Around Highlands and Cashiers this week, people were getting businesses back open and cars were coming back through town at a trickle.
Business owners in town were seeing lighter customer loads since tourists hadn’t yet come back into town following the widespread damage from Hurricane Helene the previous week.
“The big thing is getting customers back to town,” Mountain Fresh Grocery owner Steve Snead-Smith said. “A lot of people left. I think the town should be close to normal by the end of the weekend. I hope they get back. I’ve got a lot of employees that need paychecks.”
Snead-Smith said they’d had to get rid of some food that had gone bad, which he’d been “very conservative” about.
Otherwise, the store was coming through alright, he said. They’d been able to open a little on Sunday, Sept. 29, and sold some groceries and coffee to those in need. Every day after that, they opened a little more and were fully operational as of Wednesday, Oct. 2.
At The High Dive, general manager Spencer Williams said things had been slow going for them.
“We were closed about five days,” he said. “Usually, we expect October to be the busiest month, but our Saturday football felt like a Monday opening.”
Williams said he predicted tourists and activity would start to pick back up by this weekend – he said there’s a party coming up at the bar that he thought would bring in crowds again, and said there had been small pockets of activity as town got further away from the worst of the hurricane.
“I was really glad to see a wedding last night,” he added. “That was really good. The bartenders loved it.”
Calder’s Coffee owner Leigh Hartman said by email that they operated on reduced hours last week due to needing to replace their perishable food and drinks and accommodating employees dealing with issues at home from the storm. They were back to regular hours, opening at 7 a.m. and closing at 5 p.m., by Monday, Oct. 7.
At the Hudson Library, branch librarian Carolyn Morenus said although the internet wasn’t on last week – though, as of early this week, there was a sign on the door proclaiming “WE HAVE WI-FI,” indicating it had been fixed.
As she spoke a line of young children filed into the building led by pre-school instructors.
“We’ve got power, we’re here, we’re doing storytime as usual,” Morenus said. “The kids are doing after school events, we had a movie yesterday.”
Morenus said there were a lot of puzzles going out – an analog way to spend time while the power and internet were out. She said she was just grateful that the library was able to maintain a status as a community hub.
“We have a place to charge up,” she said. “We’ve been very happy to see lots of people the last few days who were safe through the storm.”
Niki Kincade, executive director of The Bascom, said their staff as well as art studios had not seen any lasting damage from the storm.
“In moments of hardship, we believe that the arts can offer a much-needed refuge, providing space for reflection and healing. The Bascom is open and here for you,” she wrote in an email.
Shifting the focus
Mayor Patrick Taylor posted video updates all last week on the website AskMayorPat.com, in which he said the town was mostly finished with its own recovery from the hurricane, having restored power and internet in most areas.
“I want to let everyone know who’s coming to visit this weekend that our town is back up and running, and if anyone wants to come and visit our Main Street and surrounding businesses are ready to welcome you to our community during this beautiful fall season,” he said.
He said that going forward, the Town of Highlands’ focus would be shifting to “helping other communities that have been severely impacted” by the storm.
Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust set up a relief fund which it intends to use to buy various supplies to donate to the areas in western North Carolina which are in need.
“During these unprecedented times, we all must come together in any way we can to meet the needs of our neighbors,” wrote HCLT president Julie Schott in an email. “The response has been very positive; ours is a remarkable community and together, we will get through this.”
Williams also said The High Dive would be putting on a fundraiser concert at their bar this Saturday, Oct. 12 at 8 p.m., with proceeds going to benefit Asheville’s recovery from the storm.
Setbacks and new projects
The Highlands Biological Station made the fortuitous choice to move some students visiting from Chapel Hill out of the Howell Dorm the night before Helene hit on Thursday, Sept. 26, since that dorm has been prone to flooding before. That same night, a large tree fell and caved in the roof of the building.
Luckily, according to assistant director Jason Love, tree removal company Bryson Enterprises was able to come out and cut the tree down. On Friday, it lay in pieces on the ground and would be used for firewood come the winter, Love said.
“They came out with a track hoe, a swivel bucket and they got it done in less than an hour,” Love said.
Otherwise, Love said the Biological Station came out fine from the storm. It will give them a chance to study microplastics in the water. Love said they’re going to be analyzing microplastic samples from the river as well as what fell with the rain. They’ll also look at samples consumed by caddisflies in the area.
“We’re looking at the relation between what’s fallen from the atmosphere and what was found in the stream and in the flies,” Love said. “In the stream, most of the microplastics come from the west, while this came from the south. We want to know, were the plastics different when they came from the Gulf Coast rather than from the west?”
They got lucky in that none of the equipment monitoring the plastics got damaged by the storm – the water didn’t get so high that it washed the equipment away. That was not the case down in Franklin where some of their monitoring devices for the wetlands there got ruined. But Love said that project is close to complete, so it wasn’t a huge loss.