Mothering at the End of the World

After Helene, mothers held their infants tight as they swam to safety. Held their toddlers close as tree limbs crashed through their roofs. Held their teenagers fiercely after their kids witnessed death. From raging fires to record floods, more families across the U.S. are experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis. We went to North Carolina to see how mothers carry on when their world comes crashing down. Sometimes they hold each other.

Words by Gray Chapman | Photos by Erin Brethauer

In the hours after Tropical Storm Helene battered Western North Carolina, Jenny Paris-Lee emerged from her home with her husband and infant daughter to find houses where they shouldn’t be, and emptiness where houses had been. Crumbled roads and washed-out bridges. Meadows turned into boulder fields. Idyllic creeks turned into powerful rivers. Whole families gone, and no way out: if Jenny and her family wanted to evacuate, they would have to board a helicopter.

The first time Jenny and I talk, it is two weeks after the storm, and she had only just been able to drive out of her neighborhood the day before. She still doesn’t have electricity or clean running water. Search-and-rescue teams are still combing the nearby river for bodies. We’re only able to speak thanks to a Starlink, plus a generator that she and a group of neighbors laboriously retrieved — a mission that required hiking to a friend’s vacation home and schlepping the machine over a mountain. (That excursion was the first time Jenny, mom to a 7-month-old, left the baby with a sitter.) “Helicopters have been the soundtrack of our last 12 days,” she says.

Days after the storm, one neighbor managed to evacuate with her two small children by taking a dangerous ATV route through what Jenny describes as “the ‘Jurassic Park’ ride of our road,” capturing video along the way. The visuals reminded Jenny of images from a war zone. “There were people walking around without shoes, carrying a bag of bagels. People walking out with their dog on a leash and a suitcase. That didn’t feel like the world I wanted to go out into.”

Instead, Jenny and her family stayed put, hunkering down with the baby and banding together with their very capable neighbors. A nearby chapel became the de facto community center for information, supplies, and the satellite internet hub. By day, there were projects to keep everyone busy: chainsawing trees, figuring out how to get fuel, transporting that generator, all as Jenny cared for an infant. “We were very much in this insular world of survival,” she says. But by evening, Jenny would turn on her generator, and invite neighbors to gather on her porch. “We started making big meals, we set up an outdoor kitchen, we had some music playing,” she says. “We were just trying to create some sense of safety.”

In turn, neighbors regularly checked in on Jenny to see if she or the baby needed anything — and indeed, as we speak on the phone, we’re interrupted by someone knocking at the door to ask if she has enough diapers. (The National Guard have just airdropped more.)

Several weeks later, when we finally meet in-person, Jenny nurses Ramona on the floor of her century-old stone cottage while she tells me about watching the FEMA search-and-rescue teams whiz past her house with body bags in the backs of their ATVs. Along the road that snakes from Black Mountain to Jenny’s home in Fairview, remnants of houses cling to the landslide-ravaged mountainside, cars rust upside-down in creeks, and entire chunks of the road that once hugged the mountains are simply gone.

Ramona, now 9 months old and crawling, occasionally interjects with shrieks of delight as she makes her way around the rug. It’s November and leaves are coming off the trees, which means more of the scars in the mountainsides are visible. Even now, six weeks after Helene, stories are still emerging in the storm’s wake — gruesome accounts of lives lost, of whole families swept away. But there are the stories, too, of people tracking down specialty formula from across the country for a neighbor’s newborn, of donating their own breast milk to replace someone’s spoiled freezer stash. 

Two weeks after Helene ravaged Western North Carolina with catastrophic flooding, landslides, infrastructure damage, and loss of life, I reported a news story about how mothers were feeding their babies, and who was helping them. I spent hours on the phone with mothers who, day after day, waited for their roads to be patched enough so that they could safely evacuate with their children. I spoke with doulas who supported births inside Asheville’s Mission Hospital days after the storm, when no toilets could be flushed and the only food available was military MREs. Midwives who went door-to-door after the storm, checking on their newly postpartum patients. Lactation consultants who backpacked formula and bottle-cleaning supplies into remote hollers.

I also spoke with Jenny. As both of our babies cooed and squawked in the background, I listened to her describe the surreal experience of surviving the storm, being stranded for days, and caring for an infant through it all. Mothering at the end of the world, we called it. Later, I went to her house in Fairview, because I knew that no 20-minute phone call could possibly do justice to the experience of mothering through natural disaster — and I also knew that, given the state of the world, those experiences wouldn’t be isolated.

I visited North Carolina two months after the storm. Less than two months after that, the Palisades and Eaton wildfires would ravage Los Angeles, with an estimated 28 direct fatalities as of late January and thousands of homes lost. In the aftermath of both disasters, all I could (and can) think about are the mothers. Delivering babies in a city with no electricity or clean water, or in a city engulfed in flames. Losing everything — clothing and furniture and a roof over one’s head, and also the stick-figure crayon drawings on the fridge, the beloved stuffies and favorite pajamas, the impossibly tiny hospital bracelets — to flood waters or fire. The terror of fleeing. The terror of staying. The precarity of bedtime routines, the bone-deep exhaustion, the mundane and the ecstatic of motherhood’s daily practice, all darkened by the question: What kind of world have I brought my child into?

I’d like to say that experiences like Jenny’s are unthinkable, but I don’t think we have the privilege of using that word anymore. Not in a time when records are constantly being broken for hurricanes, storms, wildfires, heatwaves, and drought; after a year when every single person in the country was under some sort of extreme weather alert at one point. Communities on one side of the country have barely begun rebuilding before communities on the other side of the country are reduced to ashes. Unthinkable? I’m not sure I know a mother who hasn't thought of it, or who’s read these stories and hasn’t imagined herself living them. Hasn’t pictured what she’d grab and what she’d leave behind, hasn’t imagined the extent to which she’d fight tooth and nail to protect what matters most. Hasn’t hoped like hell that she’ll never have to find out.

(Lead photo) Photographer Erin Brethauer, herself a mother of an infant, lives in Asheville, which is still recovering from the storm’s destruction. Photo by Tim Hussin.  (Above) Jenny Paris-Lee and her daughter were trapped near their home without running water or electricity for over a week. Her family and their neighbors received supplies by helicopter. Photo by Erin Brethauer.

People have a way of rising to the occasion for one another after disaster strikes. My favorite observer of this phenomenon is Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell catalogs the patterns of courageous, spontaneous altruism that have emerged over and over after earthquakes, wildfires, and other catastrophes. In the aftershocks of disaster, Solnit observes, social norms — like the kind that keep us apart from one another, keep us from helping one another — might be burned to the ground, too. What remains in the aftermath, among the ashes or the flooded earth, is fertile ground for radical potential in how we tend to each other or how we create and co-create community.

Appalachia brings its own character to a story like this. (To paraphrase one survivor: This is a place where your neighbor is especially likely to own a chainsaw and know how to use it.) But it wasn’t just the folks operating heavy machinery to fix roads, mule-packing supplies through the hills, or helicoptering people off of mountaintops. In hollers around the region, improvised collectives sprang up in instants: rescuing neighbors, sheltering families, hauling flush water to seniors, taking over empty churches and schools to collect and distribute essential supplies. The horses and helicopters made national news, but intimate, microcosmic acts of tending and nurturing made life bearable for those who survived.

Some people might call this a sort of utopia. Others use the term “mutual aid.” As a mother, it reminds me of a different term, one that comes up a lot in parenting circles — usually in the context of the support we need, but so often lack: village.

The proverbial “village” feels mythologized because in this country, at least, it seems unattainable — an ideal in direct opposition to the paradigms we’re taught. How does one build a supportive, reciprocal community in a culture that prioritizes individual gain and stokes competition over cooperation? To build a true village, one that materially cares for those who care for others, would require a radical mindset shift on a macro scale. But facing the long-term impacts of climate change, it might be the only way forward for families, for communities. The once-in-a-generation rainfall and inland flooding caused by Helene in Western North Carolina, a place that until very recently was often described as a “climate haven,” was very likely exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. One study estimates that at our current rate of global warming, storms like Helene will become 15 to 25 percent more likely. 

It is hard, even dangerous, to be a mother in America. On a warming planet, it will only become harder and more dangerous — especially for mothers who are not white or who are low-income: the same groups who already face disproportionately higher rates of maternal and infant mortality. An updated and brutally honest What to Expect for our generation of parents, then, might be less about how to hold a breastfeeding baby, and more about how to hold it together in crisis. How to hold your community and let them hold you. 

I wanted to learn how, so I asked the mothers in North Carolina.

On the morning of Sept. 27, Saralyn Bellmer held her nearly 2-year-old daughter close as the wind took out tree after tree around their home. While the storm raged, Saralyn, her partner, and her in-laws focused on keeping the toddler contained and away from the windows — a task, as anyone who’s met a 2-year-old might imagine, easier said than done. When an oak tree fell on the roof of the family’s home, its limbs punctured the ceiling of her daughter’s nursery, which was mercifully empty at the time.

I first meet Saralyn inside a beautiful old red barn, about six weeks after the storm. We’re at the Marshall Handmade Market, where people are browsing letterpress prints and sipping cider under string lights as a fiddler plays, and where Saralyn is selling the botanical tinctures, teas, and skincare she concocts for her business, Heilbron Herbs. Saralyn’s studio is in downtown Marshall, which is alongside the French Broad River. The day before the storm, she went there and filled the trunk of her car with as many of her raw materials as she could. She put the rest on the highest shelves, but the water went higher, and it took thousands of dollars worth of inventory and shipping materials with it. She can still see the line where the water left its mark.

In the time after the storm, Saralyn remembers parenting purely on instinct. For days, the family didn’t have power, water, cell signal, or electricity and the roads surrounding their home were inaccessible. With the roof of their house precariously cradling a felled oak tree, the family moved temporarily to a friend’s vacant tiny house nearby. Saralyn’s husband, a woodworker, set out to deal with the tree and its damage to their house, while Saralyn worked on disaster recovery admin: contacting insurance companies, landlords, updating her business’s customers, seeking a temporary space for production and storage, and having a toddler at her side for all of it. “I think I just kind of had to put one foot in front of the other day by day,” she says.

But as Saralyn says, “childhood and parenting don’t wait for things to settle down.” Throughout all this chaos, Saralyn’s daughter continued to grow and develop. She began learning how to talk. She absorbed what was happening and responded in her own distinctively 2-year-old way. She became delighted with the sight of her father in his ear protection as he wielded a chainsaw, and started saying “Whoa! Boom!” when she saw felled trees. As Saralyn’s world fell into disarray, her daughter’s little world kept turning.

“I think the thing about parenting through a disaster is that it asks us to hold multiple realities,” Saralyn told me later. “There’s a tree in my roof. We don’t have electricity or running water. My business just washed downstream — and my daughter still needs everything she did before.”

You figure out how to carry on with changing diapers and cooking three meals a day while rebuilding your business and your home because, as a parent, you don’t really have another choice — that’s simply what you have to do. And you welcome the beauty of raising a child alongside the exhaustion and uncertainty of rebuilding a sense of normalcy around them.

“We were lucky the impact of the hurricane wasn’t more traumatizing for us than it was,” Saralyn says. “But it hit us pretty hard and amidst it all, unbeknownst to her, she leads us through the rhythm of each day until we find ourselves in the ordinary again.” 

The morning of the storm, Mila Roeder heard a horrible groan and crash outside their home, then looked out the window to see trees cascading like dominoes down the mountain toward them. The landslide stopped short of their house, but nearby trees kept falling for hours. As floodwaters rose, what was once a road quickly became a raging river. When the water eventually subsided, neighbors (including one with a skid-steer) immediately got to work trying to fix the road. The community remained stranded without electricity or outside help for days; the only remains of their grocery co-op was a foundation laid bare.

Nothing could have prepared Mila, a nonbinary writer, artist, and mother of two children, for the surreal duality of parenting through a natural disaster. There were practical challenges and mundane disruptions: How to handle picky eaters when your food supply is dwindling, or how to manage bedtime without a nightlight because you haven’t had electricity in over a week. There were bigger obstacles, too, like how to miss a playground, a library, a park, or a hiking trail — now long gone. How to teach children to grieve an event of this scale. How to keep it together for your kids, playing with Magna-Tiles and learning to cook pasta over a campfire while shunting your own grief into small stolen moments of weeping or screaming in the ruined woods. How to talk about what happened, and how to talk about death. How to prepare a child for a world that sure feels like it’s dying. 

“You’re going through a crazily traumatic thing, and then you have to stay regulated somehow and make sure your kids are fed, they’re still kind of on their routine,” says Mila, who lives in the tiny town of Celo, just south of Burnsville. “You have to almost put your trauma to the side to make sure they don’t get traumatized.”

As fresh food rotted in the fridge and dry goods began to dwindle, Mila and their family supplemented meals with apples from a neighbor’s yard and foraged greens from their own. The children wondered out loud about the animals who’d lost their homes; whether the mama deer who lived nearby had survived with her fawn. “They were really sensitive to the pain of the land, in addition to their own pain,” Mila says. In stolen moments, Mila slipped out to the woods to process their own grief, furiously writing a thousand words a day. (They self-published the resulting journal as a zine, Helene in Appalachia, several weeks later.)

But while caring for 5- and 7-year-olds, those hard days were also interlaced with beauty, even joy. The welcome comfort of that first hot meal (after Mila figured out campfire cooking). The children’s glee of picking out whatever they wanted at the neighborhood’s ad-hoc food pantry, amazed that everything was free. (“All stores should be like this!”) Most days, the family spent time outside, and so did the rest of the neighbors, many of whom were still working every day to clear debris and fix the road. “It was like the worst block party in the world,” Mila says. “People would be like, ‘yep, my house is gone, it slid off its foundation, but do you need water?’”

In their zine, Mila recounts the frustration of feeling stranded with very little outside help, contrasted with the free-flowing support and resources their tiny community brought forth, from CSA farmers handing out their vegetables to the gluten-free goods the food pantry operators set aside for Mila, who has Celiac disease. “Everything is operating in this community without any money, just fueled by kindness and generosity,” Mila wrote. “There are no tales of thievery or stealing, no dog-eat-dog or survival of the fittest mentality, it’s the exact opposite — everything is a shared resource and everyone is ready to help. There are no political or divisive boundaries. No one is turned away or looked down on. Solidarity is real. This is the news that needs to be amplified. This is a living, breathing, functioning example of mutual aid and community care.”

That buffer of care wasn’t just about meeting daily needs, but giving the smallest members of the community a soft place to land amid the wreckage. “The care that emanated from our street did a really important job at influencing how my kids saw this,” Mila says. “Because they saw all this devastation, but then they also saw everybody coming together like they hadn’t seen before.” It reminded Mila, whose writing and artwork is deeply tied to the natural world, of mycelium networks: symbiosis, connectivity, a humming web of interdependence. “It was really weirdly beautiful to see it come together.”

Though Mila has deep ancestral roots in Appalachia, none of their family lives nearby. I ask them whether they feel this experience got them close to that so-called “village” parents love to talk about. “I don’t know, but I’m very happy with how close we got,” Mila says. “My community proved that we can literally get through anything together. Like, buildings and houses and roads washed off the face of the earth. And we took care of each other as we got through it.”

For some survivors of Helene, it’s the sound of rain or wind that jolts them back to the trauma of the storm. But it’s the quiet that unsettles Kym, taking her back to those long, hard, lightless nights when her 14-year-old son couldn’t sleep without her at his side.

In a short documentary first published on TikTok, a woman named Bonnie details her harrowing escape from the third story of her flooded Swannanoa apartment building by wading through raging, chest-high floodwaters with her crying 1-year-old son in her arms. She’s nearly to the embankment when she sees a group of neighbors on a hill above her, yelling and offering to help get her to safety.

One of those neighbors was Kym, who spent that morning desperately trying to help people escape the flooded Riverview Apartments down the hill from her family’s home as the Swannanoa River swelled to nearly 30 feet. At Kym’s side was her teenage son, who witnessed it all: the pandemonium of the adults racing to call 911 and figure out how to safely get a kayak out to save people. The faces of neighbors across the river whom they could not reach. Trees crashing down on homes with people inside. Houses breaking away from their foundations and careening down the river. Some rescue attempts that were successful. Some that were not.

After the storm, her son “went into fight-or-flight mode,” panicking about the wellbeing of friends he couldn’t contact. Of those neighbors across the river. By day, she says, he’d “fight” by joining the volunteer efforts. “But as soon as the night got quiet, that’s when he started to panic.” The first three days, Kym couldn’t leave his sight, and for a few nights, the whole family — a multigenerational household of 12 people, including five children — slept in one room together. For months after the storm, Kym still sees echoes of its aftermath — anxiety, hypervigilance — on her son. They have difficult conversations about mortality, and perhaps most tragically, “he doesn’t want to be at home, because it doesn’t feel safe to him anymore.”

“​​It was heartbreaking, because it was the moment that, as a parent, there’s not much you can do but be beside them and listen and try to explain,” Kym says. As the mother of a teenage boy, she says, it was also bittersweet. Hearing Kym describe her experience, I’m struck by the moment’s symmetry with an earlier kind of mothering, when your own body is your child’s ultimate comfort, their proverbial shelter from the storm.

Six weeks after the storm, when I meet Kym, Swannanoa is still in splinters. Along the main highway, there are piles of debris where homes and buildings used to be. I drive past Silverado’s, a concert venue-turned-supply hub, where volunteers, many of whom are temporarily living on-site in campers, direct traffic and distribute goods. A shopping center parking lot hosts a pop-up medical clinic, a shower station, and potable water supplied by a tanker truck. I stop for gas, and a man in a pickup truck pulls up beside me. “If you know anybody who’s hungry,” he says, “we’ve got nine hundred pounds of barbecue going right outside Ingles.”

Inside a vacant former hair salon off of Highway 70, a group of five women, including Kym, are gathered to make plans for their nascent community center — so nascent that the morning I’m there, the group has just received its first Amazon package addressed to their organization, which they’ve dubbed Swannanoa Communities Together. Most of these women didn’t know each other until their paths crossed while distributing emergency supplies to their neighbors after Helene. Now, they’re bound not just by geographic or professional ties, but a shared experience and vision.

Kym’s involvement in hurricane relief efforts began, she says, “the moment we could get out, when we knew our trucks would make it through.” After she and her neighbors set up a supply hub in the church down the hill from her house, the group began spreading out to do welfare checks farther afield and deliver supplies to more remote communities. They started distributing supplies at a nearby income-based housing community that hadn’t yet received outside help. It was here, at the Jasper Apartments, where Kym met Beth Trigg, who was there to do the same thing. The two began working in parallel, dispensing supplies and sending volunteers out on routes where roads were passable.

These grassroots efforts coalesced into the project now housed inside the empty hair salon, where we sit surrounded by boxes of free diapers and toilet paper. The week before my visit, the group hosted a clinic with a team of lawyers from Pisgah Legal Services offering legal aid and assistance with navigating FEMA. A nook that used to be a hair stylist’s station is now a free food pantry. There is a corner with children’s books and toys, so that kids can play while their parents get assistance. Kym helps guide people through the process of applying for FEMA’s Serious Needs Assistance, a $750 payment to offset costs of essential goods. Carmen Ybarra, a longtime community organizer, helps families secure emergency housing, including those who have received donated RVs but don’t have a place to park them.

“We’re helping each other, we’re supporting each other,” says Beth. “This is our community, we live here, we have a connection to this place and we are here for each other.” Whether they call this work mutual aid or community care or something else doesn’t matter to the group as much as their shared values in carrying it out. No “vetting” or asking people to prove they’re worthy of help. No excluding people. No donated supplies piling up because it’s not what people actually, directly need. No savior complex. No pity. Just asking people what they need, then helping them find it. Which sounds an awful lot like the daily, mundane work of motherhood, too.

Beth and Carmen are both single moms, and each sees echoes of motherhood in their day-to-day community organizing work. “There’s a thing with single moms where it’s like, we’re going to make this happen because we don’t have a choice,” says Carmen. “It’s like, what do I need to do, not who can do it for me or help me. You have to find a way to make it happen. A lot of us have built up an ability to see where the roadblocks are and just have that single vision of — this is what’s happening.” (Or, to paraphrase Beth: moms know how to get shit done.)

“One thing I want to say is that moms actually, physically rescued people,” Beth says, nodding toward Kym. “Moms in my community actually saved people’s lives during the storm. That will always be part of the story to me, that people saved each other — actually, literally. And we’re going to keep protecting each other.”

When I visited in November, the systems of support that emerged after the storm were at a precipice. Some supply hubs were beginning to scale back their hours, or close entirely. Others were questioning how long they could manage to keep going, as the initial wave of volunteers subsided and people involved with recovery efforts had to go back to full-time jobs. Meanwhile, another disaster nested within Helene was settling in for the long haul: food insecurity, job loss, housing instability, poverty. A region already beset by these problems was now facing an unknowable economic future.

Bald Creek Relief, a supply hub in Burnsville housed in a 87-year-old elementary school, opened several days after the storm when a small collective of people — most of whom knew each other through their children — leapt into action. After the storm, Krysten Crabtree, an office manager and mom of two girls, was ferrying people back and forth from the fire station to her home so they could use her showers. Seeing the urgent need for emergency supplies, Krysten happened to reach out to another mom she knew through her daughters’ school. Lori Denley was “a mere acquaintance” of Krysten’s. The two women decided to make use of the empty school building next to Krysten’s house. Within 24 hours, monetary and supply donations were coming in from all over the country, and local volunteers were joining the effort via word of mouth. “​​It just kept growing and growing,” Krysten says. “So many different types of people were coming in to help.”

The day I visit, Bald Creek’s parking lot is jam-packed, with volunteers directing traffic in and out. Inside, the labyrinthine halls of the old school are filled with people and families wheeling old shopping carts from classroom to classroom filled with shelf-stable goods, clothing, bottled water, baby supplies, propane tanks, toiletries, medicine, Narcan, and more — all free to whomever needs it. There’s an area for kids to play while parents shop. It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and Krysten’s group has arranged a visit from Santa next week. 

Krysten has only recently returned to the office where she works an abbreviated workday before rushing back to Bald Creek for her second shift, helping other volunteers direct shoppers and sort donations. In between, she manages home-schooling her fifth- and eighth-grade daughters. Other volunteers are starting to juggle returning to work, too. The needs are also shifting — people don’t need diapers and formula as much as they need, say, kitchenware to replace everything they lost, or propane heaters to stay warm in their campers. At the “Babyland” space inside the old gymnasium, stacks of diaper boxes reach nearly to the ceiling, while fuel canisters, baby bottle brushes, and potted meat are in high demand. 

While the specific needs have changed, the demand hasn’t once let up: at the time of my visit, Bald Creek is fielding about 500 shoppers a day. They’re coming not because supplies are physically inaccessible but because they can’t afford them. Krysten says she and the other volunteers want to keep going as long as they’re needed — and she foresees the need lasting a long time. She tells me about friends of hers, two teachers who lost their home and are facing the financial repercussions of rebuilding without any help from their insurance company. Another friend is lost in the paperwork of getting assistance because he was a renter, not a homeowner. There are, Krysten says, people paying mortgages on houses that no longer exist. Saving money on groceries would go a long way toward helping these households recover. The group, which has a six-month lease on the building, is “holding on to every inch of possibility” that they’ll be able to turn the space into a permanent community center serving Yancey County.

As Krysten tours me through the circa-1895 stone school, we regularly pause to meet volunteers. There’s Whitney, who quit her job and moved here from Cartersville, Georgia, to help out at Bald Creek. Katie, who normally runs a taproom in Asheville but now distributes tents, sleeping bags, and propane out of “Camping World,” and is reluctant to go back to normal life. Some volunteers, who otherwise might not have ever met each other, have formed close friendships — a “ragtag” group of people with bonds forged in the trenches of trauma, hard work, and deep purpose. They greet each other (and tease each other) like family. They look out for each others’ kids while the adults run the hub. Some of them live in campers on-site. On the walls, between paper maps of the facility and bilingual translation guides for shoppers (¿Puedo ayudarle? ¿Tú tienes leche?), there are hand-written notes of encouragement: You are not alone. Yancey Strong. Together we can do hard things. One, in a child’s scribble: Your Loved.

“I finally found my village,” says Krysten. “I’ve missed it for way too long, and now I have it.” 

Krysten Crabtree teamed up with moms of her daughters’ friends to set up a resource center in an empty school building next to her house. Within 24 hours, donations were coming in from across the country. Crabtree still juggles working part-time as an office manager, helping run the supply hub, and home-schooling her fifth- and eighth-grade daughters.

After I get home from North Carolina, it’s just before Thanksgiving, and my nasturtiums and snapdragons from the spring have rebloomed — Atlanta still hasn’t had its first frost yet. That weekend, after we put up our Christmas tree, I am in the garden harvesting sweet peppers while each of my children bite into ripe red tomatoes, juice dribbling down their T-shirts. I look at them and wonder what will be left for them. What might be saved, what will be worth saving, what it will take for them to bear what’s ahead and how I could possibly begin to equip them for it, let alone equip myself.

The week after my son turned one, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its urgent warning of the “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” climate cataclysm in every part of the planet. I sat at the kitchen table reading words like “unprecedented” and “irreversible” while this half-naked summer baby gummed out-of-season strawberries from a plastic clamshell container, oblivious to his bleak inheritance, but only for so long. The report was frightening, but “essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.” How we can prepare.

How does a parent prepare their child for this kind of future? You can teach them how to start a fire, how to wield a chainsaw, how to administer first aid. How many gallons of water to stock in their homes. The right resources to stockpile, the right survival skills to master. These skills certainly kept some people alive in North Carolina.

People like to talk about these skills in terms of self-sufficiency, but in Celo and Waynesville, in Fairview and Swannanoa, it was the work happening outside of and beyond these selves that helped keep so many of these families afloat. It may not get you a Boy Scout badge, but solidarity is a survival skill, too. In the context of raising kids while staring down the barrel of  future Helenes, teaching it feels essential. 

I’m not sure which is harder to imagine: a world in which people selflessly choose the collective over themselves, or a world that, for a moment in time, witnessed that very phenomenon in action and didn’t fight like hell to keep it going. But I think about the path that Krysten, and the other folks at Bald Creek, chose. I think about the women of Swannanoa channeling their purpose with clarity. I think about the mothers who fed one another, and the micro-communities that held them. And I know I’d pick the mothers’ vision of the future every time.  ◊