Detective Sam DeGrave sorting through photos recovered from debris piles after Hurricane Helene.
Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

Piecing Life Back Together After Helene, One Mud-Splattered Photo at a Time

by · NY Times

Four days after Tommy and Mary Moss watched their home float down the Swannanoa River, the couple and their son Dallas returned to their neighborhood in Asheville, N.C., to begin searching through the mud-caked debris.

Dallas Moss quickly put on his boots, insistent on digging down to the foundation, turning over the remnants of their home’s hardwood flooring, never mentioning what they all most hoped to find: the photos and reminders of his older brother, who had died as a child from a rare genetic disorder.

After 10 days, they came out mostly empty-handed, with only a handful of sentimental items, including a figure of Pumba from “The Lion King” and a photo album from a baseball tournament. Generations of family photographs, childhood art and toys that they had collected in their home of more than 40 years had been washed away by the immense floodwaters unleashed by Hurricane Helene.

“I thought I was going to be able to find things,” said Dallas, 27. “I really did. We knew what we were trying to find, but we never said it out loud. It was just defeating.”

Mary Moss believed that almost everything she had left of her son Tommy James Moss was gone with the house.
Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

Ms. Moss believed that almost everything she had left of her son Tommy James Moss was gone with the house, including a baby tooth that she had kept in a silver necklace.

That was until, weeks after the storm, someone tagged Dallas in a Facebook post from the Asheville Police Department showing several dingy pictures that officers had recovered from piles of debris, more than a mile from the Mosses’ home. Pictures of himself as a child. Pictures of his brother.

One of Dallas and Tommy sitting on a bench, taken by their father at a photo studio he had set up in their garage. Another of a neighbor, kneeling by the young brothers in their blue wagon. And there were others, too.

“It’s been bittersweet being able to focus on these photos and the fact that I even have any,” Ms. Moss said. “God works in mysterious ways.”

The remnants of Hurricane Helene that battered North Carolina killed more than 100 people in the state, caused an estimated $53 billion in damage and ripped apart communities like Botany Woods, where the Mosses lived. The family, and others like them, say they have not only lost their homes, but also the artifacts of their past and the sense of belonging they had found among their neighbors.

The Mosses lived on Driftwood Court, a quiet, flat street by the river, making it the ideal spot for children to ride their bikes. In recent years though, the neighborhood had aged, becoming a mix of empty-nesters, retirees and people looking after their elderly parents. Calling it “Botany Woods Assisted Living” was a neighborhood joke.

Early on Sept. 27, the floodwaters tore through the neighborhood. Marjorie Graham fervently warned Shelley Kloesel, who has Parkinson’s disease, that they needed to evacuate. Rebecca Wait ran to help an elderly neighbor.

They all huddled in another neighbor’s house uphill, thinking that their homes would only be flooded. Ms. Graham had even asked her son to move a box of pictures up to the second floor of her house. Over several hours, they watched 11 homes in the small community float away.

They are still coming to terms with what they lost.

Ms. Wait returned to her lot recently and burst into tears when she found that the street had been bulldozed, with sediment piled onto the azalea bushes her mother had planted. Now, she brings two candlesticks and a plate she found amid the wreckage with her everywhere she goes.

“I want to go home,” she said. “It hits you every morning, and it’s the worst part of your day. We realize now that what we’ve lost is so much more than a house.”

Gone are the neighborly traditions, cultivated slowly since at least the 1980s. The late-summer block parties. The inclination to check in with one another when taking short strolls down Driftwood Court. Ms. Moss cracking jokes at the biweekly happy hours held on Ms. Kloesel’s driveway.

“It’s like you watch your life go down the river, too,” Ms. Kloesel said.

It has also become apparent that they will no longer be neighbors. Many of them have abandoned the idea of rebuilding. Ms. Kloesel will live with her sister in Colorado. Ms. Graham and Ms. Wait have already bought new homes in Asheville that are farther uphill, and away from bodies of water.

Ms. Moss might be the only one to return, if it is possible. Her husband told her recently that he only wants to live — and die — on their property.

But if it weren’t for Detective Sam DeGrave, the families may have even fewer reminders of their lives before the hurricane.

On the day Helene struck, Detective DeGrave had been busy evacuating and rescuing people from rising floodwaters and watched eight homes in Botany Woods float down the river and pummel into a bridge.

The next day, amid the search-and-rescue missions, he returned to the area, and wondered if would help to track down where those homes had ended up.

He wandered downstream, where he picked up a photo of a young girl, taken on a picture day at school. Initially he thought it might help locate a missing person. But over the next few days, as he combed through the rubble, more than 50 feet deep in some places, he kept finding dated family pictures sticking out of the mud. Some were even hanging, wet, on tree limbs. He wiped them down and stuck them in his pocket.

Detective DeGrave had been interested in photography since he was a child, and always admired the moments people chose to capture. He turned his police car into a makeshift photo studio, where he bagged the pictures and labeled them with descriptive details to help organize them. He recruited other officers to the cause, and eventually they gathered about 300 photographs.

“That was the point in which I realized it was about saving something for someone that lost everything rather than using them as a clue to find a missing person,” Detective DeGrave said. “Once you started looking for pictures, they were everywhere.”

An Instagram account called “Photos from Helene” has also helped people recover hundreds of photos from the debris.

When Ms. Graham went to the police station in downtown Asheville to meet Detective DeGrave and pick up photos from her house, she searched through his collection, combing through clear pictures from a 50th wedding anniversary, a photo of a baby with curly pigtails from the turn of the 20th century and others that were smudged by the red and yellow pigment leaching out. She also found some of Ms. Moss and her children.

When Ms. Moss went to see her pictures a few days later, she noticed some that belonged to Ms. Kloesel, including one of Ms. Kloesel’s mother and aunts. Ms. Graham had also missed a photo of her daughter. They promised Detective DeGrave that the neighbors would meet and exchange photos. Ms. Kloesel’s would be sent to Durham, N.C., where she is temporarily living with her nephew and his wife.

Almost a month after losing their home, the Mosses met Ms. Graham in the parking lot of a Home Depot to trade photos, marveling at the handwriting on the back of them, another reminder of the past.

“You see a disaster on TV and you say, ‘Why are they going through stuff? It’s gone.’” Tommy Moss said. “And then you think about it. You can’t replace your great-grandfather’s pictures, your child’s first-grade picture and the things you accomplished.”

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