You couldn’t know beforehand what it was going to be like. It didn’t matter that you were paying attention to the weather forecast and hearing the dire warnings about how bad it could get. And nothing in all those images and videos you had seen of other disasters in other places at other times could prepare you. Even when you first woke up to it, you didn’t realize how violently the world had changed overnight.

First was the sound of rain pounding down outside the window and the howl of the wind when you get up a couple times in the night. When you finally awake hours later in the morning light the sound is just the same. Then you look up from the bed to the ceiling overhead and see a water stain that was never there before, so it’s get up, get dressed, climb up into the crawlspace and find the leak, stick a bucket under it and wonder why the roof is leaking when the shingles are only five years old. You come back downstairs to hear the electricity is out, then someone tries the faucet. At first water comes out and all seems okay, but then the flow slows to a faltering trickle before cutting off altogether. The water has been out before, during a flood some years back, and again for maintenance on the water lines and most recently due to freezing in an extreme cold snap. It was out for just a day or two in those instances, but even so it caused problems and the situation in the bathroom started to get nasty. The electricity has been out before, too, lots of times. It’s an inconvenience at the least, but also a safety concern. Pitch black darkness after sundown, traffic lights out at busy intersections, no heat or air conditioning – so many problems when the grid fails. Loss of water service and loss of power are misfortunes that have happened before. But you can’t remember them happening simultaneously before. The storm must have been bad. You think that, but you still don’t know the dimensions of the thing, only how it’s affecting the immediate environment of your home.

You decide to look at the news online. Last night you read how the hurricane would land on the Gulf coast of Florida, then travel north-northwest through Georgia and South Carolina before arriving in western North Carolina. There would be lots of rain, the forecast said, maybe as much as twenty inches. There would be high winds too. Now you look to read about how it all went, but you can’t make connection. The Wi-Fi is down because the power is out, but you figure the phone should still connect to the Internet, only it doesn’t. “No Service” is all you get. It takes a while for this to register. No power, no water, no cell service – what’s going on? The storm must have been very bad. Remarkably, as you sit there sizing up the situation, the rain gradually subsides, then stops altogether.

There isn’t much of anything happening inside the house, so you decide to go outside and have a look around. You gather up the dogs and a couple family members come along and you head out, checking along the way to see if flicking the light switch does anything. It does not. Outside first thing you notice are the deep ruts in the gravel drive, where a torrent of runaway rainwater made channels for itself to move in. Then you leave the driveway and walk out on the road, seeing branches lying about everywhere as you make your way up the hill, walking through a carpet of leaves and twigs. At the top of the little hill where the road bends left into a T-intersection you see the first fallen tree. It’s a good size tree, a northern red oak, maybe two and a half feet in diameter, seventy-five feet or so tall, fractured at its base, showing the hidden rot in its core. That big oak is leaning at a forty-five-degree angle up against another big oak growing nearby, one mighty trunk held up by another, with the whole expansive top of the fallen tree coming to rest on the roof a house.

You walk on a short way through more tree debris and come to the intersection of another road and turn left to follow it. You see more trees down, and big limbs down, and another tree laying on a house. You get to a place where the way is completely blocked by big trees that fell on either side of the street, crashing toward each other. A great tangle of power lines is trapped beneath them. You work your way around the jumble, picking a pathway through a maze of interwoven tree limbs. Just beyond that place is another where multiple large trees lay on the ground, including a gigantic white oak that must have carried five hundred pounds of English ivy. These trees grabbed a great mass of many wires as they toppled, and pulled with such force they snapped the tops off two telephone poles, one on either side of the street. The walk goes on like this for a mile or so, trees down everywhere, snapped power lines lying about everywhere, streets completely blocked, trees laying on houses. You look upon it all in a state of shock. What you see are scenes like those on the news from someplace where a disaster has happened, only there it is in real life right in front of you and it isn’t someplace else – it’s your neighborhood, the someplace you call home.

Now you reach Point Otis, your made-up name for a high piece of ground with the municipal golf course on either side. Here there is a three-way intersection where until last night stood a picturesque persimmon tree, with two crooked trunks and a single shaggy head of leaves just beginning to color, loaded with small, round, orange fruit. Standing no longer, the tree now sprawls across the road, power lines pinned beneath it. You look at the crown of the tree, now at eye level, seeing all the persimmons, hundreds of them, probably more than a thousand. Your mind reflexively thinks of the local wildlife that would have eaten that fruit, the bear, deer, fox, raccoons, possums, turkeys and so many other smaller creatures. That tree was making food to fatten a host of living beings before the winter’s chill, and the oaks that fell with all their acorns were doing the same. Those trees were also homes for countless birds, mammals and insects. The storm wreaked havoc for the people in its path, but it punished the wildlife too. There’s not much time to think about this. From Point Otis, where the picturesque persimmon tree once overlooked the three-way intersection, a person can look southeast down the short length of the eighteenth hole of the municipal golf course and beyond to the two-lane ribbon of asphalt that follows the Swannanoa River.

Nowhere is the Swannanoa River majestic, but in some places it is scenic enough. The river’s headwaters are way up in the Great Craggy Mountains, starting out as two streams that come together tumbling through the mountain forest, building volume before feeding into Burnett Reservoir. Below the reservoir the Swannanoa continues through the forest before finding its meandering way through rural countryside. The river flows through the towns of Black Mountain, Swannanoa and Wilson heading west with US 70 riding alongside. The Swannanoa River is modest and lazy and not very clean as it winds its way through East Asheville, heading toward a meetup with the larger French Broad River in West Asheville, not far from the River Arts District. When the river runs through East Asheville it’s generally around one-hundred feet wide. Sometimes you can just barely see it when the sun glints off the water, when you’re standing about a quarter mile away at Point Otis and know where to look. Now, on this day so surreal, with horizontal trees all around and power lines snaking underfoot, you look down the hill and at first you don’t recognize what you see. Everything’s different, like big areas in the valley below have been erased or made blank. It doesn’t make sense at all. What is that you’re seeing? Oh… Is that water down there? Is that the little old Swannanoa River down there, all swollen like the Mississippi in lower Louisiana? The road is gone. All the buildings that fronted the road, mostly businesses, poke out like shipwrecks in the water. The front nine of the municipal golf course, which runs along one side of the road with the river on the other, is nowhere to be seen. It’s all a lake now, and although there must be a strong current, it looks all placid. The whole scene is ridiculously calm, a big, dull grayish-brown lake with trees sticking up out of it here and there, small rounded mountains in the distance, gently bucolic under the most obscenely pleasant sky. When you first set out on the walk the rain had only just stopped, the sky was gray and the air was heavy. Now, less than an hour later, the sky shows pretty blue in places with high white clouds and the air is fresh, the temperature perfectly mild. Nothing seems real.

How horrible for people who live by the waterside when the flood comes! An unstoppable natural force rises up and swallows your house, swallows your yard, your car and every blessed thing you own. It will swallow your life if you don’t flee from it. Not so many people live along the Swannanoa River in East Asheville, but some do and elsewhere many more people do. Around here the land along the river is commercial property, businesses of varying types, but also some green space, a park and an animal shelter. You think of these things because they must be all gone now. They were too close to the river and now the river has swallowed them. How much rain must have fallen and how quickly it must have come down! You look away from the flooded wasteland below and scan the damage all around you. The trees were laid low by another unstoppable natural force. How hard the wind must have blown to topple these giants, to send their massive forms crashing to earth! What would it be like to witness that, to be out in the dark and wild night and see the trees thrashing about as if possessed, shaken for all they’re worth by an invisible power of unimaginable strength, lacking any semblance of reason or feeling?

You’ve seen enough. You turn for home. All along the walk there have been people outside to a degree you never encounter ordinarily, standing in front of their houses, blinking in disbelief at the new reality. Small clusters of neighbors gather together, wearing worried expressions, murmuring amongst themselves in hushed tones. You walk by people you’ve never seen before and they look right at you and say hello, ask if you’re making it alright, ask if you can believe what happened. You pass a woman your age standing in the street, a look of fearful urgency on her face. Two young women stand in a clearing nearby, holding cell phones up to the sky in primitive supplication. “Are you getting any signal?” the woman your age calls out to them. Now there are cars on the road. People are venturing out, trying to go someplace, maybe trying to get away. There’s nowhere to go. Street after street is blocked by fallen trees and downed power lines, and heading down to where the river road used to be is impossible. There’s only one way to drive out of this neighborhood and it leads to the nearby highway, but people don’t know that so they drive up one road and down another, around the block and into situations where the only way out is backing up. The people in the cars look more nervous than the people outside their houses. One car pulls up alongside you and the window rolls down. An anxious older man is driving, an upset older woman is in the passenger seat. They ask if you know where a certain road is and if it’s passable. It happens that you know the road and took note that it was open when you passed it, so you tell the couple how to go and that the way is open and they overflow with thanks. “My sister lives there and we can’t reach her!” the upset woman says and the car drives off.

You finally arrive back to your house. You look around your yard and it’s a mess, with leaves and sticks and tree limbs everywhere and plants blown over, but no trees down, no real damage to the house or property. That’s amazing, based on what you’ve just seen. You and your family were lucky.

The thought of being lucky grows only more profound as news from the outside world starts to trickle in. There’s no cell service and no internet, but there’s still the radio. You listen to a local station talking about nothing but the storm and all the news is terrible. It’s the evening of the first day after the fateful night, and the staggering scope of devastation in Asheville and all of western North Carolina is being gradually revealed. As reports come in from various part of town and from the surrounding region, all the news is bad – whole towns and communities washed away, power out everywhere, water out everywhere, landslides and road closures. The two Interstates that intersect in Asheville, the main thoroughfares running north and south, east and west, are closed in all directions. There are thousands displaced, hundreds missing and scores of people being air-lifted to safety by helicopter. Reports begin to come in of fatalities.

All day long you’ve been hearing the sound of sirens, nearby and in the distance. Now, increasingly, there’s also the sound of loud machines in the air, prop planes flying low and helicopters chopping their way in crisscross patterns overhead. There’s also a roar of engines here and there through the neighborhood as people run generators to make some electricity. You have a generator, too, and it’s roaring outside the house. That generator keeps the refrigerator running, preserving the supply of food within it, so you have that and that’s a piece of luck, too. What about gasoline? Gas pumps don’t work without electricity. The car was filled yesterday – lucky again – and the truck has a little more than a quarter of a tank. You’ve got two five-gallon cans of gas for the generator, which might get you through a couple or three days if you conserve it. You’re going to need more. What about water? There’s a case of bottled drinking water out in the garage and there’s a five-gallon bucket sitting in the bathtub that you half-filled as the house plumbing was draining out. There are some containers outside that filled with rain during the storm and there’s water in the toilet tanks, and you suppose you could drain the water from the hot water heater, but that’s it. Water’s going to be a prime concern. Beyond what you need for drinking there has to be water for cooking, bathing, cleaning and flushing. If you can’t do those things, it’s a big problem.

You think about this stuff as night comes on. There are important matters that have to be figured out, big questions that right now don’t have answers. You can’t get online to find out what’s going on, you can’t call for help or text to check if someone you care about is okay. The lack of ability to communicate is isolating and not a condition you’re used to. The isolation is fertile ground for a feeling of helplessness which leads to fear – fear that people elsewhere don’t know what the situation is or don’t care, so no help is coming, or fear that something else bad might happen now, like an injury or serious sickness. What about violence? The night is dark and people are scared and desperate. What about disease? Thousands of people in close quarters with no clean water, no sanitation, no ability to keep food and drink from spoiling. There are too many ways the situation could go wrong from here. On the other hand, what if everything goes right? How long will it take to dig out from this mess? How long will it take to remove all the fallen trees, clear the roadways, replace the broken telephone poles, replace all the wires and cable and damaged electrical equipment? How long to assess all the damage done to the municipal water system, with hundreds of miles of pipeline traveling down from the distant mountain reservoir to every street in the city? How long to even access all the areas where the pipeline might be compromised, with countless fallen trees and landslides blocking the way, before repair work can begin? And the cell service and Internet connection – how long will we be cut off from contact with the rest of the world? Even the best imaginable outcomes will require weeks of waiting it out, managing everyday life under uncomfortably difficult circumstances.

Then stirs within you the deepest, most disturbing fear of all. It’s a fear you suppose is always there, lurking in the shadows silent and menacing but never to be acknowledged, a brutal truth from which you hide and everyone hides, every day. It is the fear of how easily everything comes undone. In this moment of chaos, when the machinery of comfortable reality we’ve built up around ourselves is shocked to a standstill and suddenly that on which we depend is no longer dependable, you see all too clearly how fragile your world is. You see with chilling clarity how little it would take to bring the whole business of modern life to a catastrophic collapse. You know it can happen. You can imagine the scenarios that might trigger it, and they are not impossible. For a moment you see how flimsy the veneer of normal really is. Would you even want to be around when the bottom drops out?

No – can’t think that way! You have to stay positive. Remember, you’re lucky – that’s what you have to keep foremost in your mind. Other people were not so lucky. Some people had their homes destroyed, their cars washed away, trees through their roofs while a tropical storm raged. Some people were in hospitals, in the Intensive Care Unit, when the power went out and the water stopped. Some people lost loved ones and some lost their lives. You and your family are lucky. Stay positive. Humans are resilient creatures, have faith that people will help each other and the Government will provide the big help and it will all come back sooner or later. The water, the electricity, the Internet, the cell service – all of it will be back eventually. It’s a matter of how you’re going to make it until then, of how you’re going to manage the difficulties. Right now might be the worst of it. You sit in the dark and think about all you’ve seen today and the problems that might come in the days ahead. Not knowing is the hardest part and you can’t know right now, so be quiet about it. Be still. Tomorrow will be another day. It might not be much better than today, but it will bring you one day closer to when things do get better. One day closer. Hold onto that. And remember how lucky you’ve been so far.

Asheville the Day After