Day Seven

Abstract

Day Seven Melissa Helton (bio) It’s been a week. And I don’t know what to say. It is so big. I can say it is three a.m. and my cat inexplicably woke me up at the same time that I stirred on July 28th, feeling queasy and uncomfortable enough that I sat up in bed in the dark, wondering if I needed a Tums, wondering if I was going to be sick, wondering why I felt so terrible. And then [End Page 78] I looked at my phone, which was silently blowing up with missed calls, texts, and messages. I did not go back to sleep. I can’t this morning either. I can give a record of events. How in the preceding days I had been in the joy of the forty-fifth annual Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, the first fully in-person workshop since the pandemic began. I had finished leading the Troublesome Team Trivia contest and driven home instead of staying on campus that night. So when the flood hit in the wee hours of that Thursday morning, I was able to act as remote communication, spending a literal eleven hours on my phone. I began relaying information across campus from an hour away since I had one contact with cell service in each of the four areas where the workshop writers were stranded by the flood water. Then arranging rides home for those whose cars had washed away or were four feet underwater, relaying road condition information, answering the concerns of writers not on campus. I can tell you how those eleven hours were filled with fear and then joy as I learned all my friends, teachers, mentors, and fellow writers were safe on and off campus, and managed to eventually make it home. I can talk about my first view of campus on Friday. The disorientation of book tables still set up for the remaining days of the writers’ workshop in one place, and broken glass, splintered wood, upended desks, and flood mud in others. The donations. The distribution. The crying community members who lost everything, or lost nothing and were heartbroken for others. The calls and texts and emails and social media posts and questions and best-guess decisions and donations and meals and stunned faces and hugs from strangers and mud and old photos and meals and water bottles and questions and questions and a few hours’ sleep at night to do it again for a week straight. [End Page 79] I can talk about being in charge of saving our archive. Ninety-five percent of the material was wet, seventy percent of it also covered in mud. Books, handwritten records, photos, quilts, baskets, files, silver nitrate negatives—precious historical items significant to us and the Appalachian region. I can describe standing there in the archive, my two teenagers sweeping the dark scene with flashlights as we sloshed through three-inch putrid mud, and how it was so big a disaster I didn’t know where to start, completely unqualified for such an important and time-sensitive task. And how that feeling has not gone away this entire week as we’ve hurried to do what we could. And the list of names and organizations who have emailed me advice, websites and tutorials, came on site for hours or days, helped pull materials from the molding rooms, helped make these sometimes educated and sometimes uneducated decisions, arranged for transport of documents or offered their freezer space for preservation—it’s a long list. If I began naming people and organizations, for each one I could pull forth here, I would forget at least six. Some names I never got in the first place. Our Great Hall became our supply distribution center and is also a working archive rescue center. Tables of diapers and garbage bags sit across from clotheslines of irreplaceable photos and slides slowly drying as folks hurry back and forth. And the only reason these items are being rescued is because of these volunteers. I can say how everyone has been thrust into positions where they are scrambling to learn what needs done and how to do it...