This is the world we live in

Or, what happened when I went to see what Hurricane Helene did to my hometown

Oct 03, 2024

Last week, I wrote to you expecting not to be in touch again for a few days, maybe even longer. That’s because the weather forecasts we were seeing all pointed to the same thing: that Hurricane Helene was barreling its way north from the Gulf, directly toward where I live in Atlanta.

Fifty- to sixty-mile-per-hour winds were certain to head our way, along with a dumping of rain that would flood the city and perhaps leave us without power for a week or more.

That forecast, of course, didn’t pan out. At the last minute, the hurricane “wobbled” — yes, it’s a term meteorologists actually use! — away from the path we thought it would take and headed northeast, toward the city where I grew up (Augusta, Ga.) and then into the Carolinas.

By now, you’ve no doubt seen photos and video of the damage done by the storm. They’re heartbreaking, especially the ones coming out of western North Carolina, where entire towns have been swept away by flood waters. As David McCullough wrote in his book on the famous Johnstown Flood of 1889, “nature’s power knows no bounds, and when it unleashes its fury, even the mightiest of man’s creations crumble.”

This past weekend, I went to Augusta to check in on my parents, who still live there, in the house I grew up in. Which still has the backyard where I played as a kid, and is in the neighborhood where I rode my bike, where I went trick-or-treating at Halloween every year, where I’ve gone for a run countless times around its roads.

It looked… very different. As I drove toward my neighborhood, just off Interstate 20, the landscape at first looked the same. But the closer I got to home, the more I noticed little things — like the electronic billboards, which were dark. The traffic lights, all turned off. Plastic road signs, broken off with jagged edges, revealing the fluorescent light tubes inside.

I drove a little further and saw a pair of huge pine trees, which had snapped in half, leaving splintered stumps exposed to the open air. And the more I drove, the more trees I saw down, many of them strewn across the roadway, like fallen soldiers struck down in the middle of a battle. (Which, in a way, they were.)

In fact, the further I drove, the thicker the mess of trees criss-crossing the road became, to the point that I couldn’t really drive any further. I ended up having to turn around and find another way to my parents’ house, zig-zagging along a winding single lane where there had once been three wide lanes, now covered in black and silver wires, pine bark and needles, and giant clumps of branches and debris.

The sounds you normally hear in this part of town — cars whizzing along, birds singing — were gone, replaced by buzzing chainsaws and the smell of fresh pine in the air, like a Christmas tree lot.

When I got to where my parents live, everything looked different. Trees, some of which were probably 80 or 100 years old, were lying on their side in surrender. At the base, most of them had ripped huge mounds of dirt and roots out of the ground, which I couldn’t reach the top of when I stood next to them.

They had crashed across fences, forming a barrier on the driveway coming out of the house, which meant my parents couldn’t leave if they needed to. (And they’re in their eighties, which means they’re much likelier to need to get out for an emergency trip to the hospital than most of us are.)

Back when I worked for The Weather Channel’s weather.com, one of my colleagues was a television producer who happened to be with the remote team that was dispatched to Joplin, Mo., after the city was torn apart by a monstrous EF5 tornado in 2011. I’ve never forgotten what she shared when she came back, how shaken she felt, and the emotional reaction she experienced seeing that kind of destruction.

I should add, the damage I saw this weekend definitely wasn’t at that scale. Not even close. But still, Helene hit Augusta with 80 mph winds, which did enough damage to make parts of the city almost unrecognizable.

The places in our yard where I played as a kid? The ground is still there, of course, but all the trees I ran around, darting in and out of? Gone. The next-door neighbor’s yard, which backed up to a creek we played in every day when we were little kids? Completely stripped of their tree canopy.

Even the places I’ve taken photos of little T, when I’ve taken him to visit my folks, all of it is changed completely, now lying under big tree trunks. So much of it will have to be sawed apart and taken away. I tried, clumsily, to reassure my mom that a lot of what they’d lost could be replanted and, one day, grow back. “Yes,” she said. “But not in my lifetime.”

When I worked for weather.com, I wrote about a variety of topics. Mostly weather-related (or weather-adjacent, as we liked to call it). But in my last couple of years there, I was the climate change editor, which meant I reported on any and all climate-related news.

I interviewed lots of climate scientists, names you may even have heard of if you’re familiar with the space — like Michael Mann,

Katharine Hayhoe

, Kevin Trenberth, and many others. I loved every minute of it, as I am fascinated with anything to do with the earth sciences — I love learning about plate tectonics, the giant caldera volcano that lies underneath Yellowstone, the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, all of it. I find myself completely absorbed by it.

While I was there, I read reams of books on climate, and read from cover to cover whatever the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in its reports every few years — which, as I read them over time, I noticed became increasingly urgent in their warnings.

To be honest, I didn’t mind that climate was talked about in controversial terms. In fact, that fueled my drive to understand it better, to know that I what I was writing was actually backed up by science, and not by some crackpot theory.

Even with all that I read and all that I learned, and all the conversations I had with people who were among the world’s top experts in the science, there was still a part of me that hoped it was all overblown. Consciously, I knew they were right. But in the back of my mind, I hoped they were off, at least by a few decades, that maybe all the impacts they were warning us about lay in the distant, not the near, future.

Then yesterday, I stumbled across this Threads post from Dr. Hayhoe:

It turns out that after all these years, the subject I once wrote about and thought was limited to melting glaciers in the Arctic and the changing of the seasons, quite literally came crashing back into my life — in my own back yard.

So, the question now is, what is to be done? I thought, after all those years and all those pieces I wrote, I was done with climate, that I’d said all I could possibly say. But life has a way of tapping us on the shoulder, doesn’t it?

Frederick Buechner, the American writer and theologian who died two years ago — and wrote one of my all-time favorite essays, “The Calling of Voices” — had a theme that ran through much of his work, listening to your life:

[I]f I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

What does this mean, and what do I do with it? That’s the question, isn’t it? And I share this with you not to be narcissistic (!) but to ask also — have you ever had an experience like this? Have you ever felt your life “call” you to something? What did you do?

I’d sincerely love to know — keep in touch and, as always, let me know what’s new with you in your running/life.

Your friend,

— Terrell

The Half Marathoner

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