The last time I saw Dan Shead, it was at his rural Rolling Prairie home, where the retired industrial arts instructor was teaching my three-and-a-half-year-old grandson how to use a power drill in the construction of a birdhouse. Two weeks later Dan was visiting in the mountains of North Carolina when Hurricane Helene hit.
And, we’ve been here ever since. I think today is day twelve for us, and eleven of them without power.
Dan Shead is, like me, a retired New Prairie High School teacher, I spoke with him Monday through our cell phones.
We are currently in a mountain community, five miles south of a small town called Black Mountain, North Carolina which is twenty miles east of Asheville, North Carolina. My wife, Sue, and I, we’re visiting her sister, Barbara Syburg at her place of residence, a mountain.
After a rough few days, Dan told me things have improved.
We’re doing okay, now. We’ve got quite a bit of a build-up of water, paper products, and things that we need. So these people up here are okay… We’ve had probably, I think, seven helicopter landings on the area just outside off of the driveway where Sue and I and her sister are staying. And these guys, these are cowboys with helicopters, and they were dropping off medical supplies, generators, bottled water, medicine, that sort of thing, in the first week.
Dan says that while basic necessities are accessible, it will be a while before power is restored.
I don’t anticipate power returning to these people, sadly, for at least another two weeks or more. They just, the road to get the power equipment up here, the highway, is damaged to the point where I don’t think they can get there, there’s poles down, there’s lines laying across the highway. It’s gonna be awhile before they can get it so they can get those large electrical trucks and poles up here to do the repairs that’s needed to get power back to the area.
Dan told me that he, like the area’s residents, didn’t realize how bad the storm would be.
They had no idea it was coming because of the fact that the storm met with that other front that was there and it just stalled. It just started dropping rain on them.
The willingness of people here to share and help each other has been pretty impressive. You know, I don’t know a lot of these people personally because we don’t live up here. They know my name, first name. They know my face. And they’ve really been willing to help each other out. A lot.
Among other things, Dan himself cleared brush from a field in order to make it easier for helicopters to land. I asked him what’s a day like up there.
Because we have no power, we’re fortunate because we do have a small portable generator. I’ll get up early in the morning and the only thing we’re running the generator for is we try to keep the food that we have in our refrigerator from perishing because we’ve got to try to keep it chilled, so we’ll run the generator for a while. We’ve not been able to, we don’t have a pump that will pump water, so we’ve been bathing out of bowls or a five gallon bucket and fixing meals, if we have to heat something up, fortunately my sister-in-law’s house has a fireplace so I set up a little grill type thing in the fireplace. If we need, basically, we’ve been heating water in the morning because we both like a big cup of coffee. So, we’ve been boiling a little water and any water that’s left over we use to wash the dishes. Any water we’ve got we save because if you’re washing your body, you rinse it out and put it in a bucket because we’ve gotta use that to flush the toilet because that’s the only way we have to be able to flush the toilet.
A lot of nearby areas have it worse, he told me.
There was no loss of life directly where we are, but I do know the town, Swannanoa, that I mentioned, they lost a lot of people. Lake Lure, a little town south of here, a resort area, there were unfortunately a lot of people that perished down there. There are places that they can’t even get to. The roads are washed out and they still have not been able to get vehicles up there to see if they can find them. I do know that the law enforcement around here are using drones to travel over areas to see if they can see any signs of life and they’ll do everything they can to send rescue crews to try and find them if they see therm.
We’re doing okay. And the people up here say that to each other every day when we meet. We’re very fortunate. There are some people near us down the mountain that are far less fortunate and we’re telling the like the army national guard was up here yesterday with a Humvee that had supplies and we said, we tell them, take them someplace that needs them more than we do because right now at this point, we’re doing okay.
I’m standing on a deck and I have the, one of the most gorgeous views of the Smokey Mountains or the Blue Ridge Mountains. And people would pay good money to see what I’m looking at right now.
Dan told me that he and Sue are hoping to be back in their Rolling Prairie area home in time to vote in the election next month. I’m hoping to see him at the next New Prairie retired teachers breakfast the Friday before that.
Music: "Aqualung" by Jethro Tull
