I direct an outdoor program at a small college in Southwest Virginia, and if you work at a small, private college, a significant part of your job is recruiting, selling the value of the institution to prospective students. For a college in Southwest Virginia, it’s also been about selling the value of place.

I tell this story. It’s my story, and I have been sharing it with prospective students and their parents for over twenty years. It’s the story of how I came to be at the college and how I came to live in Damascus, Virginia. I think it has been a good story, or good enough. I start the whole thing by telling them that in 1997 my wife Aliese and I hiked from Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail, completing a southbound thru-hike.

I typically pause a bit here for effect.  

Continuing, I talk about how once we returned to Memphis after the hike, we knew we didn’t want to live in a city anymore, and we sold our house and set out to find a place to call home, maybe even to start a family. 

I’m an animated person, so during this part of the story, I typically can’t help gesticulating for emphasis. This is where I tell folks that we decided to start our quest for a home with a brief stop in Damascus, Virginia, because we had had such a good experience there on our big hike. I tell them that our stop in Damascus was just that—a stop, only a month or two, enough time to bike the Virginia Creeper Trail, revisit the Grayson Highlands, backpack some, then move on.

The story wraps up like this: Those couple of months turned into twenty-five years, and when our families questioned our decision to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, we told them that this “nowhere” is someplace special, an outdoor lover’s paradise. I then provide the prospective student and parents with literature that highlights the many resources for outdoor recreation in Damascus and the surrounding area.

I might need a new story.   

I might need a new story because on September 27, Hurricane Helene ripped into Southwest Virginia. The violent winds toppled hundreds of trees, and the deluge of rain caused Whitetop Laurel Creek to flash and send a torrent of destructive water down the mountain and into Damascus, destroying bridges, inundating houses with mud, wrecking businesses, and shattering the nature lover’s paradise.

I might need a new story that includes how, after the storm, I kayaked one of my favorite creeks, white-knuckled, to search its shattered rocks and debris-strewn rapids for bodies. How I had to inform my students that the local rivers where we paddle are currently contaminated, clogged, and dangerous. How the Mount Rogers National Recreational Area and the Appalachian Trail are closed for the foreseeable future. How the Creeper Trail will take years to rebuild, its bridges ruined, its trail scoured away.

The new story will tell how I helped bring aid to some folks high up in a holler who had lost everything to the floodwaters and who had been living in their yard and sleeping on the ground for seven days. How these folks, though stinking from the fetid mud and weary from grief, also exuded an undeniable, unbeatable dignity.

The next part of the story will be about the countless people who started helping as soon as the winds and rain subsided. How despite the destruction, there has been no pause, no cessation of work, no tangible sense of defeat, but only the raw effort and toughness of a people bound together in purpose.  

What I have always left out of the story: When we first moved to Damascus back in 1998, I walked down to the main road to buy a few groceries, and a lady with beautiful white hair rang up my items. When she told me what I owed, I frantically searched my pockets, but I had forgotten my wallet. Embarrassed, I told her I would have to put the groceries back, but she just smiled. “We all know who you are, honey,” she said. “You just come back and pay when you can.”  

What I always left out of the story—maybe I thought it mawkishly sentimental—is that it is a beautiful thing to be part of this small community in the mountains. We made the decision to stay in Damascus because we immediately felt connected, a part of life here, and though we have always enjoyed the trails and other resources for outdoor recreation, we mostly enjoy knowing the people of this town and that they know us.

One time when we were getting ice cream on the main street with our children when they were just six and seven, a tourist and his wife struck up a conversation: “Sooo, I can hear the mountain in your children’s voices,” the man observed, “but where are you and your wife from?” I remember how this caught us off guard, gave us pause to know that there is an indelible stamp on our children—something “mountain” that had been imperceptible to us. At the time, I couldn’t believe there was part of the story of which I was unaware.

I guess I have a new classification of story—Post Helene, PH for brevity.

Like the one where my knees almost buckled when I heard my daughter’s voice for the first time after the storm, knowing she had survived and was safe in the North Carolina mountains where she attends graduate school. I asked what she was going to do, and she said that she was going to hike medical aid into a remote community where she knew the roads were washed out, because she couldn’t “sit around.” As she reminded, “These mountains are my home.”

Jim Harrison is a whitewater paddler, and he has been making bad lines look good on the steep creeks of the Southeast for years. He directs the Center for Outdoor Studies at Emory & Henry University, where he also teaches courses in backcountry leadership and nature writing.

Header image: Laurel bridge swept away from flooding, Damascus, Virginia. Photo by Aliese Harrison.