ACROSS WESTERN N.C. — Anita Crowder stood in the warm October sun, her face weary, her shoes caked in mud, her blue eyes surveying a place she’d known all her life, but one that now seemed so unfamiliar.

“I buried my daddy two weeks ago,” Crowder, 67, said outside the home in Swannanoa her father had shared with his wife, Betty, for more than a half century. Six days after his funeral, on Sept. 27, the storm had hit and the river had swelled, devouring much in its path, including this small white house where Kenneth Crowder’s daughter had spent Thanksgivings and Christmases for as long as she could remember.

“I called him every day. If I didn’t call him, he called me,” said Anita, whose 87-year-old stepmother waded to safety through the floodwaters with the help of neighbors. “It would have made him sick, seeing everything they worked so hard for washed away.”

Now, as she navigated rooms where the water had flipped and mangled furniture, where mud stuck to the walls and sat ankle deep on the floor, she tried to salvage a few old photos and tools and documents. She thought about how so much had changed so fast — both in her life, and in so many lives across this region.

“Two different eras,” she said. “Things will be totally different.”

Barely a week after Helene barreled across the South, leaving a trail of suffering and loss hundreds of miles wide in its wake, its true toll has yet to fully come into focus.

The crisis here in Western North Carolina — as well as in parts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — remains far from over, and only the first flickers of recovery have begun. At least 229 people have died, a total that seems destined to climb higher as communities dig out from oceans of debris.

While the level of loss varies from community to community, and sometimes from street to street, almost everyone who endured this unprecedented storm agrees on this much:

In these mountains, Helene will forever mark a dividing line. A before and an after. The end of one era, and the beginning of another that, for now, is full of uncertainty and angst.

Entire towns lie in ruins. Roads large and small are washed out. Search crews continue to scour the mountainous terrain in helicopters, on all-terrain vehicles and even on horseback to check on souls still unaccounted for in rural outposts. Many residents still have no power or cell signal or running water, even as a wave of aid flowed in over recent days.

Already, the storm has changed not only the physical landscape of this region, but the inner landscape of those who experienced this cataclysmic event.

“I’m trying to understand the magnitude of what is happening,” said Adam Smith, who endured the storm with his wife and two kids just outside Asheville, N.C. Smith, a scientist and economist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is also one of the nation’s foremost experts on the costs of extreme weather disasters, but not until this week had his own family experienced such a catastrophe firsthand.

“I think everyone is still in a bit of a state of shock. It’s almost like a dream,” he said Thursday, nearly a week after his own home lost electricity and running water. “Maybe dream is not the right word. Maybe more like a nightmare.”

A week on, there are more questions than answers.

Why was this region so unprepared for a storm of this magnitude? What will happen to the economy here? To the vibrant culture built on art and breweries, on music and nature? How long will it take to reconstruct what’s destroyed, to reopen schools, to house those suddenly without homes, to bury the dead?

Will aid keep coming? When will the world move on?

‘Surprise and shock’

So much vanished in the wake of the storm.

Houses and vehicles. Businesses, and with them livelihoods. But there were also less tangible things that disappeared in the past week.

One was the sense that Western North Carolina, with its high elevation, inland location and mild seasons, is a safe harbor in an age of more extreme weather. This, the thinking went, is a place more and more people are destined to flee to escape rising seas, stronger storms and the crippling heat elsewhere in the country.

Then came Helene.

“For someone like myself who studies these [disasters] deeply over many years and understands them quite well,” said Smith, the NOAA scientist, “they can still surprise and shock us.”

He had spent the Tuesday before the storm working, tracking the latest additions to a list of weather events around the country that cause more than $1 billion in damages — a tally that had already reached 20 as of Sept. 1. A record 28 billion-dollar disasters hit the United States last year.

By the next day, the forecast was so alarming, Smith left work early.

He texted friends a dire warning the National Weather Service had issued, making clear Helene’s flooding would likely surpass that caused by tropical systems that passed through here in 2004 and 2021, and perhaps what had been the area’s historic flood of record in 1916.

Then he stepped out into his yard Wednesday evening and felt the ground — it was already saturated. The storm’s eye had not even made landfall in Florida and yet he began to dread how dramatic the flooding might become.

He found himself feverishly hunting for portable pumps and other supplies to protect his basement, which had flooded in 2021 when the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred brought deadly rains. He visited four stores that were sold out before he found the pumps, and he also grabbed sandbags and waterproof tape.

Like so many, Smith and his family had to navigate a world with no electricity, water, internet or cellphone connection after the storm. His children, in sixth and 10th grades, kept themselves entertained playing outside with neighbors. As families gathered to grill food that would soon spoil, he wondered how dire conditions were in so many communities that weren’t as fortunate as his own.

He finds himself in the fog of recovery. In the past, so much of his work on disasters was confined to spreadsheets, rather than the world outside his door.

‘A looming sense of panic’

It seems almost callous, amid so much loss, to consider what October might otherwise have looked like in the communities that dot the Blue Ridge Mountains.

But amid the immediate suffering here, there is a quiet but unmistakable grief — not only for what has happened, but for all that will not, no matter how trivial.

The autumn leaves will come and go without the usual hordes of tourists clogging the Blue Ridge Parkway and filling up the inns and restaurants that help fuel the local economy. The woolly worm caterpillar race won’t happen at the Woolly Worm Festival in Banner Elk. The famous Biltmore Estate sits closed.

Driving out of the region earlier this week, Canda Molinari despaired as she saw how many local landmarks had been claimed by the raging waters.

“Places where we used to go shop or eat were replaced with the French Broad River,” said the retired teacher from Weaverville.

For Liam Brown, this place once brimmed with opportunity.

He landed a job managing the taproom at Archetype Brewing in Asheville over the summer, and things were starting to click in the days before Helene. So many people flocked to play trivia the Tuesday before the storm that one of the 19 teams had to sit outside. The 24-year-old Brown stayed long past the end of his shift to help.

Two nights later, rain started to pour as Helene made landfall in Florida. Crowds packed the bar inside for “hurricane beers,” with no sense of what lay ahead.

In a place known as “Beer City USA,” with dozens of breweries, it can be hard to stand out as a small neighborhood taphouse. But the packed house had Brown optimistic that October would be a busy month. “We had some good momentum,” he said.

Helene has now upended life for workers like Brown, who keep the region’s tourism engine humming. Even for businesses that didn’t wash away, pipes that deliver much of Asheville’s water have been destroyed, and until the taps work again, much of the industry has ground to a halt.

Sky Warren, 23, worked at a bed-and-breakfast in Black Mountain until Helene nearly destroyed it.

“The only money we have is what’s in our pockets,” Warren said. “There is a looming panic about the future.”

She had just moved in with her partner, McKenzie Malone, who cooks at a restaurant next door to Archetype. They got the initial $750 from FEMA for households in Helene’s path, but otherwise, have no current way to pay rent. The basement of the old house they share was so damaged by flooding, their landlord told them they’ll need to find a new place to live by early next year.

A week after everything changed, life at the brewery also looked very different.

Brown and his small team managed to reopen, with enough cans of free water and beer to last a while. Stir-crazy customers filed in, some newly out of work, looking for a place to charge phones and get out of the house.

The effort was wearing on Brown, on top of the stress of getting by in a city with no running water. He planned to leave town for a few days, to visit his parents and hopefully, to take his first hot shower in a week.

On Thursday, though he learned the brewery would be closing for now, he said: “I hate that we’re shutting down. … But it is a little bit of a relief.”

He, too, would be headed for the unemployment rolls soon.

‘Mom, what about the house?’

A week after Helene, the skies above Western North Carolina buzz with constant traffic from private planes and small helicopters bringing in donations.

In one Black Hawk high above Ashe County on Wednesday, National Guard members scanned the mountainsides and valleys below. The radio crackled with requests for help: A woman had run out of food and water and wanted to leave. A man with diabetes needed to be evacuated.

The ground has shifted under so many people in a swath of the South, from the streets of Augusta, Ga., to the mountains of East Tennessee.

Before Helene even battered Valdosta, Ga., Rhiannon Abrahamian and her husband, a butcher, had gotten used to living without power for a few days or more. It’s already happened three times in the last year because of hurricanes and a tropical storm.

“I used to be able to buy formula and diapers” for their toddler and 8-month-old, Abrahamian said. The reality now feels more dire — “everybody’s babies were running out of diapers at the same time.” Wipes were gone too.

In this area, where more than one in five people live below the poverty line, “you have to drive three hours out of town to find something,” she said this week. They had half a tank of gas.

Two weeks before the storm, the main street in the small North Carolina town of Marion was shut down for a huge festival organized by Latino Unido, a nonprofit supporting the region’s Latino community. Performers traveled all the way from Mexico, and people came out to eat and celebrate.

But on Friday, the group’s offices were busy with volunteers organizing food and supply drops. Others helped Spanish-speakers navigate the FEMA application process. The Mexican embassy sent staff and money.

Maria Guadalupe Garcia Rodrigues sent her 14-year-old daughter to her aunt’s house ahead of Helene.

Garcia Rodrigues got ready for work the following morning and realized she couldn’t get out or reach anyone because cell service was down. She was rescued — she believes by police — and her brother-in-law was able to pick her up amid the driving rain and flooded roads. But for two wrenching days, she did not know whether her daughter was safe.

“When I finally talked to her she said, ‘Mom, I’m okay.’ And I said, ‘Thank God, this is finally over,’” Garcia Rodrigues said.

“And then she said, ‘Mom, what about the house?’ And I said, ‘We don’t have a house anymore.’”

A ‘slice of paradise,’ lost

Surrounded by massive loss, Monnie Roten also was thinking about family.

Only days ago, she had hosted her granddaughter and friends for dinner before a homecoming dance. They ate pasta and meatballs, and sat on the sprawling back porch overlooking her large goldfish pond. When would that ever happen again?

For more than 50 years, their home in Boone, N.C., has been a haven for Roten and her family, the spot where she raised two sons, who later built homes next door to raise their own children.

Living alongside a creek, Roten has seen these waters rise before. Floods have come and gone. But nothing like Helene, which sent a propane tank crashing into her porch and destroyed much of her bedroom and den. “This was a hundred times worse,” she said, “because when it really let loose, you knew it was going to take lives, homes.”

Not far away, Joseph McGinnis lived in a serene creekside apartment. When his girlfriend came to visit from Raleigh, they spent weekends cooking and watching movies. In the evenings, he walked his Siberian husky, Romeo, around the complex and sat outside to listen to the trickle of the water.

“This was like a little slice of paradise right here,” said McGinnis, a car mechanic.

After Helene’s torrents arrived, that idyllic trickle turned into a raging torrent that swept five feet of water through McGinnis’s home.

“Watching everything I’ve worked so hard for just be destroyed in minutes,” McGinnis said as he examined the damage Wednesday. He held Romeo from entering the apartment as he fought back his own tears.

“No, bubs,” McGinnis told his dog, “we’re not allowed in there anymore.”

‘Suffering will come in this life’

Back in Swannanoa, at the First Baptist Church, Pastor Jeff Dowdy and his wife, Melody, had witnessed kindness and sadness, tragedy and fortitude at their doorstep day after long day over the past week.

They felt certain, like many here, that Helene would reverberate in these mountains long after they were gone.

“A hundred years from now, they’ll be talking about this flood,” he said.

Before the storm, they had been planning for the church’s annual fall festival, with a bounce house and face painting for kids. There were sermons to plan, hospital visits to make, Wednesday morning prayer gatherings to prepare for.

After the storm, the couple and a handful of volunteers had set up a makeshift aid station with the few supplies they had, handing out peanut butter sandwiches and limiting visitors to two bottles of water per person.

Only a few days later, as help poured in from around the country, the church’s gym was brimming with supplies — table after table of canned goods, stacks of diapers and dog food, mountains of bottled water. There was a medical tent and place where people could get clothing, and volunteers directing traffic that seemed never to stop coming.

“Now, people can take all they want,” the pastor said.

There had been one humbling moment after another. The day Melody Dowdy had to shop through the donations, after realizing they too no longer had food at home. The day they gave a donated tent to one family whose home had washed away, and the mother said in Spanish, “It’s small, but it’s enough.”

Jeff Dowdy was determined there would be a Sunday morning service over the weekend, even if it had to take place in the parking lot. Already, he was thinking of what message he might deliver to the battered and worn.

“The Bible talks a lot about going through hard times,” he said. “Suffering will come in this life.”

There had been plenty of that in the days since Helene. But scripture, he planned to remind them, also says to hold out faith for better days, to remember that “they can make it through this, because other people have,” he said.

Outside, in the sky above, the president and the governor were circling in helicopters, surveying the aftermath of the storm, sprawling and still unfathomable. Generators hummed. The engines of dump trucks and bulldozers roared, as workers cleared heaps of debris by the river.

Just down the hill, Anita Crowder was wrapping up another visit to her father’s house, where mud now covered the site of so many memories. She had fished out her stepmother’s checkbook, her father’s Social Security card and some antique lamps from the muck.

She planned to head to her own storm-ravaged town a half-hour away to get some rest. Then she would come back tomorrow, through the broken world around her, to see what else could be saved.

Sacks reported from Valdosta, Ga. Nicolás Rivero in Washington and Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Houston contributed to this report.

previous coverage

• Helene response hampered by misinformation, conspiracy theories
• Harris visits North Carolina, in second trip to areas ravaged by Helene
• Up to 1,000 Fort Liberty troops deploying to aid Hurricane Helene recovery