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Weary but together, we rebuild

“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines…

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow….

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death…

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example–where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted… It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh….The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit…

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.”

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes of a town devastated by chemical pesticides. We have all lived that story. This one is about bees.

I have always been fascinated by bees. They are incredibly intelligent, unselfish team players, and so damn pretty. We don’t know all that much about their behavior and communication, but we are sure of two things: they love their queen, and most of the time, when you leave them alone, they return the favor.

I learned that early, the hard way. On a chilly day in Boone, North Carolina, sometime around 2002, my mom propped my sister and me on a picnic blanket in the front yard. We toddled around the pond, home to a family of ancient-faced snapping turtles. Mom watched from the kitchen window as I became particularly fascinated with a honeybee, curious enough to grab it in my chubby little fist. Both of our days were ruined.

We left Boone for Virginia when I was seven. Many of my Appalachian memories are adopted from tales over-told to dinner guests at Christmas. Our farmhouse was tucked into Valle Crucis, named for its cross-like shape as the crow flies. I remember it in fragments — the chilled burn of briars on my cheeks when we snuck into the neighbor’s horse pen with sugar cubes in our pockets. I recall the smell of lawnmower exhaust and the burnt fringe of riverside reed, Mom’s overflowing window boxes, and Dad repairing the wooden fence every time a white-tailed deer crashed through to feast on them.

In my hazy memories, it looks much like Rachel Carson’s idyllic town. We spent our days nestled at the foothills of the stooped Blue Ridge, collecting frogs in buckets and racing sticks down the river. I learned young that, when cocooned by the wild, you must compromise.

Every spring, snowmelt slipped through the mountains and pooled at our feet, and the valley would flood. Mom calmly circled the living room, lifting thick curtain tails onto chair backs. My sister jammed her fingers in her ears, and my brother and I directed shadow plays against the wall with flashlights. Dad carried each of us to the car to evacuate up the mountain to grandma’s house, tossing Mom over his shoulder and making us giggle and squeal. When the river receded and we returned home, we gently evicted the snapping turtles out of the garage and back to their pond.

I return to Boone with any excuse: my grandma, Nina, needs help with the raised beds, someone’s birthday, the leaves are changing, and so on. I’ve brought many of my favorite people to the farm, where my grandparents built a home out of love and sourdough and honeybees. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Boone.

Two weeks ago, in Manhattan, I regaled my new coworkers with stories of my heaven. There are green beans and corn and tomatoes, and all the cinnamon sweet sourdough you can eat. The next day, I heard the name of my hometown on the national news for the first time ever: Hurricane Helene hit Watauga County. Hard.

For three days, we didn’t hear from our Boone family. My sister, now a nurse in Duke’s Emergency Room, was deployed to a town outside of Asheville to help run a pop-up hospital in a church. I booked and boarded a flight in the same day.

We swarmed to Boone like our queen bee was in danger, because she was. All roads in western North Carolina were declared closed except for emergencies. We passed truck after truck stacked with cases of water, gasoline, and generators, all driven by mountain men with beards of varying lengths. Dad and I picked up two boxes of green grapes on the way, and practiced excuses to Highway Patrol. Officer, this is an emergency. Nina loves grapes. Oh, also she doesn’t have power, her house is flooded, and there are a million trees down on the farm. We only have chainsaws and grapes.

Eastern Boone looked almost untouched, but when we got to the farm, we turned off the music and rolled down the windows. Have you ever played Monopoly with a sore loser? It looked like someone had flipped the game board and wiped all the little houses clean off the map. Mudslides had swept bridges, pasture, and roads away, dumping the shrapnel in the river. I listened for the wrens and the juncos, but heard only the drum of generators, the whirr of helicopter blades, and shrill sirens ping ponging around the valley. No birds.

Nina’s driveway was more potholes than gravel, but a kind friend named Squirrel was already filling them.

We sat on the back porch, which was missing much of its railing, and surveyed the damage, picking peeling paint off the Adirondack chairs. The greenhouse was smashed, most of the citrus seedlings carried down the hill and into the pond. A tornado had tiptoed down the ridge and spliced a stack of trees that now lay across the grassy path. The root cellar was a looming wall of mud.

Helene dumped 2.5 feet of rain on Watauga County. The ground was already soaked, and the walnut trees had simply lost their grip.

The neighborhood received an evacuation notice at 9 AM that was meant to arrive at 3 AM, but even then, where would they have gone? With no power, blocked roads, and miles of switchbacks, few would have tried to race flash floods down the mountain. It’s tricky to untangle yourself from the wild cocoon.

As we rolled up our sleeves and began the slow work of moving earth, I noticed the constant hum of bees. They were everywhere. Yellowjackets and wasps and honeybees swarmed the deck and the wood piles. My uncle told me that the mudslides had taken out thousands of bee boxes and wasp nests in the ground and in the trees. Red Cross was shipping in cases of Epi-Pens with all the water bottles and peanut butter jars. The bees had lost their homes, too. They swarmed to protect their queens, too.

We spent the weekend mopping mud and chopping trees.

All through the holler, there were whispers of elbow-grease donated by FEMA and the National Guard. Nurses on horseback went to aid families cut off by lost roads. A helicopter dropped supplies onto the neighbor’s roof. At one point, a hoard of college kids appeared to haul away pieces of ancient walnut trees as thick as school buses. We carted work gloves and tampons to the free store down the road, set up to supply neighbors with soap and Benadryl for all the bee stings.

I could write for days about how humans have superheated the Gulf of Mexico, ripped Helene off her normal path, and slingshot her onto Nina’s porch, a seven hour drive from the coast. But you’ve heard all that. Of course the bees are stinging, we have not left them alone. As Carson writes, the people had done it to themselves. Nevertheless, the community will rebuild the hive, slowly and step by step, pausing to sit in the Adirondacks and drizzle sourdough with honey. Weary but together, we build the hive again.


RCC National Environment Leadership Presidential Fellow – Molly Herring – University of Santa Cruz

RCC Presidential Fellow Molly Herring is pursuing a Masters in Science Communications from UC Santa Cruz. She recently graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with a double major in Biology and Global Studies and a minor in Creative Nonfiction. She has been published in Oceanographic MagazineCoastal ReviewThe Marine Diaries, and Cellar Door.