‘I Heard a Lot of “We’re Gonna Die”s’
It was early on a Friday last September when Hurricane Helene sawed through the Eastern Seaboard, unleashing trillions of gallons of water over the Southern states. By Sunday evening, the denizens of Warren Wilson College, in western North Carolina, were winding down their second day of recovery. A lightbulb sun was dimming beyond the foothills on which the old farm school was built. The Swannanoa River had spilled into the college’s crop and grazing fields. Halls and facilities had been hammered by falling trees. Roads and trails were blocked by debris or erased by floodwaters. Power and internet service was severed.
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Damián Fernández, the president of the college and a social scientist by training, remained on campus, along with more than three hundred students and dozens of professors, administrators and staff members. He was updating students’ parents by dictating blog posts to a colleague in Florida whenever cell reception permitted. Helene, he told me later, had disrupted every connection, physical or digital, between the school and the world, sequestering the campus in a “vacuum of information.” “One bridge collapsed,” he said. “The other was underwater for the first day and a half. The roads were impassable, and we were not getting any information from the outside world. We were totally cut off.”
Total disconnection was a defining experience across the region. Like many nearby neighborhoods and mountain towns, Warren Wilson College quickly reverted into something “primordial,” a sort of commune where information was shared, as Fernández put it, “through oral traditions.” Each day everyone gathered at 8:30 a.m. near the cafeteria, which housed one of the college’s two generators, for a morning council — a routine that helped them strengthen morale, maintain a shared picture of their predicament and delegate the labors of survival.
Those labors were not unfamiliar to the students, who work the land as part of their curriculums. Some cut down branches and cleared brush. Others did the heroic work of the “poop crew,” supplying flushing water and emptying portable toilets. Groups lugged hay and water to cows, pigs and ewes. You find, in some of these students, an unusual marriage of sensibilities: The ruggedness of agrarian labor and bushcraft is coupled with the indiscriminate sensitivities of the liberal-arts undergraduate. Flags had been planted throughout the college’s fields to protect underground nests of yellow jackets; when those nests flooded, the wasps took to the air in a bewildered rage. Rosemary Thurber, a student studying environmental education, sympathized with the insects. She took meals by the garden where she worked and got “used to them crawling on my lips as I was eating.”
