God Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise
The fact that Helene was not natural, but a human-made climate disaster means that humans can start to do the work of mitigating climate change.
A few years back, I tagged along with volunteers delivering Meals on Wheels outside Creston, North Carolina. We drove up winding roads through hollers of beech and basswood dropping off food to elderly residents. At one house, the homeowner was waiting for us on his porch, dressed to the nines in all black, from his shiny boots to his cowboy hat. He told me he was known as “Ashe County’s Man in Black.”
He rode with us back down to the community center, where he played guitar for me in an empty storage room. He talked to me about his favorite Johnny Cash songs, grafting hickory trees, and the many generations of his family that lived in these hills. He told me story after story and I felt grateful to be in his presence. When we dropped him off back home again, I said I’d love to visit with him again. He grinned as he shut the car door and leaned in the window and said: “God willing and the creek don’t rise.”
I’ve lived in, hiked, and camped in Appalachia enough to know that surprise storms can quickly come over a ridge and catch you off guard. I also know that steep slopes and low creeks can cause fast floods. Ashe County’s Man in Black lived up such a creek and no doubt had more than once become cut off from his neighbors due to high water — that’s not rare here.
But what Hurricane Helene has done in Western North Carolina is rare — in fact, it’s unheard of. My friends in Asheville tell me the water came fast and furious, cutting off one side of the town from the other before they could even make it home. In Swananoa, helicopters flew overhead announcing evacuations when they thought Beetree Dam would fail. In Madison County, all of Marshall was underwater. The whole town.
Helene has made me think about that saying I’ve heard all my life: “God willing and the creek don’t rise.” In my mind, God and flooding have always connected, both being a part of a natural order of things. You know not to pitch your tent by a creek in a rainstorm, just like you know not to climb a tree during lightning, just like you know to lower your voice as you walk through a cemetery — you just don’t tempt fate.
I’ve seen Hurricane Helene’s flooding in Western North Carolina described as “a biblical disaster,” but my fear is that it is not. I don’t see what has happened here as anything close to God’s will or natural order, but as something deeply blasphemous. The ever-increasing strength of these storms, and the warm air they move through, is entirely a result of human-made climate change, not God’s plan.
In two weeks time, North Carolina saw two historic weather events. The tropical cyclone that battered the Cape Fear region brought twenty inches of rain in two days — meteorologists said this happens only once every thousand years. But emergency management scrambled only days later to prepare for Helene, which brought even more rain and broke even more records. No wonder I was seeing friends share warnings of yet another storm ready to bear down on our state — these warnings, while sincere, were misinformation — they go to show that people are just plain scared.
A week later, Milton came — sparing North Carolina but hitting Florida with, again, historic force.
It’s getting hard to stand in mud this deep and deny that the climate is warming. This last decade has been the warmest on record in North Carolina, averaging about .6 degrees warmer than the 1930’s (NC Climate Office). That may not sound too wild, but researchers predict that these intense storms increase 10–30% for each degree of global temperature increase (Princeton, 2024). This means that hurricanes like Helene undergo rapid intensification, where wind speeds increase at least 35 miles per hour within a day and produce “significantly higher rainfall hazard levels” (Princeton).
From Florence to Helene to a freakish tornado that ripped through his school, my son, now 17, has seen more climate disasters in his childhood than he has seen snow.
While global warming may not be natural or God’s plan, it doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. In fact, the thing about the climate crisis being human-made means that, to a large degree, it can be also mitigated by humans.
In the wake of Helene, our local governments can use available Infrastructure Bill funds and the disaster relief funds that will be rolling into our state to rebuild in ways that protect our communities from future climate disasters: reconstructing dams, roads, and houses using green building practices to make them more resilient.
We can also leverage the massive federal Inflation Reduction Act funds coming down to North Carolina to invest in residential solar, home weatherization and the like to make climate security something we can all access, no matter where we live or what our income.
When God is willing, the creek will rise. The rest of it is up to us.
