Author's note: I haven't posted in awhile, but I've been doing a lot of writing. Hopefully you'll get to see some of it in one form or another in the future. This post is something I've been scribbling away at for several weeks, and is a divergence from my typical, more strictly informational posts. It's a bit more editorial in nature.
I stand in the middle of the river, in the middle of winter. Rocks along the shore sport crusted snowcaps from last week’s snowfall, and a rim of ice has formed like a healing scab along the edges of the water. It’s the warmest day (nearly 50 degrees!) of the coldest January we’ve had in several years. I look up river, towards the headwaters, over the shoulder of Mount Mitchell. The water is crystal clear. My feet scream for release from the icy shallows, but I tell them to wait just a bit longer, and I turn around and look downstream to take in once again the bent-over trees and tangled banks. I marvel at the power this river briefly held, and violently distributed, for a few hours in late September. I’ve spent most of my life trying to learn from these forests and its inhabitants, which have amazing things to teach us. Now I look to the river and ask — what can I learn from you? I drop the rest of my body into the pool, letting the water stab me with a million tiny icicles. I spend just long enough submerged to let my body and mind settle into the experience, before I stand, dripping in the sun.
Where I cold plunge, the river flows fairly straight, with room to spread on either side. The floodplain is a quarter-mile wide in some places, and much of the bottomland is field or pasture. Despite the fact that roads parallel the river on both sides — Hwy 80 on one side, secondary roads on the other — the river is protected by narrow strips of riparian forest on each side. Birches, maples, sycamores, majestic white oaks and even some still-alive hemlocks line the banks, sheltering an understory of ironwood, witch hazel and rhododendron. Yellowroot and dog hobble provide ground cover. Although thin and disturbed in many places, this forested buffer largely held during the flood. I generally think of this strip of forest as protecting the river from us — filtering silt from our fields and roads, muffling motorcycle noise from the sensitive ears of otters and kingfishers, and shading nocturnal river critters from the glare of porchlights and headlights.
But when Helene came, we can thank this strip of trees for saving roads. In places where a road edged too close to the river, and a riparian buffer was not allowed to grow, the river took bites out of the roadway, in some spots devouring the road altogether. This is most noticeable on the Cane River, where both 197 and 19W snake along the river, in many places lacking an adequate forested buffer between the water and the pavement. But here where I stand, the highway and even the packed gravel of Hannah Branch Rd was spared. The one place along this stretch where there was little-to-no forest buffer — a short piece of Seven Mile Ridge Rd — caved into the river. NC DOT spent many thousands of dollars repairing that short section with riprap, gravel, and asphalt. South Toe Conservation followed with dozens of volunteer hours and another $1000 of seeds, coir matting and livestakes of willow, ninebark, and elderberry to stabilize the bank. Perhaps by the next flood, there will be a young forest there to help absorb the river’s energy.
Just as one can make a case that the rains of Helene were intensified by our meddling with the climate, WNC’s last great flood, in 1916, was likewise exacerbated by our behavior — that time it was from stripping the mountaintops of their mossy spruce forests. Those forests play a crucial role in absorbing mountain moisture, and slow the flow of rain water into the rivers. We’ll never know exactly how much of Helene’s precipitation to attribute to climate change, and we will never know how much of 1916’s devastation was due to mountaintop logging. But climate change and deforestation aside, these floods are natural disasters. Storms like Helene have played a major role in making the mountain valleys the shape they are now. As an all-powerful keystone species in this landscape, our job today is to treat the forests and the rivers right, and learn true resilience in the face of future floods.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about how the creeks and rivers are more prone to flooding now since the big flood. The thinking goes like this: Helene’s flooding “damaged” our rivers and, among other effects, filled them with sediment and debris. Because of this, we have to clean them out by clearing the debris and dredging silt, gravel, and rock from the river bed in order to restore them to a safer state. The truth is that the river simply did what rivers do, funneling the water out of the mountains. In the process, the water gouged the channel deeper in places, clearing it of rock, sand and silt; in other spots the water deposited rock, sand and silt, making the channel shallower. In some places, the river roared through narrow gorges. In others it spread out and inundated floodplains. There may be a few locations along the hundreds of miles of rivers and creeks in the Toe River Valley that need work in order to fix problems caused by human infrastructure, or direct threats to infrastructure, but the vast majority of our waterways simply need to be left alone to form and move and re-form in the ways that they always have. Roads and bridges and yards and houses may have been damaged, but the river was not damaged.
We cannot control these mountain rivers with dredging or berming. “A dredged river behaves like a pipe that blasts water from one point to another,” says Sarah Noyes, flood resilience educator. South Toe is a headwaters river, which means that every flood is a flash flood. The larger, flatter rivers in the piedmont or coastal plain rise gradually over the course of days; our river crests are measured in hours and minutes. Dredging the tributaries and the river would make flash floods even more violent. The wreckage of a flash flood has been displayed on our landscape for months now: houses torn apart, twisted cars, debris flung into the treetops. It has touched all of us; for those who lost homes or loved ones, the trauma is ongoing.
The forest knows how best to handle water: slow it down. For centuries the forest has grown tools for slowing the water: leafy trees, shrubs, absorbent moss, fallen trees, leaf litter, mycelium, tangles of roots. All of these forest features work together to capture, divert, and moderate the progress of water as it falls from the sky and drains back to the sea. Rivers are the overflow valve for the system; when too much water comes at once, the river takes it in and shepherds it along. Once the water is in the river, we want it to meander and spread as needed, not to be hurried any more than it already is by gravity and momentum.
On September 27 the river did its job — and in order to continue doing this job well, the river does not need to be fixed; it needs room. River banks and river bottoms are not supposed to be permanent fixtures in a landscape. It is their nature to move left or right, always seeking that low, soft spot in the landscape to flow through. Helene was the first flood of this magnitude that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, and perhaps the first since descendants of Europeans arrived in these mountains (not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things), but these hills have experienced numerous Helenes over millennia, and will continue to.
The alternative to fixing the river is to give it space, let its banks grow tangled, and allow it to run wild when it needs to. The best space we can provide a river (for itself and its inhabitants, and for us humans, our infrastructure, and those living downstream) is a riparian buffer of trees, shrubs, and ground cover. In places where the river has (temporarily) scrubbed away this buffer, we can play our role as a keystone species by replanting woody native plants to hasten the return of the riparian vegetation.
Helene was certainly a challenge for the river and its life — it accommodated far more water than it’s accustomed to, but it did its job, ushering the water down the mountain and out of the valleys. What didn’t do their jobs are the roads and bridges and houses that were in the way. In some places they impeded the river and the result was not that the river changed course or gave up, it simply continued with utmost determination, to the detriment of our infrastructure, and caused human heartbreak that will take years to heal. As we build back our infrastructure, let’s give the river the space that it has demanded; if we don’t, it will continue to insist, again and again, on taking the space necessary to do its job. There is little we can do to help it do its job any better than it already knows how to do.
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