Guitars, dolls, urns, snow skis, entire cars and trucks, porcelain angels, lost dogs and cats, photographs. So many photographs. This is only a sample of what volunteers are finding after the flash floods of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.
Jennifer Michael’s post about the wedding album first showed up in the Facebook group Friends of Swannanoa, NC. Her post alone has been shared over 1,400 times. This shows you how much the flood victims and their neighbors in WNC need to see a success story. Jennifer Michael had come from out of town with her husband for the day to volunteer in the hard-hit area of the Swannanoa River. They found the wedding album in a pile of muddy trees and debris and took a series of pictures to help return it to its owners.
Now y’all know me. You know that my heart broke when I saw these photographs, wet and muddy, knowing that mold will soon steal these images, these faces, from someone’s memory if nothing is done. I’ve written about the horrible state of my mother’s family photograph, the one of her biological family that she never bothered to show me, and kept in a box under her bed until she died.
Immediately, I wanted to save the memories in this album and return it to the family. Returning orphaned heirlooms is an obsession of mine, and this wedding album is a part of someone’s family history. Last year it was an antiquarian Bible I found in a Waynesville, NC antique shop that took a few months to research and find descendants of the family who owned it.
Read about the Bible here.
As soon as I saw the post about the wedding album in another Facebook group, I found your stuff – WNC, shared by Lynn Jenkins Baker, I contacted Jennifer, the original poster, by tagging her. She gave me the names and address of the family who owned the property where the album was held. That’s all she had.
I tried calling a phone number but no response. I tried emailing the couple and still no response. If I’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that the contact information I find isn’t always effective and that sending a letter through snail mail is the best way to reach a stranger. I sent a letter and they texted me.
David and I left yesterday for the hard-hit flood zone in Swannanoa and this is what we saw:
The rest area on I-26 is covered with temporary housing and potable water trucks.
Uninhabitable homes with large orange X’s.
Debris of all kinds.
“❤️ You can do it! We will help!”
The neighborhood is unrecognizable from one residence to the next. A surviving street sign marks where a road used to be. We walked down a mud-covered path, making sure to step within the tracks of the large trucks, past a tent city where volunteers unloaded two sheds from a flatbed truck. Were they for storing tools, food, or supplies? Or were they for sleeping because tents in this mud seemed no longer feasible. The landscape was that ugly.
We found the couple living in a camper at the end of the path. They had been protecting the album since it was found. When he handed it to me, I was in awe.
It was so swollen, and so full of mud that I was speechless. (Coffee cup in photo for perspective.) I had to close my eyes for a sec and catch my breath in order to remember why I was there. Not just to pick it up; I needed some information too.
I asked the couple which direction the river flowed in that area. They pointed, and then said items have been picked up there that floated from properties 1-5 miles upstream. I looked across the property and tried to imagine how high the water got. I couldn’t. All I can do is watch flood videos on Facebook and pray.
I couldn’t carry the album back to the car because I injured my wrist the day after the storm moving tree branches away from our crushed shed. David carried the album focusing on stepping in just the right tracks to not lose his footing, trip, fall, or drop the album back into the mud.
The couple was wonderful to protect this album until we could pick it up. Now, Juls Buckman, professional photographer and owner of Buckman Studios, and I can do our best to save as many of the images as we can, and then return it to the family that lost it during the flood. We’ll be posting close-ups of the album soon.
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