Erin Kellem’s Asheville, North Carolina neighborhood is a short drive from the city center, but feels remote. The Haw Creek area’s culs-de-sac are fronted by spacious yards and surrounded by thick woods that give the illusion of isolation.
Hurricane Helene changed that, dropping an ocean of rain on the southern Appalachian mountains. Floods of biblical proportions killed dozens. Power outages left thousands without electricity for at least two weeks in most places. There was no gas or cellphone service for days following the storm, and most of the city is still without potable water. Roads disappeared under rushing water and mud. The help that was on its way had no way in, and those stranded in their homes had no way of checking on loved ones.
“Anyone in the neighborhood with a chainsaw came out to help clear the roads,” said Kellem, whose family has lived in Haw Creek for 22 years. “When it became obvious that we weren’t getting power back any time soon and our freezers were beginning to thaw, we collectively said: ‘Well, what do we have in our freezers? And what can we all make with it?’”
Like so many around town, Kellem and her neighbors dug through their fridges and freezers, pooled their wilting veggies and thawed meats to feed one another.
“Our neighbors told us they were also planning what they called a ‘freezer burn’, and told us to bring a grill or camp stove if we had one,” said Taylor Aurilio, who lives near the Smith Mill Creek neighborhood, on the western side of the city.
“I think they were expecting maybe a dozen people, but it ended up being about 30 people. Neighbors were wheeling their grills down from their houses, bringing all the meat from their freezers. And the next thing you know you’ve got a grill doing Mexican food, one doing Asian food, another doing barbecue. We all ate and brought things back to put on the ice in our coolers. It was awesome.”
Rachel Wingo is a social worker who lives in West Asheville, on a small block between the interstate and the Pisgah View public housing community. She proudly said, “We are a super diverse neighborhood. We are a community of Russian-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and English-speaking families,” and some neighbors had a history of exceptional potlucks even before the storm.
“We were all checking in on each other, seeing what everyone needed,” said Wingo. “We all had to clean out our freezers and refrigerators pretty quickly.” They picked the vegetables from their gardens as there was a cold snap just around the corner in the forecast. “We had some tomatoes, I had some garlic, a few onions … My garden washed away in the rains, so I could only gather what was left. But that turned into our first meal.”
She’s not a big meat eater, but had bought a food subscription box from a local farmer. She didn’t really know how to cook the meat that came with the groceries. So all that beef was in her freezer and in danger of going bad.
She walked the meat across the street to Salvadoran neighbors. “And they made carne asada with it. They explained to me that they cooked it very dry … and it didn’t have to be refrigerated. And you could still eat it for a couple of days. So I had multiple days of carne asada.”
In some neighborhoods, there were multiple days of community meals. While Aurilio’s area enjoyed one big bonfire, Kellem’s family attended a cookout every night for a week. For Wingo and her neighbors, it has been three weeks and counting. The power is back on, but many challenges remain and multiple sources of food have been disrupted. So they’re still cooking for each other. She marveled: “We did all of this with no money. We just used whatever we already had.”
Her favorite meal of the whole affair was one evening at the home of Marty Gutierrez and her family. Gutierrez runs a home-based custom cake shop, Marty’s Cakes & Desserts. She served banana bread, grilled meats and veggies for tacos. Someone else fried nopales, a kind of edible cactus. The owner of a local natural wine shop called Crocodile Wines showed up with a case of wine. “That one was at the center of the neighborhood, and everyone showed up. Adults, kids, older folks, people I’d never met, people who didn’t speak the same languages but just showed up anyway!” Wingo remembered.
It was a moment. Generosity won. And a community bonded over the shared distress of living in a city where wrecked infrastructure means you can’t drink from the tap, cook with its water or just pop out to the grocery store due to road closures or power outages. How long the recovery will take, no one knows.
“None of us are hoarding supplies. None of us are being weird about it,” said Wingo. “We’re all prepared for the worst. We all had pantries, but we shared what we had. Over that grill, wine and banana bread, I realized we’re all going to be okay.
“Before this, I probably knew the names of the dogs in our neighborhood more than I did their parents,” she said with a laugh. It took a catastrophic hurricane and weeks of power and water outages to turn those neighbors into friends – at least for a short time. Wingo’s Buttonwood Court is slated for demolition due to a massive interstate expansion that will gut the neighborhood like a knife.
