Part Two: Mutual Aid in North Carolina: How Asheville Has Come Together in the Wake of the Storm

western North Carolina. And I'm talking about that because I wanted to take a week off of researching history to go down and try to talk to people on the ground there and do whatever I could to help out

because I live there for a very long time. The very first seed of this podcast was me in a barn outside of North Carolina trying to explain to my French friend why she should care about this one thing that happened in anarchist history a long time ago, and realizing that if I can convince her to care about it, then hopefully we can figure out how to talk talk about radical history and more interesting ways. And I was like,

I should do a podcast, And here we are. Years later, I'm on two and a half years into this podcast that some of you all listen to, and I'm really grateful, but that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about history unless you count last week as history, which you should because it's technically history. Where is it just the past? I was learning the difference between history and the past recently, but that's besides the point. And what you all can tell is that I just drank a

bunch of sugar water. I thought it was just like electrolyte mix, but I had a bunch of sugar in it. And so I'm going to talk really fast, well or more excitedly anyway. This week is the special week yet still despite not being on Mike. Sophie is our producer Hi Sophie, and Rory is our audio engineer Hi Rory. And our theme music was written for us by on Woman. I'd say pie on Woman, but I have no idea.

I think she listens to the show sometimes, but you know, she doesn't have to for a job like the other two people I mentioned. So where we last left the people doing mutual aid in Ashville, They were doing mutual aid in Nashville, and I had just shown up with a van and started talking to people. There were and probably still are two sort of informal economies running side by side right now in Asheville, North Carolina. Both come from a good place. There's a free economy and a

cheap economy. Like there's like needs wants boards, for example, up on the outside of Firestorm, there's a big old chunk of cardboard and lots of markers around, and people are writing what they need and want, people where wellness checks need to get done, and what people have on offer and all those things right, And some people are writing down things like generator available for sale. It cost me six hundred, I'm willing to sell it for two

hundred and fifty. Other people are donating generators. I've got a bias towards the latter, especially since I donated my own generator. But I also can't blame someone who wants to not fuck themselves financially, because the financial impacts of capitalism will probably in the end be worse for the community than the floodwaters themselves. Easier for me to donate an extra generator because I didn't live in the flood.

There was a group of activists. I think they all met through school, not entirely certain who was gathering up all the donated gas cans they could, And they were just driving back and forth two runs a day, the three hour round trip to Shelby, North Carolina, to fill up on gas. Then they would come back. They would park across the street from Firestorm and fill up anyone's

tank who needed it for free. They were prioritizing those driving around mutual aid supplies, but they weren't strict about that, and no one was like selfishly taking advantage of it. I actually saw no one get their entire gas tank filled, even though that was being offered anybody. While I was talking to them, a man walked up and asked if

he could buy gas. So he's like, coming from the different economies, coming from the cash economy, that's kind of growing up too, oh right, And they told him he could have the gas for free. He asked if he could buy one of the gas cans. They told him that he could have the gas, but they needed the can. The man was not rude about this at all. He in the end, he only took the tiniest bit of gas, just enough to get himself to where he desperately needed to go and donated far more money than he would

have paid if he'd bought the gas instead. Two folks from the south Side Community Farm showed up for a refill too, and I talked to them for a while.

The black community in Asheville has been and this will not shock anyone to hear, both been historically mistreated and segregated away from the rest of the city and also among the hardest hit by the storm because the black community has been pushed out by gentrification over the decades into like sort of physically more dangerous areas, physically more

disaster prone areas. The south Side Community Farm's motto on its website is growing Black food Sovereignty, and of course the farm itself was under risk of losing their farm plot even before the storm. For anyone wants to check them out there Southside Communitygarden dot org, and they seem worth supporting. In general, most of the city of Asheville

is accessible. Most of the isolated communities that we talk about are the ones that have been cut off by the storm out in rural areas, but some of the black communities within Asheville were just as badly hit. Public transit has been disrupted, of course, and you know, these places are often further away from downtown and things, and also just physically more of the roads in and out of these neighborhoods have been rendered inaccessible. Most of the

supplies are coming into downtown Asheville or West Asheville. I mostly hung out near Haywood Street in West Ashville because that's mostly where I hung out when I lived there. One of the main tasks in front of mutual laid workers that they're working on. It's not perfect, they're working on it. It's distributing supplies out from these central locations to the harder to access places or the places that are more likely to be forgotten. The response from businesses

has been well mixed. Already infamous is that six employees of Impact Plastics in Tennessee died after being told that if they didn't report to work in the storm, they

would be fired. Rumors on the ground in Asheville, which I haven't been able to confirm yet, include things like one neighbor I talked to said some delivery drivers for Ingles were told that they had to drive that day and they died, or that Ingles, which is a large grocery store chain in the area refused to give the food away that was going to be lost when the power went out from like their fridges and freezers and shit, there's not a lot of ingles love going on, is

what I'm getting at from multiple different groups that I talked to. Meanwhile, I waited alongside about ten or fifteen other vehicles behind in Aldis, which is another large chain grocery store, while employees brought us palette after palette of produce and other goods that were going to go bad. We loaded up our vehicles and drove out to the various distribution centers where other drivers were to take the

produce the last mile. I recruited one of my best friends to basically become my handler while I was there. They've been doing relief work with Mutual ad disaster relief for years, and we drove around the city and the surrounding areas, dropping stuff off and talking to folks, and honestly, even above driving stuff around, I think that one of the main things that I've been able to do is

literally just connect people because of my public presence. It'll be like people on Twitter, you know, messaging me, or I guess adding me. I don't have my dms open on Twitter because that was a nightmare because I'm trans but you know, messaging me and letting me know what they have to offer, what they need, and trying to get that in touch with people. And that's also what my friend on the ground was doing. You know. That's also so much of the work as we're driving around

delivering these supplies. Some of it is delivering supplies and a lot of it is just talking to people. A lot of it is saying like, what's going on here? Right? Because these informal networks without central command, that's how they work, and they work really well. And wherever we went, there were people ready to help load or unload the vehicle, and there were folks happy to talk, folks happy to meet my poor overstimulated dog. It's currently quite happily napping

at my feet. I don't normally sug just bringing dogs into these crises. I just live alone, and also was set up to be self sufficient, and so I had no other choice. And that friend of mine who was driving around with was excited for the canned water. It's apparently a thing in disaster relief circles. This like canned water. This is unlabeled water. And beer cans, and it's water that tastes a little beery. It doesn't have beer in it, but it's like water that is perfectly potable, but is

like part of the process of making stuff. As my friend explained it, breweries have an awful lot of distilled water around in their tanks for the beer making process, and when supplies are needed, they can just can up that water and drop it off at mutual aid hubs. The best breweries I don't put their name or logo on the cans when they do it because they're not doing it for clout. They're doing it to help people. So ironically, I don't actually know who directly to thank

for the canned water that I drink. I'm guessing it was from Pisca Brewery, but if it was someone else, you're cool too. It was an interesting echo of when only a few years ago in twenty twenty, when I was living in Asheville, the distilleries turned their equipment to make hand sanitizer to give it away. The small business community in Asheville was out in force for relief. Restaurant

after restaurant was providing hot meals. Some places sold things as cheap as they could without losing their shirts, you know, like a quarter of their price or whatever. Other places just accepted that they were going to lose their shirts and gave everything away. At one point, I was waiting outside my friend's house while the van was loaded with supplies. Asheville is a strange place geographically, class wise, just just

an interesting place. There are all these streets where kind of regular old vinyl sighted houses that have been around since at least the eighties or nineties or whatever are right next to these cube shaped modern houses. And these cube shaped modern houses are often built on stilts because they're built in the wash where there's not actually land right or it's just a direct, crazy steep angle, so

they're built on stilts. And these houses seem to me, and I could be absolutely wrong, they seem bougier to me. I don't know if they are, but my friend calls them Frank Lloyd wrong because they're kind of ugly. And I'm not even like anti modernist stuff. I just honestly, if I didn't think they were like a weird, gentrifying thing, I might not think they were ugly. I don't know.

The class is complicated, but the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses are around, and my friends live on a street like that where there's, you know, some of the older houses that are on land. And then Frank Loyd Wrongs on stilts and a hatchback stopped in the middle of the street where we were hanging out in the front yard. A man got out and shouted water, and it took us a while to sort out his meaning. He was

making sure we had enough water. He then asked about each of the other houses in turn and didn't leave until he'd satisfied himself that everyone had water, and he introduced himself. He was actually a neighbor. He lived in one of the cube houses on stilts. He didn't want to approach us and come hang out and be friendly. But I don't really blame him. We're a bunch of subcultural folks wearing all black, and many of the people I was hanging out with were the neighbors he'd never

actually met since he'd moved into the neighborhood. I would be nervous if I was him too, And this interaction stands out in my mind as a really positive one. I ought to be really clear, this man did nothing wrong. This man is amazing I like him, pro this man. This interaction stands out in my mind because we don't actually have to like each other to help each other out, you know. Elsewhere, of course, I saw subcultural lines break

down fast at another friend's house. I talked for about a half an hour with a seventy year old couple who lived behind that house, like in a different house, who are grateful that one of the watercubes from my basement in West Virginia had wound up on their porch because my friend knew they might need it. We talked about the dry toilet situation, and they explained that growing up around there, their own parents and our grandparents have been used to outhouses anyway. And that's why we're proud

to announce our newest sponsor, shitting in a bucket. That's right. If you're listening to this, feel free to try shitting in a bucket. Uh. But you gotta do it like the right way. You got to use saw dust. You got to either compost it real good or throw it away. Honestly, it's like you need more information than is available in this ad for shitting in a bucket. Here's some other.

The folks from Southside Community Farm had been going door to door teaching people how to bucket flush, where you dump water directly into the bowl of the toilet to force it to flush, and you can use non podable water to do it. That's like the upside to the

fact that it takes a ton of water. One friend of mine, while the storm was still going on, ran around the house and cut all the down spout gutters or the down spout spouts, I don't know if they're still called gutters when they're the down spouts whatever, and set up trash cans underneath them all which left their house with hundreds of gallons of toilet flush water. That has saved their asses. If you'll part in the pun.

I talked with a woman named Lark from the band Holler and Crow, who was set up outside Firestorm teaching people how to make and use dry toilets. And you'll notice this is like one of the only names I've used, and that's because I've mostly been leaving everyone's names out of my writing, because that's like a default in the activist circles that I'm part of. And I'm still readjusting to journalism times because I mostly forgot to ask people if they wanted their names on the record or not.

There's a funny tension here because a lot of activists specifically don't want to be mentioned by name, but a lot of people, for good reason, are looking for recognition for the work that they're doing and don't want to be left out of the story, especially groups and individuals were traditionally left out of stories. I'm from an activist background, so I default to not naming people. For anyone who's work I've left uncredited, I'm quite sorry. So Lark has

set up outside Firestorm with a few dry toilets. These are five gallon buckets with pipe insulation for a seat and sawdust at the bottom. Normally you'd use these as composting toilets, but for emergency use you just use trash bags to collect the poop. The idea is that you don't pee into them, You just poop, and then you cover the poop with sawdust. You pee outside. In most of these situations it sounds sort of gross, but honestly, shitting in a bucket it's not too bad at all.

This was my primary toilet for years when I lived off grid and done right. They actually don't really smell. You have to cover them. But Lark printed up instructions in English and Spanish to distribute. She figured she'd pass out maybe four or so of these toilets. When I talked to her two hours in, she'd given away around twenty,

which was more than she'd brought with her. Because people had seen what she was doing and thought I can help with that, and they brought her buckets and pipe insulation. One man who owned a sawmill had already been driving around town with trash bags full of sawdust, thinking I bet someone needs these for composting toilets.

You know. I brought my own backup generator down, the one I'd used when I'd lived in a cabin and the winter days had been too short for my solar array. I hadn't run it in three years, and Okay, I sort of hate small engines. They're so fussy and I don't understand them. And I was like, oh, I left this for three years. It probably doesn't work anymore. I don't know. It's a weird thing to say you hate

small engines. But in my personal life, I tend to run solar generators as my first backup choice, and I use an electric chainsaw because I'm only taking down the occasional tree, not doing like arborist work day in and day out, things that need oil changes and use chokes and rip chords. They're finicky and confusing and they scare me.

So I had literally no idea. I had no idea whether my generator worked, and I actually thought it was sort of like a dick move to bring down a generator without bringing everything it needed to be immediately put into the field. And in a lot of situations that would be true. Right if there was like only one group doing this work and you show up and like I brought you a broken thing, that's like not great, right, But I had forgotten. Ashville is full of people. People

are resourceful. Also, it turns out my generator was fine. They just put gas in it and it ran, So I guess that's good. Watching people do what they were good at in the service of saving lives was sort of magical. All of everything I saw was magical, to be clear, Maybe the repair station wasn't even like extra magical, But I just I love a world in which there are people who like fixing things and who will fix things because there's things that need fixing, and that is

the world we live in. I love the world we live in. I did a supply run drop to the Asheville Tool Library itself, which is just outside of town. Well, I guess it's technically within the city limits, but it's like rural area greenhouse land because They were collecting bar and chain oil there and also tarps and ppe and I had a bunch of that stuff and it's gonna be one hell of a long cleanup. I talked to the sculptor there who was sorting gear and getting it

ready to go out with the various crews. We also drove up to Marshall, which is a smaller town about thirty minutes north of the city. There we saw what we'd been seeing everywhere, named groups using their infrastructure and then melting into one another. The Harm Reduction group up there, which distributes safe use supplies to the rural community, teamed up with a group called ROAR, which stands for Rural Organizing and Resilience and this is a rural mutual aid organization.

Their storefront, the Harm Reduction storefront, was now a relief center. They talked to their landlord at the Strip Mall, who I believe for free opened up another one of the empty storefronts for them to expand into. Because Marshall became

a node reaching out further into the county. A group of rural punks unloaded supplies from the van, a lot of diapers and wet wipes and stuff like that, if I remember correctly, and we hung out for a while so that Rentraw my dog could run around and not be over stimulated by the people on the cars of the city. Several families came in to gather what they needed and take it out to people while we were there, and a pickup truck full of donations arrived and it

was unloaded and sorted. One of my friends from RORA was there, and I've known him almost twenty years. I've been working with him on anarchist projects off and on the whole time he was busy, but we talked briefly about how well it's just fucking cool to realize that so many of us from the early aughts are still here, still doing things, still trying to make the world better however the fuck we can. And for him it's organizing his rural community. And I don't have a clever AD transition.

I'm sorry. I know that's usually the thing I'm best at, but I don't have one. I just have a regular AD transition, which is where talking gets interrupted by ads. Now and we're back. I remember talking to someone from RH few years back about their work. One of the main things that they do normally is that they get firewood to people who heat their homes with wood and don't have the resources or often the physical strength anymore

to go pick it up themselves. Rural communities do tend to be older than city communities, and one thing that Roor noticed is that it wasn't just progressives and activists and stuff who were down to help out. A man with a pickup truck and a trailer wants to be useful, whether he voted blue or red or refuses to vote at all. And I'm not trying to like say me samey. I understand that there's like serious political divisions and that those do impact our lives. I'm a trans woman living

in a rural area. I'm very aware of this, but there's still the desire to be useful. I think about the pickup truck a lot. It's not my Roman empire. I probably only think about it like once every couple of months, but I think real deeply about pickup trucks. When I do, I mean I also think about the because I drive one. From the outside, sometimes people see and sometimes from the you know, lots of people, including pickup truck drivers, see them as sort of these big

phallic symbols of exaggerated masculinity. But I remember one time someone asked me what non toxic masculinity looked like to me, and I actually wound up thinking about some of the people I know and their trucks. People drive trucks because they're symbols of self reliance, and even more so because they believe that they can be useful if they have tools to be useful with. Someone carrying a recovery strap

in their pickup truck isn't carrying it for themselves. They're carrying it so that they can tow a car out of a ditch, so that they can be useful. We talk all the time on this show, especially recently since the last week's episodes were about it. In this week's episodes about it, we talk all the time about disaster compassion. And when you talk about disaster compassion, people often say, yeah, but that can't last past the disaster. It could. How

do I know that? Because RAR knows that people will donate their time with their pickup trucks to haul wood for their neighbors, because people will pull people out of ditches, because we're fucking hardwired to help anyway. Pickup truck tangent Aside, the people in Marshall itself ironically got power, were stored sooner, and since so many of the people there are on wells, they have more reliable access to water. While we were there, they were discussing how to get water relief into the city,

mutual aid being famously mutual. Unfortunately, since I left last Thursday morning, it's come out that the level of toxins in the water downstream, which is north of Ashville, the level of toxins is terrifyingly high due to plastic chemical spills, and people in Marshall are likely to be going through something an awful lot worse than initially expected. This is still in the rumor stage as I record this, but I'm hearing about relief workers with rat and worse and

serious ppe is needed in the area. Another sort of rumor has been floating around since the start of the crisis, rumors that hopefully will know more about soon, Rumors of law enforcement interfering with relief efforts. I expect I'll be returning to this subject as I understand more about it. But to be clear, the government is not a monolithic entity. Local, state, and federal are all different. There are different departments within each of those, and each department is staffed by people

who are famously different from one another. There has absolutely been a lot that various government agencies have been doing that is useful. There are radio broadcasts of information that have been going out constantly. There are places for people to fill their own water containers. The government is set up a refugee camp essentially. I've heard FEMA, which actually in the end is more of an insurance company than an actual disaster response organization, is working to get people

some monetary relief, although I understand why. We also people are very madahema about all of that because there's an enormous meta red tape and it sounds like the whole thing isn't going to be as funded as is expected. And again, this is not a current events podcast, and that's stuff that's coming out now. Fire stations are collecting

and distributing gear. Official city workers are often handling the most dangerous chainsaw tasks, like specifically chainsawing the trees entangled with power lines, and the lines between official and informal relief are often blurred. And we can and should be friends whenever possible. A mutual aid disaster really friend of mine made coffee for the chainsaw crew on their street working at night to yeah clear a tree tangled up

in power lines. People from various organizations are sharing supplies with one another wherever it's necessary, including going from government to informal or formal NGO to informal or vice versa. You know, the emergency declaration that allows doctors to be doctors in informal settings, or allows pharmacies to refoe prescriptions without prescription forms are life saving things that the government

is sort of doing now. Granted they're kind of like, is not enforcing a thing really count as doing a thing? I don't know whatever. While I was there, though, there were constant rumors about roadblocks being set up by the government to prevent resources from going where they needed to go, or attempting to requisition disaster supplies and to centralized official locations, which are famously really bad at getting things out that last mile and figuring out where things actually need to go.

On the condition of anonymity, I spoke with a female worker about this. They told me, in essence that while a lot of the long term disaster relief staff come from community organizing backgrounds a greater percentage of the immediate disaster response. People who are interested in the shorter deployments are like military and law enforcement types who struggle to see something seemingly structuralist and have an intense desire to impose structure upon it, which is to say, to move

into sort of an enforcement mode. Some of the rumors of roadblocks have proven to be exaggerated, but not all of them. I can point to three things like that that I have more information about right now, and again I suspect we'll know more by the time you're listening to this. That's why I normally stick with history. Hell, that's why I used to start with only doing history of where no one in the story is alive anymore. But eventually I moved into the more recent history. Here

we are, what's next? Am I going to do future episodes? Who knows? Okay, the stories that I know a little bit more about. I know that cops pulled over a vehicle headed into one small town earlier in the week to tell them that the town was closed to traffic. When the people in the car explained that it was full of diapers and other supplies, the cop let them through.

That's the nicest interaction I know of like that. Another well publicized cases of a helicopter pilot who went to go rescue people and was told he'd be arrested if he flew into the area again. I've heard rumors on the ground that other pilots have been welcomed with open arms by local officials and they've promised a clear airspace

for them. I've also heard from a tractor trailer of supplies that was pulled over on the interstate and the cops essentially said, you can either turn around or let us take all that stuff to our distribution center, and the tractor trailer turned around. I'm assuming they found another route in cops are famous for highway robbery. Of course, it's called civil asset forfeiture, so it doesn't surprise me at all. There are also rumors of regular highway robbery,

and some of these seem to be corroborated. It seems very likely that a tractor trailer full of supplies on forty, where they were sleeping in their truck, as people and trucks often do, was robbed at gunpoint, and people took all of the supplies that fit into their car. That is the only corroborated thing like that I've personally seen. There are a lot of rumors going around about wild looting and things like that, And first of all, I don't have a problem with people breaking into stores to

take what they need when it's that or starve. That doesn't bother me at all, especially if people then redistribute those things where they need to go. I love living in a society where we all love robin hood and yet pretend like looting and disaster situations is wrong. I mean, even in disaster movies the heroes do it. What's wrong with you people? Anyway, It's still not nice to rob people at gunpoint for the supplies that they're driving into

the city. But these rumors of looting, it's possible that a couple people looted or were arrested looting, they seem to be greatly exaggerated. Even again, I'm hearing this on hearsay, but even the local law enforcement when sort of asked about it, were like, Nah, that's just like not really happening. That's like more of like the Facebook madness that happens where people are posting like Ashville's gone into crazy mode.

The purple hair freaks are killing everyone, and there's all these rumors about people burning their houses down while they're gone, and just fucking bullshit. It's just all fucking bullshit. That's besides the point where were we It's possible, even likely that official channels will slowly get their shit together and start essentially trying to strong arm the competition out of

the business of helping people. One small town restaurant posted a Facebook that it was told to shut down its free distribution center to get back to the business of selling things in order to bolster the local economy and let the cops handle the relief work. And that's the whole twisted end of it, isn't it. We actually genuinely could build a society based on mutual aid and solidarity. Many such societies have existed throughout history, and they pop

up naturally every single time something goes wrong. It's what we want to do. And what's funny is they don't look good on paper, they look good in person. There was a carnival air to Asheville while I was there, which is a bit tragic and strange, and some people feel intensely alienated by that Carnival air especially the people who are suffering, or are isolated, or just lost loved ones, or have no fucking clue how they're going to pay

their rent now that their job is closed indefinitely. But still there are a lot of smiles on a lot of people's faces, because giving each other things feels good. That's the core of it. That's the lesson I learned from Rebecca Soulnett by way of all my friends who've read her books. That's the lesson I've learned from the random Soviet era beggar by way of a strange biography.

We feel good when we help each other. We can help each other more, but the state and capitalism wants us to get back to the business of selling things, back to paying rent, and back to waiting around to die in the next disaster. I don't want to paint a rosy picture. I didn't go toward the devastation. I didn't work with a chainsaw crew or an ATV crew to get supplies into the worst areas on our signal loops. There are constant messages of worry and fear, and the

need is intense and ongoing. People need help. If you're in western North Carolina, make sure you have what you need personally, and then go see about helping others. If you're within a day's driver or so, there might be hubs being set up to collect supplies to get them to Ashville. Work with a supply hub rather than assuming the best thing to do is go beyond the ground.

Asheville doesn't lack people at lacks supplies. Help move supplies towards Asheville wherever you are, but also look into what's needed instead of just sending old sweaters or whatever. If you do expect to go into Ashville bringing supplies, do so connected with a group and expect to be self sufficient. If you're coming for a day, make sure you have five days of food and water with you. But for most people, the best way to help is to donate.

There are a lot of groups worth donating to, too many to easily collate here, and the needs EBB and flow, and who knows when you're listening to this, So I'll say two groups that I've either donated to or worked with, and they are Asheville Medical Solidarity and Mutual Aid Dissease US for Relief. Donate to them. Thank you for listening to this extra strange episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Thank you listeners for providing me a job that's flexible enough that I was able to take a

week off to go help my friends. And thanks for taking care of each other. Oh, and if there's a second lesson here, Store a week's worth of water and food in your house, keep at least half a tank of gas in your car at all times, and go introduce yourself to your neighbors.