beach, North Carolina. Saturday morning.

As the life-threatening emergency faced in the wake Hurricane Helene ebbs in Haywood County and the reality of the long road to recovery washes over the region, so too does the task of processing the traumatic event. On Monday evening, Meredith McCarroll and Nickole Brown led a workshop at Orchard Coffee in Waynesville to help people process that trauma through writing.  

Putting the truck into park, my girlfriend, Sarah, and I finally returned to our quaint apartment in downtown Waynesville Monday evening. After a long journey from the North Carolina coast back to Haywood County this weekend, it’s been a whirlwind of emotions.  

AGAIN. For the second time in three years, Haywood County, the highest east of the Mississippi River, experienced devastating flooding from a tropical weather system that reached mountainous Southern Appalachia’s narrow, rocky canyons and broad, lush river valleys — wiping out whole towns, inundating normally impregnable areas and crippling the communications and transportation infrastructure that powers public safety, commerce and the dissemination of information.