Hurricane Helene and the Nature of Life in an Open Boat
The stories, images, and videos coming out of western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene are devastating. Like those from Katrina, they will not only be etched in the American consciousness for decades to come but will also likely define a presidency and affect local, state, and national politics in ways that can’t yet be fully anticipated or known. In the wake of a natural disaster that causes damage and suffering of biblical proportions, with entire towns and communities having been washed away or buried under mud, many will inevitably search for some hidden message or agent behind the event—often framed as some kind of divine punishment for some human transgression or excess. In the case of Katrina and the widespread destruction of New Orleans, for example, Reverend Franklin Graham famously remarked,
This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years. They believe God is going to use that storm to bring revival.
While the largest city in western North Carolina, Asheville, is known as a progressive mountain town full of artists, craft-beer drinkers, and New Age hippies, and an Old Testament God might well find enough fault with their lifestyles to send two feet of rain their way, it was also the long-time home of God’s ambassador and America’s pastor, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham’s father, and remains home to large communities of evangelical Christians. Indeed, Franklin is a native-born Ashevillian and lives in nearby Boone, where he directs the evangelical charitable organization Samaritan’s Purse, which has been among the many groups providing much-needed disaster relief not only in their own backyard but also in other affected states.
Indeed, average citizens have played a crucial role in helping their fellow citizens through this crisis. Individuals have organized grassroots relief efforts, including setting up shelters, distributing food, water, and vital supplies, and providing transportation to those in need. Further, businesses, churches, and nonprofits—including many from distant states—have tirelessly worked to raise money, solicit donations, and offer urgent assistance to the affected areas, such as through the provision of medical care and technological lifelines. Included among these actions are some truly heroic efforts by pilots and others with the skill-sets, machinery, tools, motivation, and will to reach remote areas. While organizations like Save Our Allies, which was cofounded by Green Beret and former UFC fighter Tim Kennedy, are deploying teams on the ground in North Carolina, as its volunteer relief form notes,
Due to the nature of current conditions we are fielding submissions for exceptionally specific tactical experience, specializing in search and rescue at this time. Volunteers who don't meet this criteria will be much needed in the second phase of clean up and rebuild, you will be needed!
At the same time, the government response has faced credible criticism and, according to many residents, has been slow and inefficient, leaving communities especially reliant on the goodwill and hard work of their fellow citizens to survive. To many residents of western North Carolina, all of this help is not just welcome but vital, because they are, in effect, stranded on a string of remote and inaccessible islands—an Appalachian archipelago carved by unrelenting rain, raging mudslides, and ravaging floods.
To make another comparison, those stuck and alone in the North Carolina mountains are like the survivors of a sunken ship, adrift on a small launch or dinghy, desperately trying to flag down a passing vessel and reach safety before their food, water, and strength are exhausted—much like the situation four men found themselves in more than 125 years ago, when the steamer they were on sunk about twelve miles off the coast of Florida. Although the actual circumstances of that event and Hurricane Helene are vastly different in size and scope, we can identify truths about nature and the human condition in both. When it comes to man versus nature, these truths are the same whether the event is large or small, macro or micro, old or new, worldwide or hyperlocal.
The story of those men began one day out of Jacksonville, exactly twenty-four hours after the clocks had chimed in the year 1897, when the boat’s engineer of SS Commodore discovered that the vessel was taking on water after hitting a sandbar in dense fog. Bound for Cuba with a cargo full of rifles and ammunition, the ship carried a party of filibusters eager to help push the Spanish off the Caribbean island. Among the group was a young news correspondent from the New York Press who was also a writer of fiction. In search of fresh story material, he was eager and anxious to cover his first insurrection. However, the rebel spirit of the would-be-revolutionaries and the green war correspondent sank in proportion with the rising water level of the vessel’s hold.
Within three hours, the captain gave orders to abandon ship. Two large launches were quickly filled with a couple dozen men. The only hope of survival that remained for the captain, the correspondent, the cook, and the oiler, the last to leave the doomed ship, was a small dinghy that, when occupied by the four grown men, bobbed precariously a hand’s length from the water’s edge.
Fighting wind and waves for over a day, the four-man crew on the ten-foot craft worked together, toiling at the oars to avoid a watery grave. Arriving at the Florida coast, they sat heavily among the billows, staying within sight of land but far enough out to avoid being engulfed by the pounding, impassable surf nearer to land. They expected a quick rescue, but no boats arrived. At a fatigued stalemate with the rolls of the ocean and with the realization that no help was coming, they set their oars toward shore. The dinghy soon swamped, and the men were dumped into the breaking water. In the end, the captain, the correspondent, and the cook, reaching land and finding sand between their toes, sipped from the chalice of life. The oiler, on the other hand, with a lung full of seawater, had already tasted from the goblet of death.
News of their escapade quickly spread. Press reports popped up around the country. Ironically, the correspondent was the focus of special praise in many of these accounts. The cook pronounced:
That newspaper feller was a nervy man. He didn’t seem to know what fear was. . . . He never quailed when he came on deck and saw the foaming and raging billows and knew that the vessel was sinking and that it was only a question of time when we would be at the mercy of the terrible sea in a small ten-foot dinghy. . . . His nerve greatly encouraged all hands.
The captain, meanwhile, asserted:
That man [the correspondent] is the spunkiest fellow out . . . [He] behaved like a born sailor. He and I were the only ones not affected by the big seas which tossed us about . . . When we were thrown up by the waves, [he] was the first man to stagger up the beach looking for houses. He’s a thoroughbred and a brave man, too, with plenty of grit.
Although he hadn’t made it to Cuba, the correspondent certainly had an adventure to tell. On January 6, his own account appeared in the New York Press. He described the flooding of Commodore, the lowering of the launches, and the last dash for the shore through the surf. He did not, however, discuss what had occurred on the dinghy. Rather, he simply said, “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be instructive for the young, but none is to be told here and now.” He had already decided to save the details of “life on an open boat” for use as an allegory in a more literary form.
Today, with hindsight, we can see that he had come to view his adventure on two levels: the literal account of the adventure and the moral truth of the human experience that the adventure had revealed. The factual account was printed in the New York Press article. A far more revealing and penetrating truth, however, was communicated in a short story he wrote about life on the dinghy, “The Open Boat.” With regard to the short story, Joseph Conrad wrote, “The deep and simple humanity of its presentation seems somehow to illustrate the essentials of life itself, like a symbolic tale.” H. G. Wells, meanwhile, believed it to be “beyond all question, the crown of all his work.” Considering the correspondent, Stephen Crane, had already written The Red Badge of Courage and The Black Riders, these words were not hollow.
“The Open Boat,” on a surface level, conveys the literal truth of the fact and the physical, emotional, intellectual, and psychological response of the men under extreme pressure. A deeper examination of the story, however, reveals how humankind’s internal moral realities of justice and injustice have no resonance in nature’s external reality. After having struggled for so many hours to come in sight of land, only to be met with an impossible surf that could not be passed, the men initially asked, “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” At first, each believed, “This old ninny-woman, Fate, . . . cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work.” Only later do the men come to realize that Fate is not malicious:
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
One moral truth of human existence, Crane tells us, is that nature is utterly indifferent to our fate. Individual resilience, situational courage, and personal grit are all vital for overcoming adversity but these traits are by themselves never enough in the face of this reality. This is a truth Franklin Graham now seems to understand, telling a Christian radio audience less than a week after Hurricane Helene hit his town, “Sometimes when a storm like this comes people think that God is mad at us. That this is his judgement. No.” More so than his words, though, this understanding is evidenced by the very actions of his organization in the aftermath of natural disasters. He may want his organization, as he says, “to respond always in Jesus’ name,” and he may “want people to know that God loves them, that God cares for them,” and he may ask for prayers, but with regard to Hurricane Helene, which Graham has referred to as a “thousand year flood,” he also talks specifically about the actual work Samaritan’s Purse has done:
We’re helping people mud-out their homes. When the water comes into a home, and then goes down, sometimes people are left with five feet of mud inside. We’ve been taking chainsaws to cut the trees that have fallen on people’s houses. Also delivering a lot of water. We’ve been using a helicopter to go to remote communities where the roads have been washed away, and there’s no way in or out. We’ve helped set up an emergency hospital. It’s going to take an army of volunteers and people to respond.
Appeals and prayers to an external agent, whether the seven mad gods who rule the sea, Fate, or God, are never enough without an actual human response when lives are at stake or when we as individuals or as a society face a crisis that requires immediate and urgent action. As so dramatically communicated by Crane more than a century ago and so harrowingly instilled in the present moment in the ongoing tragedy of Hurricane Helene, only through camaraderie, compassion, and collective action can humankind survive in this universe—this open boat.
Kurt Volkan is editor of Presser. He lives in North Carolina.