My apprenticeship to Connie Regan-Blake began a couple of weeks before Hurricane Helene. For the interim weeks, we have each seen our beloved landscapes of the Southern Appalachians transmogrified by water and wind. For that first week, we could not reach each other–no one could reach anybody. With the exception of military helicopters and chainsaws, the world was as quiet as it was hundreds of years ago. Beings and events within our immediate radius became all we knew, all we could be sure of. Though we still rely on bottled water, the streetlights and traffic lights, the stores are illuminated again. We are still far from normal. To say that we are back to normal is a bit like having a soaring stock market during a global pandemic. We need new indicators. By far.

The quiet of those first days lives on in my nervous system. On the morning after the Hurricane, my daughter, Andaluna, drove from my mom’s cabin in Swannanoa to check on me. So brave. She drove along I-240. She saw how the Swannanoa had broken its banks and bridges just meters beyond the on-ramp. Both the cabin and my home were spared, both my daughter and I.

As the days progressed, we would discover the full breadth and depth of the disaster. We would see scenes in our surroundings we would not believe if we didn’t know at least three people it impacted. White toxic mud coated everything including our nightmares. From under its weight, stories arise.

My post-hurricane evenings were silent and dark. With power gone, an end-of-daylight curfew kept everyone at home. Everyone listened. No cars drove along the curved road I can see from my deck. I built fires each evening. I cooked my pasta and sauce. I made tea. Then I sat, surrounded by night, until my fire drifted off to sleep, suggesting I do the same. I read in bed by the light of a solar landscaping light. Outside my bedroom window lay the fallen Hemlock, half a Boxelder, two Pines, and my neighbor’s carport roof.

Thoughts of Tom Hanks in Castaway frequented my quiet days. I cooked on a little table-top Japanese barbecue I got at World Market in June and didn’t use. I’d bought the firepit for my daugther’s birthday party. The categories of our objects change in a disaster. Things we thought were “cute” become essential. A sixth sense comes into play wherein the brain recalls inventory with exactitude, and the body goes scurrying after whatever it is we forgot we had but that in the wisdom of economy soars in value. You really get a sense of being in a story that nature has co-written from the other side of everything.

That’s what it was like. It was as though the earth was telling. Our role was to listen and move in keeping with its wishes. The earth had drawn us close around and together. None of us knew what to do. All the same, people were doing it. Without a central office, without communication, people of Western North Carolina helped each other. I saw scientist friends wearing Hazmat to search for bodies in the water. I saw business owners salvaging each other’s businesses by the river. I saw people of different political views handing out diapers together from the back of a pick-up. When 54 busses of Amish carpenters arrived, I was still processing the astonishing work of a “Mule Train” carrying supplies into areas roads no longer reached. Within days, the Amish have built an entire village of lovely homes for people who suddenly, or for some time, had nothing.

This is story at work. We are characters in the earth’s story. Sure, there’s politics. There will always be politics probably for worldly matters. For Earthly maters, we have storytelling. Stories hold when everything else gets washed away.

When the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly penned his Defence of Poetry, he concluded by saying poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, I think it’s related to what we all saw here in the weeks after the storm. Nature gives us the experience, and it is our role to “legislate” its meanings. Only individuals who abide by nature’s laws can do this, for the laws of nature are seldom the same laws as those of humans. Thrust out of the reach of the usual human laws, we dwelled in a highly effective, intuitive, instinctual, collaborative spell of earth.

The poet and the storyteller are one in my mind. Without the methods of poetry, ancient stories and songs could depart from memory. The patterns, the rhythms, the figures shape stories into things we can remember. The division between oral history and paper history signifies a drifting apart of neccesary memory. Yet, when the rivers leap their embankments by 25 feet, the old ways were new again. Take away our phones for a week, and natural rhythms and roles emerge, almost like no time passed at all. We return to story-self, to a life of feeling worthy of community just as we are.

I am meeting with Connie tomorrow. Last visit, I told two “real life” stories. The first is about a mysterious event involving a beach on Siesta Key, off Sarasota. The other was about a mysterious experience involving a memorial service in Manhattan. To maintain balance, tomorrow I will tell two Irish Folktales. With these, I will dig around in history of the Gaelic World to learn the provenance of the tale.

My Scots friend, Alastair McIntosh suggested one evening that the reason I couldn’t find the cottage I had reserved for him and my other Scots friends, Norrie and Birgit when they visited.

Alastair suggested we stop the car, get out, remove our jackets, turn around three times then put our jacket back on inside-out. This was the way to release us from the hold of the Faeries. I surmise I will be driven to similar behaviour since I’ve been unable to find my multiple books I’d prepared for this apprenticeship and now can’t find a one of them. I drove to a Barnes and Noble today to see if they have any. There was one book: A Treasury of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. About three-inches thick with gold edge inside a hardback green adorned with Celtic knots like a page from Book of Kells, the editor’s name, Richard Doyle, isn’t readily available so I used Google. Before this, though, I read the introductor text. The language of this portion enveloped my mind as I read. There wasn’t a hint of highbrow gloss. Rather, it was as much story as it was preface to a collection. I felt the voice graft itself upon my imagination. At the end, I saw why. The Preface is by Yeats. I have literally written a portion of his introduction to Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali in black Sharpie on a large canvas, so deeply did that preface speak to me.

I will continue my exploration of the book. I must select one or two by three o’clock tomorrow. With Yeats as my guide, I have placed one of my feet inside the Faery Hill.