[upbeat music] [gentle music] - [Narrator] In the heart of Western North Carolina, communities rise from loss with strength and creativity after Hurricane Helene.

- I'm a huge believer, and I just feel like it was part of my designed plan just to be a servant my whole life, and this has given me that opportunity to keep serving.

- [Narrator] From the resilience of Asheville's River Arts District, as artists uncover their work from the mud, reclaiming what was lost, to the determination of the townspeople of Swannanoa, sifting through the mud and the heartbreak to find hope.

This special edition of "My Home" shares stories of healing, community, and that unwavering spirit known across these hills as mountain strong.

[gentle music continues] - [Reporter] Asheville, North Carolina, that town is basically cut off from the rest of the state right now.

Most of the city is totally submerged in water.

- [Official] This is an unprecedented storm and it's causing us to have an unprecedented response.

- [Mayor] Hurricanes can cause a lot of wind damage and they can cause a lot of flooding, and we got them both.

We have downed trees all over our community as well as devastating flooding you're looking at right now.

- Still looking at Hurricane Helene as the category-four storm tore through the southeastern United States, leaving nearly a hundred people dead and a trail of devastation.

[solemn music] - Helene has fully changed everything.

Sadly, I lost my studio and all the work that I had built up to in those five years in Helene, but along the way, I managed to meet incredible people and to really figure out what it means to be an artist in this modern era and what it means to find your community.

That's me.

[junk clatters] [XCVI sighs] You start to wonder what's actually worth trying to salvage and what's worth just moving on from.

There's a character here.

Someone's sitting on a bench with an umbrella.

This is me.

When I saw the place where I had spent the past six months, eight months building, it was destroyed.

There was nothing that can survive that.

When you look at prints hanging from the ceiling from the 26-plus surge of water, nothing's recoverable from that.

This has also changed how I view community.

I realized how powerful community is and how much of our own identities are formed from those around us, so now I can't help but to think about where the future of Asheville is gonna go.

[static buzzes] [solemn music continues] I can't help to think about the future of this district.

'cause although things are destroyed, you have the most creative minds you could ever ask for all gearing towards, how can we make this even better than it was before?

A lot of people will say, like, "I don't know how I would've handled it," but I guarantee you, had you been there, you would've found that strength.

Not even maybe from within you, but from everyone around you, 'cause everyone was being strong for the person on their left and being strong for the person on their right, and that created unity.

So, yeah, things that will come with me for forever is the value of those around us and that we are stronger than we think, that it's okay to not be okay, because there's always time to build back stronger and better.

[solemn music continues] [gentle music] My name's XCVI.

I'm an artist here in Asheville.

I moved here about five years ago.

I do abstract works to sculpture work, photography, videography, and ultimately, I'm a mixed media creator.

Arts has been in my life since the beginning.

Creating was always there for me.

When I went to college, I was going to be a business person, and that didn't happen because I took a drawing class and I felt more confident than i had in any sort of other class, and then that's when COVID hit.

I then would draw and paint all throughout the day, all throughout the night, and I posted a piece online for sale.

I wanted someone to have my work, and when I got that first $20 bill and I put it in my pocket, I knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

A friend of mine reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to move in with them in Asheville, North Carolina, and I sold everything I had and I moved in.

[upbeat music] When you show up into these mountains and you see the beauty in the city and the sky, there's murals everywhere.

There's people actively pursuing their craft on the streets, trying to sell you their work.

They're communicating to you their love of the nature around them.

The city of a million murals.

That felt like home immediately and you don't get that anywhere else.

You know, you don't get that sort of community that encourages you to take a risk.

As soon as I got that studio, everything else that was baggage fell to the side.

The only way to describe that first feeling of having my art up on white walls surrounded by incredibly talented artists was the most vulnerable I've ever felt and the most comfortable I've ever been in my own skin.

They say there's no free places in the world anymore.

They're wrong.

You could go to the River Arts District any day of the week.

You could see murals from people from all around the world, signatures that maybe you didn't know but you were curious about, shops that you could walk around and just look.

They had taken an area that was going to be condemned and they gave it to the artists and the artist built that into something that can only be described as gold.

It was pure.

It was beautiful.

It was inspiring.

You don't get that for free very often, but those artists, they made it and they said it was for you.

It was for me.

It was for everyone who wanted to be a part of it.

[mellow music] [rain pattering] On the 26th of September, the rain had been falling for about two days nonstop.

That night, the storm, it just kept picking up and it was pounding.

That was the last night for about two and a half weeks that we had power.

When I woke up the morning of the 27th, I woke up at 7:00 AM to the blinds of my room flapping in the wind chaotically, the tree in my front yard cracking and moaning and groaning.

About 11:30 that morning, the wind had subsided enough.

I was able to get my drone up into the sky.

[drone whirring] Trees down everywhere, on houses, across roads.

My own road was blocked from either side.

We had no way to get out.

We had a reservoir of water, we had enough food, and the day that we were able to make it out to the studio, I believe was the 30th.

We had to stop at Biltmore Village.

There was no other way in.

So we trekked through inches, six inches, a foot and a half of mud, and we had a conversation that I'll never forget and I hope that I don't have to have again, which is what do we do if we see a body?

And we made a plan.

We knew that, if we took a picture, we would get GPS coordinates to that exact location.

We were going to text that to the local 911 services along with the image and then we would move on.

That kind of set the tone for coming into the district.

[skateboard rattling] When we crossed down from the tracks into the skate park, I saw what was gonna be the new climbing gym.

The tank, the gas tank from Level 42, an immaculate glass-blowing shop, [camera clicking] had been ripped from its area and dragged about a hundred yards down the district and busted through the front entrance of the Foundation Studios.

The community here, you can see the walls.

They're fractured.

The community's fractured.

One of our artists in the building, Spencer Beals, he was actually in the building at the start of the flood and he was in the building.

When the rain first started, we thought it was gonna be just a couple feet of rain.

He was there with a shop vac and brooms, ready to push out the water.

Once it hit chest deep, he was able to get out and actually able to get across the tracks and watched our studio go underwater, and he's here today, working just like everyone else.

A lot of this art is nonrecoverable, which means the time that these artists have put in into making these... [XCVI sighs] Sorry.

The level of thought that's been put into this, the level of care, it can't be brought back, but it can be cherished and it can be remembered, and I feel like, for a lot of us, our goal right now is to see this work again because that's covered in mud and waste.

You look around the area, you'll see The Pleb is gone.

It's completely washed away.

I was standing in front of it when I first got here, not even realizing that I was standing in front of the place where I would fill up a growler of wine and bring it and sip with friends as we plotted our next big studio event, and that's not coming back.

A lot of this stuff, this building will have to be demolished.

So it's coming home, trying to figure out where I'm gonna be editing.

I'll just go through and collect whatever I got during the day.

So, actually, the beginning shot that I got was of one of the partners of one of our artists, Spencer Beals.

and during one of our breaks, his girlfriend, you know, she started playing guitar, just sitting in front of the building, and what's wild and sad is that she released her first EP in this building, and you know, it's cool, because that's her medium of expression and she brought that and shared it with us even though it was temporal.

It was here and then it was gone, but in that moment, you know, when all you hear is helicopters overhead, sirens, it's beautiful, you know?

This is in front of Summit Coffee, where just about everything was ripped apart, 'cause if you look at it, at first glance, it just seems like maybe an open face of a building.

The more you zoom in, the walls are completely ripped apart.

The top floor where I'd sit with my triple-shot espresso coffee in the morning just to get the day going right, you know, it's all openly exposed.

So what was once a little area that you could sit in and feel warm and safe is just completely different.

[objects clinking] [tools whirring] As soon as I pulled up here, I saw a bunch of my pieces I never thought I was gonna get to see again, and one of my pieces that was in our most recent showroom, Same Storm, which is about how when communities come together and work towards a common goal, like, anything can be achieved.

I never thought I was gonna see that piece again, and I just got to see thick mud be pressure washed off of it and it's there and it's still beautiful.

It's different, it's changed, and so is everyone else here, but I got to see it again and it's here.

I know where it is.

- We are cleaning salvaged art and ceramics and sculptures that were stuck in the flood debris.

Reid, the studio manager, and Jordan, who also helps us manage the studio, as well as other people helped pull a lot of it out of the debris, and now we're trying to clean it of mud.

[solemn music] - I've experienced things I never thought it would in my life, and our artwork is a mirror to us.

So there will be reflection of this experience in my art.

It changes you when you see what nature can do, because we see on our TVs broadcasted all over what humans can do to one another, what a bomb can do, and that's what the damage looked like.

It looked like something you could only see from a war film, but it wasn't.

It was just nature.

The hardest thing for me to overcome with this storm was accepting help from people.

I've been raised by a single mother.

My father passed away when I was very young, and we've always been taught to be self-sufficient, to be able to take care of yourself.

'cause then if you're taking care of yourself, you can take care of others, and when those around you have lost so much, it's easy to try and still say "I'm okay" when you're not.

Our community has been devastated.

We will rise like that water did, but it won't be damage left behind.

It'll be the rebuilding, and I think, this spring, we'll see the most beautiful flowers blossom, and it won't just be the wild flowers.

It'll be the connections that have been made from this.

I am so ready to see how this community builds back something just as beautiful and better than what we did before.

[solemn music continues] [gentle music] - [Narrator] Just a few miles east of the River Arts District, Hurricane Helene swept through the town of Swannanoa, leaving it reeling, but in the aftermath, something remarkable.

Neighbors came together not just to recover but to support and lift each other up.

They dug through the mud and debris, saved what they could, and in the process, found a deeper sense of connection and strength in each other and in the mountains they call home.

[gentle music continues] - I would've never thought that I would be, for a month, you know, picking up the pieces of my home, and my life would be indefinitely changed from those few hours in that morning.

So, maybe that was naive of me to think that.

You really only have a couple choices.

Either you let an event like that become the end of you or you're just gonna die now, or are you gonna stop and give up?

I've got a family, you know.

I've got a job.

I've got my cats, you know.

I have things.

I'm not completely broken.

[solemn music] I grew up in West Asheville.

It's a beautiful place to live.

You're in, like, a valley up in the mountains.

There's a lot to see and do, and I've always had a passion for cooking, but I had the opportunity to take over the Tomato Jam Cafe.

It was a beautiful thing for my family to feel it's something they could take pride in, and I ended up winning first place, which was the title of Top Chef in Western North Carolina.

We got picked up by Food Network.

That was the rise of, you know, my professional career as a chef.

It's not about the money.

It's about the sacrifices and the personal investment.

You know, the weeks that I worked 65 hours, the nights that I missed out because I stayed three hours at work to make a little extra money.

So, yeah, it's hard.

[vehicle rumbling] I had a guy that was ready to buy this truck from me, and, man, something down in me just said, "You might need it," and I'll be damned if, three weeks later, I wasn't escaping with my family and my cats in it to get 'em out of this hurricane alive, so grateful to get my family out of the neighborhood here.

[debris clinking] There's the basketball goal I bought for my boys a couple years ago.

I recognize that.

That's about a 12-by-24 foot building that's perched up on top of a couple vehicles, and some things is hard to even recognize.

I think one of the fearful things is that, how many little things will I not remember because I don't have the small little material thing to remember it by?

My kids who spent 20 years in the only house they've ever lived in, the ornaments they made to hang on your tree, the pottery they made in fifth grade.

This cap and gown is covered in mud, you know?

It's crazy.

[birds chirping] You come out here and you hear the birds and the cars driving by.

It feels pretty peaceful right now, but, obviously, there's evidence of another time when it wasn't so peaceful.

I know very easily that my life could be different the next day, and I woke up one day and my life was different.

It is easy to say that people aren't responding quick enough when you're sitting here and you have nothing and you're like, why aren't people coming to help me?

And I think that, overall, you know, for a pretty terrible thing to happen, there's been some real beauty in a lot of the people coming together to being willing to do whatever it takes.

That makes them pretty great, I think.

[crowd chattering] - We have a load of tasks today so we can go back out and give everyone hope.

That is our purpose, correct?

- Correct.

- And I love you all for it.

My concern is your safety and everyone else's.

If we have mudslides, we cannot help these people if we're trapped on that side too, but that is what we're facing with inclement weather.

We need to get them out of this which is coming.

Everybody nod your heads if you understand me and you're awake.

Happy.

All right.

People, you are absolute rockstars, heroes.

You deserve that title.

We all do.

You volunteered your time, your energy, and your life.

I can't thank you enough.

[crowd applauding] Get to work, people!

We have an incredibly dedicated volunteer staff.

Everybody has a life.

We all have kids and our staff that have been out there for days on end, suffering exhaustion.

One group has been out there 16 days, camping in the woods, will not come in.

I can't make them come in 'cause they're volunteers, but they're that dedicated, working every day, including last night.

They cleared a landslide at 3:00 AM, so that's how dedicated people are to rebuilding this community.

[helicopter whirring] - If we can get 20 people in this area that want breakfast this morning, I got enough to take care of that.

- I got you.

- Well, there's a really great spot, kind of where we're about to head down to.

What's your name?

- Francis [indistinct].

- Francis.

I'm Daniel from right here.

[stove sizzling] [vehicles rumbling] There's the federal response, there's the state response, and then the response from just people that aren't getting paid to help.

I mean, considering what was going on, I think they responded in an appropriate amount of time.

I got a call from a FEMA inspector on the following Sunday, and I've talked to them numerous times since then.

I mean, that's kind of the town that we live in.

Dump trucks, chainsaws, and they were searching for people, all the free meals being cooked, and nobody told anybody to do this.

I think that that's what something like this can do is bring people together, and it was just the most amazing community response that you could ever imagine.

- I've been a professional chef for 14 years, and as soon as I realized I was laid off, my literal first thought was cook, 'cause I'm doing this solo.

Two?

- Yep.

So what do you have here?

- Picadillo.

It's a comfort food from Cuba.

I have the vegan option, the non-vegan option.

Avocado on both?

- [Visitor] Yes, please.

- All right, love, anything else?

You need utensils?

Tell him I said hi and I'm so glad that the puppy is doing better.

[gentle music] [crowd chattering] My biggest concern, especially for the people of Swannanoa, is that we're gonna get forgotten.

The word needs to go out.

People need to be aware of what's going on.

- [Daniel] You can't walk around in a house that's full of slippery, cold mud.

It's dangerous, it's toxic, but that's kind of the new normal is just everything's difficult, and so the volunteers now just kind of come in small waves, which is a sign that, you know, the world moves pretty quickly.

Media moves fast, and I can just only hope that we're not being forgotten about yet.

It's important to stay on people's radars.

You know, we're still struggling here.

- These people don't have a life now, so they have nothing to go back to, and people forget.

I've already seen it.

I've talked to people as far away as Vermont and they're like, "Well, we haven't seen a thing.

We thought it was all finished."

Not a clue.

So don't forget that.

That's my biggest message.

Don't forget 'em.

- You know, hopefully, by the early summer, I'll be back in my house, and I'm willing to be patient enough to earn that experience again.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] Join us as we celebrate 10 years of "My Home" as we look back at some of our most iconic stories and where they are now.

[upbeat music continues] In 2016, our second season, we told the story of Highland Brewing and got to meet owners and founder Oscar Wong and his daughter Leah Wong Ashburn.

Since our story, Highland has grown to not just a brewery, but an Asheville destination.

Now president at Highland, Leah shared how Hurricane Helene tested them and brought the spirit of community together in so many incredible ways.

- Helene was life-changing for us.

We couldn't brew beer, but we had talented people, we had equipment, we had space, so we became a community hub.

Nine organizations, people, volunteers, coming from I can't even count how many states, filling our parking lot.

Our parking lot was full of people, and I went out and met some of them.

It was just an unbelievable mixture of the best side of humanity.

We have always been more than a brewery, but it just keeps growing, and I will have guests come up to me and say, "Thank you for having this place.

We love your beer.

We come here and then we buy it at home because we believe in what you're doing.

We know you're doing a good thing."

It's like the message, the spirit of this place is meant to compliment the best parts of Asheville.

- [Narrator] And now, with Western North Carolina still healing, Leah wants everyone to know that Highland Brewing is ready to welcome you back with open arms and hearts.

[peaceful folk music] [peaceful folk music continues] [peaceful folk music continues] [peaceful folk music continues]