Our one-road town was devastated by flooding and landslides after Hurricane Helene. But we are ‘North Carolina Strong.’ We will get to the polls, if for no other reason than to honor our neighbors.

Each individual drop of rain mattered as it joined the sum of what became Hurricane Helene’s destructive flooding.

For Americans living in a technologically driven time, our individual ballots can seem unimportant in the confusing blur of electoral politics. Our local concerns can seem lost in the flood of fast-spinning news cycles about issues that seem foreign or beyond our influence.

But when we exercise our voting rights we collectively, drop by drop, vote by vote, create a momentum that changes and reshapes the political landscape. And just as each droplet in the recent storm seemed inconsequential, they all mattered and forever changed a small tourist town between Asheville and Chimney Rock called Bat Cave, North Carolina.

Bat Cave was a quirkily named storybook of a town with no traffic light and where Valerie in the post office always asked how you were doing or maybe even sometimes told you how you were doing, with the bills assuredly finding their way down the winding Lake Lure Highway to the tiny Bat Cave post office (which was 4 feet deep in mud and water by the end of Helene’s Sept. 27 rampage).

The political chaos we saw in the bigger world rarely reared its head in the bucolic riverside village nestled along the Rocky Broad River.

Prior to Helene’s devastating erasure, Bat Cave was a place people lived to avoid the clutter, traffic and complications of cities and suburbs.  

Bat Cave residents remain notably diverse − socioeconomically, politically, racially and culturally. Many have lived for generations among uniquely exposed cliffs and craggy mountain nooks and valleys. Others retired or retreated to the rich array of trails, waterfalls and lakes that offer countless scenic gems often overshadowed by the better-known tourist cities of Hendersonville, Asheville and Black Mountain.

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Our survival was tenuous at best

Bat Cave was a place you relished because of that diversity and a pervasive culture of kindness and acceptance that made the Hickory Nut Gorge a manifestation of American melting-pot idealism.

Bat Cave was the kind of place where my neighbor Candy across the street would put out blankets and cots on her front porch on the night of a storm, just in case anyone on the riverfront side of the street lost power or needed shelter or refuge. 

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At 7 a.m. on Sept. 27, we took to her porch as the last and only high ground we could reach that wasn’t flooding or being swept away in a landslide. We sheltered there, holding terrified pets and holding our collective breath for a few hours while the storm raged without relenting. Seeing neighboring houses collapse under mudslides made us feel our survival was tenuous at best.

While scores of people in our state perished that morning, our group of six survived and saved most of our animals from homes and a community that had washed away.

We soon realized in the aftermath that the beloved mountain town we once took refuge in from the storms of city life was now in complete ruin. 

What changed my life forever, though, wasn’t necessarily the trauma of the next three days of trying to survive and escape from what had become a ravaged wasteland, but the undeniable and often palpable love of human-to-human and neighbor-to-neighbor. 

The flood took away everything from my life I didn’t need. The flood left me with my life and everything (everyone) I truly need. 

Because of Helene, I may at some point forget for a moment the absolute core goodness of people – but never for long, because my faith in Americans has literally been restored through this catastrophe. 

Disaster brings clarity, bridges any cultural divides

I’ve heard or read about this kind of community revelation in other disasters but never truly witnessed it. 

The absolute power of humans bonding through crisis with one another so clearly supersedes political ideology, cultural differences, gender or any other socially imposed divide.

What I can share today, that I could only guess at before, is that as a survivor or responder, you too would almost certainly feel compassion toward your neighbor, no matter how different you know – or don’t know – them to be from you politically. You also wouldn’t feel any separation, no hate, no judgment, just a pure desire to save, or help or love your fellow American neighbor (or any human) in a time of desperate need. 

These are hidden truths that can be uncovered by each person in the throes of a tragedy. 

And by voting this election cycle we can help move us all closer to those truths, regardless of our political leanings. 

Casting a vote fulfills a responsibility to each other, even if by doing so we cancel out our neighbor’s opposing vote. It is still a necessary part of maintaining the strength and wellness of our unalienable bond.

Survivors from Bat Cave are declaring we are “North Carolina Strong” in our shared cultural DNA. We will find ways to be resilient and get to the polls, if for no other reason than to vote in honor of our lost neighbors.

We are choosing to be “strong at the broken places,” as my dear friend and colleague Kris Brightbill taught me from Ernest Hemingway’s novel “A Farewell to Arms.”

Whatever comes, I will certainly cast my vote. The local election boards and other agencies have made finding a new place to vote possible and accommodated survivors like me. So I will be one of those unassuming droplets converging with all of you in the Tuesday flow toward our renewed freedom.

Blake Smith is a clinical therapist, long-distance runner and resident of Bat Cave, North Carolina, where he lost his home and truck in devastating flooding brought by Hurricane Helene. He and his dog, Rizzo, are temporarily living with friends in the Asheville area.