Search and Rescue

I have spent the last three weeks in the Carolina mountains and in coastal Florida. I’ve been there not as a storm-tossed reporter with a nose for news, but rather as a man blessed with the chance to work remotely who has chosen to live in two of the boskiest dells God ever made.

This is a tale of two hometowns. For both, it has been the worst of times. For one of them, it has been unimaginably bad. Here is what I saw, uninformed by media accounts, to which I had no access until last Friday.

Over the first eight days of Helene’s rampage through western North Carolina, I did not encounter in or around my mountain town a single representative of the federal government. No house check. No leaflet. No email, no phone call, no text. There were rumors of a FEMA outpost setting up at a shopping center in Brevard, which is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains 45 minutes to the east. Three of my neighbors, in one formulation or another, had the same reaction to those rumors: “Damn. If I could get to Ingles, why would I need FEMA?” (Ingles is to North Carolina as Publix is to Florida. It’s a beloved supermarket chain that, along with the kitchen staples, offers propane, hydrogen peroxide, prescription drugs, an ATM, and a place to exchange hopeful information.)

By day three or four of Helene’s rampage, “FEMA” had become a verb, meaning, of course, to screw people over by overpromising and underdelivering. For some reason, public disdain has been directed not so much at the head of FEMA, or even at our addled commander-in-chief, as at Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. I would advise him not to helicopter in for a self-congratulatory tour. The visuals would not be good and the audio would be X-rated.

How bad was Helene’s rampage? Unimaginably bad. A “mountain community” is an area where most of the people live up a mountain road from the interstate. In many cases, there’s one way up and one way down. When rocks slide over the road, or when rushing mudwater tears it apart, or, most frequently, when falling trees block it, there’s no way up and no way down. Your only option is to shelter in place. If you still have a place.

So, to answer the first question from you (mostly post-industrial) readers: Yes, you can survive on rainwater and small animals and serving as your own doctor for most injuries. What you may not know is that it will take you all day to do so. Survival is a full-time job, unless, I suppose, you happen to have attended Army Ranger school.

And to address your second question: Yes, some people stood up and stood out. My experience has been that you never know who those people will be — those people who will rise to a rough circumstance even as others are defeated by it — and I want to bear-hug them here:

Franklin Graham was here, there and everywhere, bringing water and other basics to parched survivors in their battered shelters.

Elon Musk fought through bureaucratic barriers to bring his marvelous Starlink technology to some mountain people cut off from family, friends, and co-workers.

Local law enforcement — sheriffs and deputies — left their uniforms and squad cars at home, jumped in their pickups, and joined volunteer chainsaw gangs clearing impassable roads. They served and protected lives during long days. And then they saved lives, off the clock.

And the Baptists. I will never again look at a Baptist in the same way. Within 24 hours, it seemed that every Baptist church in the mountains had spontaneously morphed into a field hospital, a childcare facility, a food distribution depot, or some other hive of charitable activity. Uninvited, people would stop at a church parking lot and drop off a few bottles of water, a packet of bandages, an armful of firewood. Uninstructed, young families would gravitate to the church, pop the trunk, and pack away as many diapers, as much formula, as the volunteers could spare. People came for a shower, to borrow a satellite phone, to seek tips on missing relatives, or just to embrace another human being. It was a bloody miracle.

By last Friday, on our mountain at least, it was all systems go. Internet and cell service had been restored, the power was on, even the plumbing had moved back indoors. A kid with a new toy, I did a bit of channel-surfing and spotted several brand-name TV reporters updating the nation on developments in the “mountain community” of Asheville, North Carolina. It’s a small city, Asheville, with good hotels, fine restaurants, toney art galleries, and a regional airport. It’s full of yoga instructors, aging hippies, affluent retirees, and Harris voters. In other words, it’s unlike every other part of western Carolina. All of those TV reporters telling us about the “mountain communities” were filmed wading through the flooded streets of downtown Asheville. Which should have been a tipoff. In the Smokies, water tends to run downhill. It collects not in the mountains, that is, but at the bottom, in what’s called a valley. I don’t know about you, but there are moments when my confidence in the media wavers.

Florida is different. I live on a barrier island that the locals feel no embarrassment in calling Paradise. Life is perfect, but those of us of a certain age know that perfection has never found firm footing in the human condition. Most Floridians suspect that we’re living on borrowed time: Sooner or later a hurricane, inevitably to be known as the Big One, is going to get us. (Which calculation led your shrewd correspondent to buy a mountain home as a refuge from hurricanes. But enough about me…)

How bad was Milton’s rampage? For those directly in the path, it was the worst of times. Pets, property, precious things — all gone. Hopes and dreams — most of them gone, all of them deferred. (McDonald’s reopens in 60 days. Mom-and-pop retail, what makes a town a town, disappears.)

For the rest of us, those outside the path, it was a feeling of bone-deep relief; it was the exhilaration, as they say, of being shot at without result. We knew that the recovery would begin immediately and that we would be in good hands.

Rick Scott, who served as Florida’s governor from 2011 to 2019, set the standard. He enlarged the governor’s job description from chief executive officer to chief executive officer and director of hurricane preparation and recovery.

Ron DeSantis has raised the standard by another notch. My wife and I saw his handiwork as we dashed back to the mountains the day before Milton was projected to make landfall. As we made our way up I-95 through Georgia and South Carolina, we saw a tree-removal truck moving in the other direction. Then a linesman in a power company truck. Then trailers with earth-moving gear. Later, there were clusters of trucks, and, finally, a long convoy, all of them heading south to Florida. Ron DeSantis must have been working the phones, calling in help from across the region.

When it comes to FEMA, DeSantis had their number a few storms back. The operative word in that Federal Emergency Management Agency name is not, as popularly supposed, “Emergency.” From my personal observation, FEMA doesn’t search for people. FEMA doesn’t rescue people. FEMA provides the “Management” for the people who do that vital and dangerous work. FEMA does the more refined work described by the soft nouns of Washington bureaucracy: FEMA does liaison. FEMA does outreach. FEMA does collaboration. Like clockwork, it convenes meetings to set the time and place for the next meeting.

Last week, DeSantis blurted out what he believes to be the truth about FEMA. He says that he sees it as a kind of bank, as an institution that can provide financial resources to those who do the real work of search and rescue and recovery.

Everybody needs a bank. It will shake out in due course whether FEMA will be as generous with the bank’s depositors — taxpaying American citizens — as it has been with illegal immigrants.

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