Disaster

 You don't expect hurricanes in the mountains.

Mast Store Annex in Valle Cruces.

But the remnants of Hurricane Helene absolutely devastated western North Carolina and parts of eastern Tennessee on Friday when her unlikely path of destruction brought a trail of misery from the Florida gulf to deep within the mountains of the Blue Ridge.

You expect blizzards to bring the mountains to a standstill. Not tropical storms.

And yet nearly two feet of water have inundated and isolated historic Asheville; rock slides have taken out portions of I-40, maiming a critical transportation artery for perhaps months; and cell towers have collapsed in the face of 60 mile per hour (or higher) gusts, shutting down communications. Power is gone for hundreds of thousands.

All roads in western North Carolina are closed. Asheville, at one point, was approachable only by air.

It could take years for recovery.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo took a similar path after making landfall, only much closer to Charlotte. By the time it reached us, it, too, was a tropical storm, but I remember trees down all over the place. I mean, heck, we lived on a street called Woodsway Drive.

The Village of Chimney Rock.

 But we also lived on a hill, so flooding was never a problem for us. It was mostly the cleanup and power outages, as I recall. It might have been different for others.

It looks to be considerably worse for western North Carolina. As of Saturday morning, emergency crews in Buncombe County responded to more than 5,000 calls and performed more than 150 swiftwater rescues.

In Asheville, the largest North Carolina town in the mountains, flooding from the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers clobbered Biltmore Village and the River Arts District. In Boone, home to Appalachian State University, famous King Street was turned into a torrent of water.

Chimney Rock Village, a popular and scenic destination location, has been washed off the map.

The Lake Lure Dam was close to imminent failure for up to nine hours before Rutherford County engineers lifted the warning to evacuate.

There is also a political angle to this story. Helene was created in the gulf by unusually warm waters and intensified into a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in the Florida Bend area. The heated gulf waters added more moisture to the storm, causing heavier rainfalls than previously recorded

One element of Project 2025 – the Republican blueprint and its proposed agenda should it win the general election in November – is to defund FEMA, an agency critical in aiding natural disaster victims. The Project is also looking to shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service for no other reason than I guess they don't believe in science.

And yet, the empirical evidence we have to keep these agencies is in our own backyard.

Jim

I figure the first time I ran into Jim Lippard was probably sometime around 1977. I was an export from Pennsylvania grasping how to be a sports writer for The Dispatch. I'd just arrived a few months earlier – in the middle of football season – and I was still learning the local ropes.

I can't say precisely how or when we met, but I can take a reasonable guess. I bet I was at a baseball game, and more precisely, an American Legion Post 8 baseball game at Holt-Moffitt Field.

Jim Lippard and the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.

In addition to covering the game while keeping score and taking notes, I also had to occasionally take pictures. Serious camera work was unfamiliar to me, but there was this guy out there, working inside the fence, snapping away with his Nikon. I assumed he was from another newspaper and I thought nothing of it. Turns out, Jim was the Post 8 photographer and he was as much a familiar part of the game as a well-worn glove or a favorite baseball bat.

And I bet you a dime to a dollar, he's the one who came up to me and introduced himself. I know there was a smile in that introduction and a friendliness in his personality that simply embraced you. He made you feel comfortable almost immediately.

Over time he taught me little tricks that he'd picked up about shooting baseball games. If there was a runner on first, focus on second in case there was a steal or the start of a double play. If there was a runner on second, go ahead and focus on home plate for a potential play at the plate. Stuff like that.

Within a few years, Jim became the Post 8 athletic director and we saw more and more of each other. Then he became Post 8 commander, and after that, Area III commissioner. Meanwhile, I'd become the sports editor for The Dispatch, and our paths seemingly crossed all the time as fortune favored both of us.

There was another reason our paths crossed: my expanding waistline. By 1984, Jim had opened his own tailor shop on East First Avenue and it seemed like I was always going in for alterations. Or maybe it was for the conversation, I don't know. His shop, in fact, was a meeting place for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of patrons and his outgoing personality seemed boundless. I think his personality alone would have provided him with a comfortable living, but geez, he was a damn good tailor, too. And pretty much self-taught.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Jim had a vision: after deep research, consultation and hard work, he founded the Davidson County Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. I always thought the Hall of Fame was an important element in the county's sports culture and it warms me to this day to know that Jim was the driving force behind it. I think this creation of his may be his lasting legacy.

By 2000, he was inducted into the North Carolina American Legion Baseball Hall of Fame and in 2009, he was inducted into the very Hall of Fame he created. Then, in 2015, he received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest honor a civilian can receive in North Carolina.

But of all of his achievements, the thing I think he was most proud of was his family. He adored his three daughters – Jamie, Lisa and Julie – and was forever in love with Ann, his wife of 67 years. It just never got better than that for him.

The other day, Kim and I were taking our daily walk when my cell phone rang. The caller ID told me it was Jamie and even before I answered, I caught my breath. I could guess what was coming. And then, "Daddy died today."

Jim was 88.

I reflected on all of this the past few days and as I thought about it, I realized my friendship with Jim was one of my oldest, spanning more than 40 years. How could I ever know that would happen back in 1977?

It's been said that in our essence, we are stardust, nurturing the basic elements of the universe within ourselves. Goodness. Kindness. Vision. Charity. Friendship. Family.

Stardust. Jim was all of that, and for that, I am forever grateful.

The evisceration

Almost immediately after Kamala Harris' takedown of adjudicated rapist and 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump following their presidential debate Tuesday night, one of the first things I thought was how easy it seemed for her to politically undress and expose this incredibly weak and immoral blowhard.

The second thing I thought was why couldn't this have been done eight years ago? Why did this nation have to endure for so long Trump's lethal incompetency while he was president and his hateful poison when he was out of office?

I guess it was because eight years ago, Harris wasn't available back then for the evisceration. She was honing her skills as a U.S. Senator, not as a presidential candidate.

But on Tuesday, Harris cut through Trump like a hot knife through butter. No, wait. Too cliché. Like a weedeater through dead grass. No, wait. Like a Shakespearean soliloquy through a vacant soul. Something somewhere along those lines.

It looked too easy. Harris, the former prosecutor, set the bait all night long and Trump, a true narcissistic simpleton, just couldn't resist. Herewith: his campaign crowds are small and bored; he has no healthcare plan ("I have the concept of a plan"); his immigration policies are criminal. And so is he.

You could almost physically see her digs burrow under his thin skin and see his orange makeup turn white around his mouth and eye sockets like a sorry clown. It was incredible television.

No wonder Trump doesn't want to debate her again. Coward. Must be those bone spurs acting up. As each minute of the debate passed, he became angrier and more rattled. She became, well, more presidential.

The absurdist moment came when Trump insisted Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of people living in Springfield, Ohio. The planned attack, inspired by neo-Nazis, serves nothing more than to illustrate his innate racism, particularly against black and brown-skinned people. His xenophobia knows no bounds. How is this presidential?

Why is this cockroach even allowed to run for office?

I have no idea how the election is going to turn out 51 days from now. Republicans in power in key states are doing their best to purge voter rolls and other acts of voter suppression reminiscent of Jim Crow days.

But Harris seems to be building momentum.

Can she do it?

There are two inherent strikes against her: she's Black. And she's a woman. In this country, where it took women 131 years to get the vote after the Constitution was ratified, gender politics is still a thing. And so are the politics of race where the vestiges of America's Original Sin (slavery) still lingers in the air like lingering swamp gas.

Moments after the debate ended, the Trump campaign was delivered a blow when megastar pop singer Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Harris for president. In the real world, star-powered endorsements are nice to have but usually don't move the political needle one way or the other.

This might be different. Within 24 hours of her announcement, there were more than 300,000 newly registered voters in the books.  And most likely, they were probably voting age females, which is significant in a world where women have lost their constitutional right to an abortion after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

As a side note, I'm going to take a guess here. Swift is from Pennsylvania. West Reading, in fact. I'm guessing her endorsement of Harris could coalesce a bloc of young females from Allentown to Harrisburg and maybe push Pennsylvania and its critical 19 electoral votes toward Harris.

We'll just have to wait and see.

 

 

Pet grief

Kim and I have entered into a strange, colorless and empty land where we are grieving for the passing of our cat, Halo.

It's been nearly two weeks since we made the decision to put her down. She was suffering from arthritis, 100 percent renal failure and quite possibly lymphoma, which probably accounted for her drastic weight loss in her final months. There was no coming back from this. 

Halo

It's not as if this kind of grief is anything new for us. In our nearly 44 years of marriage, we've had cats in the house for about 41 of those years. Five cats over that span, actually. And now we've buried all five.

But the grief we feel for Halo is somehow subtly different for us than it was for the others. We made the deliberate decision that we will no longer have any more pets. I am 73 years old and Kim is 64, and we just don't want any future pets to outlive us.

I asked Kim if she was feeling the difference in grief we felt for our other cats in the same way I was, and she said yes. We tried to put our finger on it.

The grief we have for Halo seems sharper – harder – because we know there will be no more pets in the house. There's a finality in that.

There are times when I feel a sense of guilt because my grief for Halo – as well as for our previous cats – sometimes seems to transcend the grief I've felt for some humans, even family members. I've talked with a few other pet owners about this phenomenon and they pointed out that we are with our pets nearly every day. We are their daily caregivers, almost from their birth to their death. If you do have any emotional ties to your pet, it's almost inherently impossible to divorce yourself from them.

Having a pet is both a total commitment and an unspoken promise. You do that because in return you receive an unfettered loyalty and – dare I say it? – an unconditional love.

And as Kim pointed out, Halo was a solo cat. At no time in her nine years with us was there another cat in the house. Maybe that's what made her seem different to us. She was her own cat. She was independent, as cats are, but she also needed us as her stewards, as pets do. I call it independent dependency.

So now Kim and I are in that colorless, empty land where the urge to get another cat is starting to pull on us.

I kind of knew this could happen. A day after Halo passed, I collected everything in the house that belonged to a cat – scratching posts, litter boxes, toys, food, medicine, anything – and donated them to a local cat rescue. I'm hoping that by giving that stuff away it reinforces our decision not to get another pet. It's removed a lot of the household triggers to our grief.

We do have one reminder. We've kept an old cloth basket that at some point all of our cats have curled up in. That stays. For some reason, there is no hurt in that basket.

There are neighborhood cats around, so it's not as if we can't get our cat fix.

And I can sense with each day that passes, the grief is diminishing. I guess that's healthy. I don't think we'll require counseling.

As with anything that passes, we have our memories. We know we kept our promises to Halo. That will be enough. 

Halo wants her chair back.