Dinner Leftovers #4

A collection of stream-of-consciousness poetry, excerpts from unfinished drafts, & word vomit from years past

Originally published in September 2024, following Hurricane Helene

Hurricane in the Mountains

O n e ~ Time & Space

I’ve decided the best way to do this is the way I do everything: very imperfectly. A series of first drafts and surface level excavation, so I can reach the inner liquid mess of how this has changed me. Pull one thread at a time. Maybe this will help people who haven’t lived through this kind of disaster yet understand what is coming for them. Maybe they feel it already.

This is for me, mostly. I can't organize my feelings or reality filters until I write them. I can't find the words without an audience to speak to or respond to. My own introspection only exists in relationship, and this is the theme emerging.

Living in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene has turned my attention towards the impact of relativity, not just in terms of direct lived experience but in terms of personal development in intimate or inner-circle relationships. This kind of natural disaster is designated as a “before and after event”--meaning, those of us experiencing it will now map our life story according to what things were like before the floods and what things were like after the floods. It is a life-changing, life-defining event. I want to call it a “once-in-a-lifetime event” but of course that is only wishful thinking. This kind of natural disaster is a normal i.e. increasingly common occurrence now, and soon everyone will know life before and after a “historical” climate catastrophe. Soon my children will barely recall what life was like before these events revealed that nowhere is safe, not even a supposed climate safe haven like WNC.

The relativity of life before and after the hurricane was immediate; one of the first things I noticed was a shift in my experience of time and space. The only comparable experience I had before the storm was raising a newborn, when my experience of time was synced with my infant, and every hour felt like an eternity because, for a newborn, deep presence, exponential development, and the immediacy of present need or fulfillment is all that exists.

After the storm, the places that I could once access by car in 20 minutes and easily reach by phone in an instant were revealed to be miles and miles away. They had always been miles and miles away of course, but cars and cellphones had closed the distance. Without cars and cellphones, the regions just over the mountain (once 10 minutes away) were now about two hours by foot, Asheville (once an hour away) was in a different country, my family (once four hours away) was across an ocean.

Without communications, there was inability to make sense of what was happening beyond a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, a terrible knowing in the visceral information received through my body, reflected back to me in the wide, worried eyes and clenched mouths of the people around me, in the way the air smelled, in the way the trees mourned, in the way the vultures circled, in the way the gentle misty rain that once filled me with the delight of autumnal coziness now filled me with terror that the storm would circle back and finish us off.

It felt like we were on an island. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was distinct, specific, uncanny. It felt exactly like being on an island where everything was more or less intact but knowing–FEELING–that our island was surrounded by utter destruction and we had no contact with the larger world. That the larger world had no contact with us and was oblivious to what had just happened. That sense of being surrounded by devastation and being cut off from the larger world only deepened as days (that felt like years) began to pass, and we heard nothing from people outside the mountains or even from people in neighboring towns. Our entire universe became our apartment complex, our neighborhood, and the town square.

On day two or three I remembered I had a car radio, but all the channels were talking about sports. Western North Carolina had been completely wiped off the map and the radio stations were talking about sports. We lived in the age of cellphones and internet access and the radio stations were talking about sports.

The cellphones didn’t work. No one knew why the cellphones didn’t work. We kept asking each other, “What about the satellites? Don’t they run off satellites?” Even the walkie talkies that we knew the fire stations and volunteer responders would use were unable to reach the South Toe. There was a break in the chain.

So we relied on word of mouth, we focused on the immediacy of our needs and the people in closest proximity: food, water, gas, figuring out who was dead and who was trapped. As it turns out, our relationship to time and space is intricately dependent on communication and transportation; our experience of time and space is defined by how efficiently these technologies can close the gaps. In Burnsville, people have four wheelers, motorcycles, and horses. We did have cars, of course, but only some of them had gas, and none of the roads were passable. We were trapped.

On day three or four, people figured out they could send text messages from new iPhones to other new iPhones. A man walked around town square with a clipboard taking down messages for those of us who knew someone with the latest phone and updated software. I knew one person with the newest iPhone, my mother. I knew only a few phone numbers by heart, including my mother. I wrote on the clipboard: “We are ok. Days without power, no service. People in town are helping.” I had no idea if she would receive it, but it felt like a miracle to try.

I could go on…I had no maps, y’all. I had no maps. The roads were impassable but even if I had been able to get us out of town I had no idea how to navigate on my own and I had no maps. And yes, that is a generational curse that I will be amending now that I had this experience, but also…it was okay that I didn’t have maps and I suck at navigation, because there were so many people around me who had maps and who knew how to navigate. That’s the thing, you know? All of these skills of self sufficiency are only life saving if you find yourself alone. And sometimes we do find ourselves alone, so we do need some of these most crucial skills. But a lot of the time we are not alone, and we can rely on each other.

Taking a breath here.

Creator: Colby Rabon. Copyright: Colby Rabon 2024.

Hurricane in the Mountains

T w o ~ Things Weren’t Great Before the Hurricane, You Know?

No, I had not met my neighbors. But in my defense, we had only lived in this apartment for a year, and within the first week I was viciously harassed, reported, and threatened with physical violence by my nextdoor neighbor over the sounds of my neurodivergent 6-year-old. So that really put me off for a while. I just wanted to be left alone; to live in peace and solitude. It was on my list, I promise. It was on my list not just because of my values or my ideals, but because I was well aware we would need to know our neighbors if there was ever a climate catastrophe. I was going to make banana bread. But the hurricane hit before I got around to it.

Just like the hurricane hit before I got around to stocking the apocalypse pantry. I cannot tell you how many times I looked at my pantry and thought to myself, “This is not going to cut it if there is ever an emergency,” but I was still so depleted from Covid and the resulting divorce and loss of housing and single motherhood and gig economy…life before the hurricane was bad, but it turns out that was the best time of my life, and I would choose it again. The full spectrum of suffering. Even my suffering was privileged. Maybe yours is too. It's like that for some of us. It's weird.