Ready the Boats: the Personal and Professional Collide Post-Helene

Six days before Hurricane Helene struck, I directed an amazingly joyous Pride Festival in downtown Asheville. It was my work at Pride that had connected me with a woman from the American Red Cross who, two days or so before Helene, gave a dire social media prediction for Helene, something to the effect of: Get ready now. No seriously, this will be bad. I figured, given her work, she knew what she was talking about. I had never lived through a bad hurricane, or any terrible weather event other than Buffalo snowstorms (and essentially if you stay off of the roads you will probably be just fine), so I didn’t quite know what to do. I said to my wife the first thing that popped into my head, “Ready the boats”. She rolled her eyes and kept reading her book. I grew impatient and insisted-”No honey, really, I think this will be bad”. So she reluctantly got out of bed and turned both of our kayaks in the garage right side up in case we had to evacuate by water. I got out the flashlights and candles and filled the bathtub.

All night we listened to the howling winds and steady rain. And all morning. The winds became stronger and stronger until I realized the tree grove on one side of our house may start to give, so I ushered everyone into our bedroom, on the opposite side of the house from the grove, and said we’d need to camp out in bed until the storm passed. I needed to make a quick trip into my daughter’s nursery across the hall to grab some diapers; she, predictably, followed and, while she was nestled in her closet as I stood over her reaching for a shelf, we heard the first loud snap. Instinctively, I wrapped myself around her, ran with her back to the master bedroom and there she would stay for the next several hours. My wife Amanda and I made quick trips into the kitchen to grab her fresh milk, and a few times we (probably unwisely) went outside to clear our driveway drain, knowing we could possibly be injured, but equally terrified our house would flood. In one of these trips, I saw the tree had smashed both of our cars and was on top of our garage. Within an hour of the first, another loud snap, this time the tree hit the nursery; when I gathered enough courage to look through the window, all I saw was forest and tree, pressing together against the glass. I feared the worst about the roof above, but said a quick prayer of gratitude that no limbs were as of yet inside.

The rain was just as relentless as the wind, and our garage flooded within about one inch of the main floor of our house. Had we not risked our lives to clear the drain, our home may have seen significant water damage. As quickly as the storm hit, the water receded by day’s end, and we walked out into our yard, a tree graveyard, a garage destroyed, and a nursery miraculously saved by a support branch of the second tree digging itself into the ground as it fell. The leaves of that second tree dangled on top of our roof as if to lightly knock a warning and blessing at once. The blessing: a quarter mile up the road in the 100 year floodplian (we lived just outside in the 500 year) they were doing swift-water rescues. Remember the boats?

Other blessings came in those early days. A tree worker moonlighting for extra money removed the trees from our roof on Day 2 for just $750 (we weren’t ready for the subsequent cost of removing them from our yard). A woman whom I had offered a canister of gas to so she could get to her destination later came by with $40 in cash we needed to stay fed for a few days, as all grocery online systems were down, and a ton of deli meat; she was a deli owner and the food would spoil if not eaten. Amanda and I harnessed our lesbian camping expertise and cooked on our camping stove some delicious meals, including cheesy grits and bacon. And we only lost the Internet for about a day because we learned we live along one of the main connection lines for the city.

Despite knowing how to get by on very little, four days after the storm hit, we lost a way to keep our daughter’s milk cold when our ancient garage fridge finally pooped out. We had spent hours in grocery store lines, but ice was a commodity we did not have luck finding, so we evacuated to Winston-Salem where two of my sisters live. We drove the one car that, while technically salvage and certainly unsafe to take on highways, still ran. There was no other way out, and no car repair shops nor car dealers were open for weeks within an hour of us. By the grace of something bigger than us, we made it out. The next day, our 15 month old daughter tumbled down my sister’s stairs and hit her head on the tile floor. My wife was supposed to be watching her, but she was on the phone with the car rental agency and got distracted. I had kept it together for days, but on the ride to the Urgent Care I started to melt down and pressed her as to why she had recently become so dismissive of me. Then the words, as devastating as the storm, rang out, “I want a divorce.” Our daughter, by the way, was ok (huge sigh of relief).

We spent weeks back and forth to Winston-Salem for respite from no water, and to return rental cars; I tried countless times to convince her this was all the storm and we would be fine, but she wasn’t buying it and our feeble attempt at marriage counseling didn’t help much either. We would both later learn that she had been dealing with Post-Partum Depression for over a year and that the storm caused her to snap somehow and lose touch with reality…a reality that would not return to her until several months of individual counseling and a month on medication. All told, we spent six months in a profoundly broken and sad home. Her recovery aligned unsurprisingly with our roof finally getting fixed and the debris in our yard being picked up. With grief and relief as our witnesses, we too picked up our marriage.

As you might imagine, leading a Pride organization, alongside a community facing human rights abuses and threats of terror, during this time, was nearly impossible. During the early days and weeks after the storm, I was proud that the organization I led operated a Distribution Center (out of an office we had acquired 8 days before the storm) and began mental health counseling for people affected by the disaster, which was to be clear everyone in Asheville and surrounding towns. Like many during that time period, we didn’t ask questions or argue about how to do things, we just banded together to help out one another and our community. Income didn’t matter at that point; staff were offered the same help as everyone else, as people rich and poor were suddenly without housing: the poor in the lowlands because of floods and the more well-to-do on mountains because of trees and landslides. Buncombe County alone, renowned for its beautiful Appalachian hikes, lost 40% of its tree canopy during Helene.

And then the DEI cuts came. My life from September 27th, 2024 through Pride month of 2025 is a blur of divorce conversations and google searches, roof repair estimates, hauling bottled water, washing sippy cups to pour new milk while trying to prevent my daughter from falling off whatever high thing she was attempting to climb, and fundraising appeals. I wish I could say that I held it all well, but the truth is, when catastrophe hit my house, my home, my family, my friends, my place of employment and my community at the same time, something had to give. I believed fiercely in the talent and dedication of my team, and perhaps that is why subconsciously I let that ball drop most. I didn’t have time for them, mentally or emotionally, and while I was somewhat aware of this, I was not aware of the toll it would take, particularly after the Executive Orders started coming out against them. I wish I could say that, as a manager, I responded to their unhappiness well, but I first learned of their concerns during a weekend in March when I was evacuated-again-this time due to the wildfires burning a few miles from my home from the tinder box Helene had caused. I am an asthmatic and ash was literally falling from the sky like rain. I responded, and took action regarding their concerns, but trust was eroding, I hadn’t addressed certain toxic behaviors early enough, and I began to self-protect.

Frustrations and resentment festered until, under the weight of expectations of a Pride organization during June, and my lack of knowledge of how to get things back on track, the team began to go their own way. I had saved my house, my home, my family, and the organization I was leading. But I could not salvage the spirit of my full team, even though I had always been successful in connecting to people I’ve managed. When the reckoning came, beleaguered and battle-worn, I chose to leave. I had planned to at any rate the following year as event management did not fulfill me, but the storm certainly expedited my departure. It was the right call, but it felt like another blow. I had a lot of anger about it initially: here I had sacrificed myself and nearly my family to ensure the organization was ok, but-even though hurtful things were said and done to me-the truth is also that I did not practice self-care in the aftermath of the storm and what I can now affectionately say around my wife was her “divorce decree”. I actually could not, while also tending to an infant/toddler and major home repairs. As the lead of an organization with a relatively new board, I had no boss to go to to ask for substantial time off or workplace support. I only had people expecting things from me, and then criticizing me when those expectations were not met. I did try to consult with experts, but by then it was too late. Just like the storm, the administration was dealing quick blows, and with our community already devastated by Helene, the badness was just happening too fast.

It is only now, several weeks after leaving, with my home office free of rainbow glitter and the hundreds of pages of contracts, permits, receipts, etc. (not to mention the roof repair paperwork) that I can see how far off balance I had gotten. Within days of Helene hitting, I coped the best way I knew how, the way my father coped with my mother’s mental illness: I buried myself in work. It likely saved the organization’s bottom line. But on this anniversary of Helene, I have decided that I’d like to remember the hurricane by never again losing myself to a job or a cause or to other peoples’ fault-finding (we all cope in different ways!). I almost lost my family, and it wasn’t just because of my wife’s mental health struggles. Why had I not noticed how much she was struggling pre-storm? Why hadn’t I seen her lack of desire to “ready the boats” was not just a dismissal of me, but of herself?

In the weeks and months to come, I have committed myself to level up my HR and Management knowledge, and to shutting down my computer at 5pm (except to do my own writing). It’s 9:01pm right now. Three months ago, I would have been pre-populating name tags for some event this time of night. I do not believe everything happens for a reason, but I do believe that we must make the best of whatever hand we are dealt. In the first few days after the storm I was just so grateful to be alive. I tried not to complain because people had died, and some people weren’t so lucky as to have a support branch save their home. When I look back, our house was the hardest hit in our neighborhood; both of our cars were totaled; the mental health sequalae that followed for my wife was severe; and the chaos the storm, and our current administration’s hate agenda, wrought on my former workplace was like nothing I had ever experienced. And so today I’d like to admit-I am still recovering, from all of those layers of crisis. I’ve got supports in place and I’m writing again-about work and about life. I’m deciding what type of roles really fulfill me (not hauling tabling materials to an evening event!) and how I’d like to show up in my new workplace. And I’m no longer avoiding the tree branches dancing on my roof.

So many of us in Asheville and beyond are still recovering. If that describes you in any way, that’s ok. Major disasters like Helene take years to recover from. We’ve made it a year, and it’s pretty astounding how far we’ve all come in that short period of time. I invite anyone reading this to give not only others grace but also oneself. We are survivors <3