Want to help?
news
‘I’ve just never seen water that angry’ As we head into the winter season, Mountain Projects is requesting community donations in support of the Emergency Needs Fund. Contributions will be used to support friends and neighbors in Haywood and Jackson Counties who have unmet basic needs: food, heat and shelter. Between now and March 2022 we anticipate over 200 requests for emergency utility assistance alone. Visit MountainProjects.org or send a contribution by mail to 2177 Asheville Road, Waynesville, NC 28786. To coordinate an end of the year contribution, contact Patsy Davis, Executive Director of Mountain Projects by email, pdavis@mountainprojects.org.
Twin Oaks (above), the Gresham farmhouse in Cruso. Below: Jessie (left) and Travis Gresham at Travis’s home in Clyde. Angie Schwab photos
P
there. “You know, like Siddhartha,” said Travis. “Listening to the voices in the water.” The McArthur family was close to the Greshams from day one. The farmhouse, made of sturdy stone, was once part of the campground property. Travis calls Sherrie “my second mama.” Many years ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority considered a dam in this narrow spot, but instead of a lake at the upper end of Cruso, the valley contains one of the few uncontrolled watersheds in the region. That
Smoky Mountain News
“They were two hippies, with friends coming in and out,” said Travis. “They produced most of their own food. We had a nice garden. We baked our own bread.” “It was great,” said her brother Jessie. He learned to hunt with his dad, who passed away in 2008. “We didn’t have cable so we were outside all the time.” The river was central to their lives. Its constant breeze flowed through their house at night, and they tubed all summer. Their play spots were all on the riverbank, and when they were older they found peace
December 22-28, 2021
BY B ILL G RAHAM S PECIAL TO SMN oet T.S. Eliot wrote that there’s something about growing up beside a river that’s hard to communicate to people who didn’t. Travis and Jessie Gresham and Sherrie McArthur know all about this. They were raised in and near the mouth of Horse Cove in Cruso, where the east fork of the Pigeon River squeezes through a narrow spot between a shoulder of Cold Mountain and Piney Field Top mountain, and where the sense of place and community is strong. Eliot grew up by a big river, the Mississippi, set in its ways and quiet, but the sound the young Pigeon makes as it gathers itself for a trip to the sea is the song of the Gresham and McArthur’s childhoods. McArthur and her brother would pitch their tent by the river on summer nights, and their father, keeping a watchful eye, became inspired to open Laurel Bank Campground. That was in 1970. The campground grew and grew and came under Sherrie’s management two decades ago. She raised her sons there, Ashley and Andrew, and they were best friends with the Greshams. Travis and Jessie grew up in a 130-yearold farmhouse on an idyllic spot in the mouth of the cove. Their parents settled there 50 years ago, after their dad, Jack, returned from Vietnam. He used the GI Bill to enroll at Haywood Community College, and he and Patricia Lou started a family.
distinction came into sharp relief on Aug. 17, when remnants of Tropical Storm Fred dropped an incredible deluge on the high mountainsides, and the river became a raging torrent very quickly. The flood was unprecedented, easily sinking the high water marks set in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and before it subsided over 500 homes and numerous businesses from Cruso to Clyde were damaged or destroyed and six lives were lost. The Gresham’s house, affectionately known as Twin Oaks, was high enough up the hillside to be clear of the Pigeon, but was struck from behind by a cascade roaring down a tiny stream bed that usually carried no more than a trickle. “The stream went right through the house,” said Jessie, who lived there with his mom, but who was at work the evening the flood came. Patricia Lou — known in the community as Lou — is 71, not far removed from a broken hip, and is fighting cancer. She spent the night on her soaked bed as it slowly drifted around on water standing in the dark house. Lou doesn’t use a cell phone, only a landline, and couldn’t be reached during the flood. Travis and Jessie spent a sleepless night at Travis’s house in Clyde, and when Jessie talked his way past a roadblock the next morning and made his way to the house he found her on the porch, looking down on the void where the bridge to their house once was. The span, normally 20 feet above the river surface and sturdy, had completely disappeared. Rescuers were eventually able to take Lou across the stream on a gurney. Just downstream, Laurel Bank Campground was utterly destroyed, and three guests lost their lives. “I’ve never seen water that angry,” said McArthur, who spent a traumatic night helping elderly campers to higher ground and watching as her life’s work and family land were swept away.
S EE FLOOD, PAGE 20 19
