A year ago, had you stood in front of Mountain Inn and Suites on the outskirts of Erwin, Tenn., to your left you would have seen four or five small businesses and some storage units, flanked by a Baptist church. To your right would be a Mexican restaurant, Panchos & Amigos, joined to a convenience store and gas station. Approximately 200 yards behind them you’d have seen the hospital, opened less than five years earlier.
Stand in that same spot today, and you’ll see that the small businesses have vanished.
On Sept. 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene smashed them up or swept them down swollen creeks and the Nolichucky River, which had flooded its banks. The church was heavily damaged, but is now finally holding worship services again. Mountain Inn & Suites was left with six inches of mud in its first floor, and the pump apparatus for the outdoor pool was destroyed. The mud was removed by hand, and the motel reopened at the beginning of the summer. The gas station is back in business, but Panchos & Amigos remains closed while undergoing repairs. The hospital was so severely damaged – some patients and staff had to be rescued from the rooftop – that it will never reopen.
In mid-August, when I stayed in Mountain Inn & Suites, the desk clerk, Rhonda Caldwell, showed me aerial photos revealing the raging flood waters. Like so many individuals, churches, and other organizations in the community, Caldwell stepped up and helped those who had lost so much. At one point, she was delivering some donated fast food meals to victims of the flood housed in the town’s other motel, a Super 8. A woman from Asheville, who had lost her car, her purse, her phone, and everything else, began weeping at this act of generosity. “Can I hug you?” she asked. “This is the first hot meal I’ve had in two days.”
Meanwhile, from all over the country, people contributed foodstuffs, clothing, bottled water, money, and more to the region. This outpouring of help was not only a material boost to residents of these mountains, but raised morale as well.
It’s always encouraging to read and hear of such acts of generosity – and there were many of them both in Erwin and in large parts of western North Carolina. Such stories remind us of the good in our country and its people, especially given the bleak take so often reported by our media.
But another part of this story should also inspire us: resilience.
The ability of the average human to make a comeback from disaster, on a grand-scale or in personal matters, can be stunning, as it was for me in Erwin. Here, 10 months after Helene, the grit and tenacity the hurricane fostered in Caldwell and others was still palpable. None of them will forget that day of destruction – everyone in the town dates events by Helene – but no one I met had simply thrown up their hands and surrendered. They tended the homeless, broke out the shovels and wheelbarrows, and set about repairing the damage to their businesses, pitching in to help one another.
Throughout my life, I’ve seen this species of strength at work. When my dad long ago divorced my mom, for example, leaving her with three children still at home, the shock of that abandonment initially hit her like a knock-out blow. But she eventually shook it off, setting out to make a life for herself and her children. No complaints, no whining, no raised fist to God or circumstance. If anything, her faith deepened.
And that’s just one example I can recount from life.
Literature and history provide countless similar examples of interior fortitude, or its absence, when faced with calamity. King Alfred the Great refused to give up his people to the Viking invaders; the stouthearted girl Mattie Ross in “True Grit” who relentlessly pursues his father’s murderer; Hemingway’s Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea;” Corrie ten Boom’s faith in a Nazi prison – the stories would literally fill several large libraries.
Sooner or later, all human beings suffer some sort of calamity that knocks them flat, whether it be a flood, a death in the family, a failed business venture, or some other wound. Each time, we have to choose between staying down or getting back on our feet. The husband whose wife unexpectedly dies, leaving him not only demolished by grief but with the care of children, either pulls himself up and takes the reins of parenting and work, or he may go the way of self-pity, medicating his despair with drugs or alcohol.
In her 2008 Harvard Commencement speech, J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame concluded of her years of struggle and poverty, “[R]ock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
That’s the iron code which defines resilience.
—
The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Flickr-Official Photo by Christian Martinez, Office of Governor Glenn Youngkin, CC BY 2.0
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