The leaves of Western North Carolina had just started to turn. My Ford hummed along Interstate 26 and its tires sang their steady note. Outside the leaves shimmered in every shade of green, yellow, and orange and in a few more days they would be at their peak. Half a mile further the mountainside bore a jagged, dirty scar of snapped treetops, bare limbs, and a thick spill of dark dirt glittering with bits of metal, cloth, wood, and concrete. I turned my eyes back to the road and cursed the heavens.
A few days after Helene ravaged our land I drove to Asheville, NC with a friend to spend the day working with World Central Kitchen. I’m no stranger to WCK and a few days earlier I’d emailed them two or three times offering to help in any way and received no response. Finally, they posted they were accepting volunteers and Brian and I headed up. The smell of warm dirty mud was in the air and Asheville looked and felt like it had just finished shooting an entire season of Walking Dead. The World Central Kitchen team wasn’t much better off. There was twenty five too many volunteers, not enough to do, and little in the way of organization. We spent an hour putting WCK stickers on to-go boxes when we should have been doing some heavy lifting. Finally, we found a real task and sunk our teeth into it. Driving home I decided I wouldn’t go back until the following week. The next day a friend of mine, Richard King, owner of the Pure & Proper restaurant in Black Mountain, made a forlorn social media post. He spoke of neighbors that had lost much, a lack of basic services, and he had joined forces with some other restaurant folks and turned an outdoor venue into a relief center. He had a crew of dedicated cooks working from sun up to sun down to feed anyone in need and that sounded like something I could help with. A couple days later I was in Black Mountain with a few professional cooks and over the next two weeks spent more time there than at my home.
Many souls were still unaccounted for, the thrum of military helicopters was constant, secondary roads were sketchy, Interstate 26 had been detoured, and the fall season in much of Western North Carolina was lost, yet every day there was filled with joy, smiles, hugs, and laughs. Neighbors hugged neighbors and traded stories of raging water and rooftop rescues. People that had lost so much were all around us; they smiled and thanked us, shook our hands and asked for the smallest of favors.
“Do you know where I can find a bathroom?”
“Do y’all have any clean underwear?”
“Could I get a cold beer?”
On one of those long days, I went outside, lay down on one of the many picnic benches and closed my eyes. I dozed off and woke up as a woman much younger than me told a frightening story of loss to a friend of hers. When I sat up and rubbed my eyes, she apologized for waking me.
“Chef the food has been wonderful, thank you so much.”
I’ve done this kind of work a few times before and I’m always encouraged by the kindness and compassion displayed by people that have suffered tremendous loss, and those that want to help. While in Black Mountain I met people from across the southeast that had just showed up because they felt that desire to help, and the vast majority of them were not affiliated with any particular organization. A group of lumberjacks from Raleigh, some retired gentlemen from Mississippi that came to make jambalaya for three days, some ladies from Charleston that were happy to make a few hundred sandwiches, a few college kids that washed a mountain of dishes, and two well-educated men that were cleaning the barely functioning toilets. Big trucks, small trucks, and cars of all sizes showed up with mountains of food and pallets of water. Clothes, shoes, pet food, beef, chicken, rice, eggs, and cheese appeared overnight and none of it had to be signed for. One day I spent hours organizing the walk-in cooler and freezer and the next morning there was half a tractor-trailer’s worth of fresh deliveries waiting for their turn in the cooler.
Each day I was approached by strangers who asked, “how can I help?”
After my final shift in Black Mountain, I was beat, so I had a cup of coffee before heading home. A few miles into my journey, one of those 250-gallon, steel caged water cubes slid out of the back of a too-small pick-up truck and scuttled across my path. A few miles later a massive round bale of hay spun out of another truck and plopped down on the side of the highway. Another few miles and a confused driver in front of me stabbed their brakes and went from 65 to 35 in a few tire-smoking feet. We all made it home safely and that night I told Amy it was as if the highway was full of people so exhausted they had lost their way or forgotten to secure their loads.
Today we are a week away from a contentious election and both sides claim all is lost if they are not elected. While in Black Mountain, it didn’t matter what side of the kitchen you were on, no one questioned your politics, religion, or authenticity. You were there to help a fellow human in need, or you were the one in need. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. He’s a man, walking down the road to Jericho, who finds another man, a stranger, beaten and bruised by criminals. Unlike the others on the same road, he stops and shows compassion to the one in need. This story is not unique to Christianity, many faiths have similar stories and along the way I’ve worked with people with wildly diverse spiritual backgrounds, but we’ve all had that one thing in common, we just wanted to help.
When I was a little kid and complained about something far out of my control, Dad admonished me with, “Only James Bond gets to save the world, but you can save a small piece of it”, then he encouraged me to do something helpful, such as cut the widow’s grass. Thank you to the chefs and friends that helped save a small piece of our world: Payton Conner, Teryi Youngblood, Kyle Swartzendruber, Pete Murray, Worth Burns, Carlos Baez, Brian Kenna, JR Bandy, Lora Pfohl, Daniel Moore, Carson Veit, Julian Loue, Ed Buffington, Angelica Wilkie, Amy & Tony Keely, Tommy Townsend and Holy Nativity Church, Ryan Gomez, and my lovely wife Amy.
As for Black Mountain, the relief kitchen has closed because the need has diminished. The donation center will be open for the foreseeable future.
~ John
