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By Tamar Reno

 

“When I die, let my ashes flow down the Green River” 

-John Prine 

 

Of course, Prine was singing about a different Green River, yet when I hear that song, the river I imagine runs through the Green River Gorge here in western North Carolina.

Like most of our rivers around here, the Green River is born of mountains. Traveling from its headwaters on the eastern slope of DuPont Forest in the Blue Ridge, it flows through the Blue Ridge Escarpment and eventually joins up with the Broad River. 

On its way down, it goes through the Narrows. The Narrows are the three-mile stretch of white water between the upper Green and the lower. With a downward gradient of over 100 feet per mile, they’re home to several class V rapids with names like “Go Left and Die.” Kayaking the Narrows isn’t for everyone.

On September 27, 2024, two hundred days ago, Helene came to Appalachia and changed everything, changed our forests and our rivers. Changed us, too.

Helene has been retired. The World Meteorological Organization announced that the name Helene (along with Beryl and Milton) has been retired from the list of names for Atlantic hurricanes. Hurricanes earn their retirement by being deadly. Yet Helene is like a retiree who won’t pack up her desk and go away.

While we finally got enough rain to put an end to the fires of the Black Cove Complex, our forests are still wrecked from Helene. Bo Dossett, a ranger for the state’s forest service, said, “We’re really only at the very beginning of seeing how that Helene debris is going to affect wildfires for the next decade, maybe multiple decades. We’re kind of flying blind. We’ve never seen something like this before.”

If Helene was a once-in-a-thousand-years storm, no one living has ever seen something like this before.

And our Green River? In some places, she’s not where she used to be. After more than six months of clean-up and backbreaking work, a walk through the Green River Cove will still leave you wondering how anyone made it out alive.

Those of us left standing are in uncharted waters. We’re like rocks in a riverbed, wondering how we’re still here.

There’s an expression—”holding the line.” Sometimes, it’s a tactical expression, like when a line of troops holds their position to prevent an enemy breakthrough. Sometimes, it means to hang on, as in don’t hang up the phone.

However you look at it, it’s what we’ve been doing around here for 200 days and counting. It’s what we are doing still. Some days we do it really well.

It’s one of those things that can’t be done alone. Most of the really good stuff can’t be done alone. Our capacity to reach out to each other, to hold the line, to be the line, to be a literal lifeline is only magnified when we know this. When we know this deep in our bones. 

We can hold hands through the Narrows.