63. Picaresque.
A travelogue, a photoessay, a report-back from post-Helene Asheville and a raffle for mutual aid.
Note: this letter contains many photos of and links to Asheville organizations, businesses and practitioners; each one represents an individual or community that needs our ongoing support and attention. Consider it a holiday gift guide! Please engage generously: by connecting, boosting, purchasing, donating, or just listening, and scroll to the bottom for the New Year’s Day Raffle! It’s a joy and an honor to bear witness; all we have is each other. ⚔️❤️
I rode down to Asheville from Philly with Leah Peacock two days after the election, 70 degrees and blue skies and sunny all the way down through the Shenandoah Valley, cherry blossoms and purple irises and knockout roses in full, glorious bloom at the rest stop in Virginia, as if it was the merry merry month of May, and not the cusp of winter. Is there a word for the bittersweet feeling of something being so beautiful even though you know it’s a harbinger of doom? It was that feeling. Giddy and free—and doomed.
Video: Swannanoa, NC November 8, 2024
After spending the night in Swannanoa, where Leah is fixing her mom’s house (by herself, without aid of government or municipality) and semi trucks remain wrapped around trees and the devastation is near-total, I made it to West Asheville and Bex’s house, where the floodwaters didn’t reach, but still managed to snuff out power, water, and communications for weeks; Asheville was still without potable running water when I got there, six weeks after the storm. I took my client sessions in Bex’s guest office all day; at lunchtime I walked to the market to get a sandwich and ran into my old friend Emily Cadmus1 who, standing on the corner sweating in the blazing sun, told me that she’s doing her best to prepare for the hostile takeover by plutocratic fascists and then invited me over to her house for tea.
And so it began, a homecoming.
That night, Bex took me to a potluck gathering of the Be Well AVL community, lovingly nicknamed Waterworld, the mutual aid water distribution project where she has been working every single day since the floods, not beholden to any government agency, not prompted by any nonprofit job, just a group of people compelled to help their neighbors in the absence of any otherwise functioning social safety net.
Waterworld, self-organized out of the grassroots flushing brigades and neighborhood-level water distribution efforts from the early days of the disaster, purchased a flatbed truck and hundreds of 300 gallon IBC tanks (AKA water totes) and distributed the totes to strategic locations around the city—particularly in proximity to public housing developments and senior high-rises. They found a location to use as a hub—a house in the same complex in West Asheville where the Asheville Tool Library and the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Hub buzz day and night to distribute supplies, lend tools, fix chainsaws, and convene organizing meetings.
At the potluck that night, welcomed lavishly, squeezed around a long table on a back deck under the stars, eating soup and fresh green salad with these affable, beautiful, farmpunk strangers, bantering about nothing, blinkering up at the big orange half moon hanging low and soft over the bare tree branches—I marveled to myself in a kind of prayer: let me never stop doing this, let me never stop finding myself under new skies with new faces, let me never stop being astonished.
The next day, I met up with my friends Christina and Sally to help out with the weekly mutual aid distribution with the unhoused community in Aston Park. Here, Hawthorne Community Herb Collective offered hot tea, Plan B, and herbal medicine, and Asheville Survival Program/Streetside offered wound care, food, sleeping bags, and winter coats. I ran into my old friend Dave, who is an EMT and just successfully wrote a grant for a van and team to handle mental health and first responder crisis calls without cops. I’m so fucking proud of my friends.
Lounging in the grass in the sun, there was little distinction between “giver” and “receiver,” it was people together, sharing. Like a dream you might have about what is possible, but for real. Sally made a CBD herbal salve named in honor of Stephen, a community member who had died unexpectedly recently. I spoke to another young organizer who told me, “I knew Steve had died when he didn’t show up to Streetside that day, because I knew that would be the only reason he wouldn’t come.” In fact, Stephen had passed away in his tent. The organizer shared, with tears in their eyes, that in honor of Steve, they vowed to show up every Saturday just as steadfastly.
We went to Tacobilly and then went to Southern Dharma Oasis to check out the grief space that my old friend Ekua Adisa had curated. We cried, we pulled cards from the new Abacus Corvus deck, I got a massage, for free. Everything is free now, the song in my head on a loop.
Day after day, a homecoming.
Walking past the house where I lived for seven years, past the spot on the road where, coming home from the bar one night, Lucy and I slipped on the ice, our legs comically swooping out from under us, one after the other, landing side-by-side on our backs on the ice in the road, laughing with such boundless mirth that if we had been hit by a car at that moment it would have all been worth it, we would have died laughing.
Walking past the bookstore after hours and seeing my friend Patrick in the window, and knocking on the door and being let in; unexpectedly sobbing when trying to talk to him about the love I felt being back, the way I was loved, forever prodigal, and noticing the sticker with a picture of a gnome that said you can go gnome again!—a nod to Thomas Wolfe, Asheville’s native son, and gnomes, I guess?—and just a perfect comic circle to the conversation we were having and we laughed and laughed. You can go gnome again, Patrick said, placing his hand on my shoulder in playful solemnity.
I had lunch with Olga, beloved friend and the owner of Short Street Cakes, at Gypsy Queen Cuisine, the Lebanese restaurant owned by my friend Suzy, whose new business, Black Cat Sandwich Company, was on Eater’s list of the 15 most anticipated restaurants in the Carolinas on September 10th and 17 days later, was washed away, gone, two weeks before the opening date.
Standing there talking to Suzy was so normal and natural, and it was so good to see her, that it didn’t really sink in that she just lost her business. All the money she put into getting it set up, before a single sale was made. And not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no money coming in, there’s no unemployment, no relief for most people. There’s SBA loans, but not grants. People feel abandoned. Everyone is exhausted, grieving, navigating endless loops of red tape, hanging on hold for days on end. And if you feel any partisan urge to contest this point, please just listen to the people who are living it. Just believe them, for God’s sake.
I met with a friend who I worried I had lost, I made an offering of repair in the form of an elixir, she made an offering of repair in the form of her warmth and generosity and good faith, and and the magic held, thank the gods, thank them all.
I made it to Old North Farm, where
and Jamie were still coordinating and making supply runs up the mountain to Poder Emma, even while baking and prepping for the busiest pie season of the year at Milk Glass Pie.
I walked the land and made ablutions with a friend with whom I made an agreement of unconditional love long ago, and there is a place in me that only exists with him, and it only grows more lush and beautiful as the years deepen and refine us, and we wandered onto his sister’s farm, in the midst of their sorghum syrup making process, and chickens that ran underfoot, and the farmers that played their fiddles and their guitars, and the old feeling welled up again, let me never stop finding this feeling, let me never stop feeling this wonder, this aliveness, this thisness.
I walked mountain roads with old friends and their good dogs, I watched the sun crest the horizon and burn off the fog of the morning.
When I left Asheville in 2020, I was a form of wounded, and when I came back I had experienced a modicum of healing, and somehow between what had changed in me and the cataclysmic transformation of the land and the people that started at the end of September with Hurricane Helene and will never end—the journey became a kind of jubilee, and all was forgiven.
Lately I’ve been seeing life as less of a morality play—with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a lesson and a purpose—and more of a picaresque:2 a wander through places and circumstances and situations with no inherent meaning other than the living of them. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes horrific, almost always interesting; with no need for a redemptive arc to justify, well, anything at all.
It’s a great relief, to glimpse life in this way: not relinquishing purpose or meaning altogether, but relinquishing the insistence of it, the primacy of it—making way instead for the recognition of (to use that ubiquitous 12-step aphorism) life on life’s terms.
My life that week in Asheville became a picaresque: not just in spite of the trauma and devastation that took place there but maybe—dare I say it—because of it; and what to make of that? What does it mean? That the hurricane was good? That moving away was bad? Was I right? Was I wrong? Was I being flippant or glib? It doesn’t have to mean any of those things. It’s just an experience we are having, something we are living through.
If it’s true—as the poet once said3—that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, then I have spent my life circling around this essay, unable to do much more than start it, but also unable to do much else until it’s finished, for no discernible reason other than for the sake of the writing itself, and the fact that I said I would, and the fact that I’ve needed time; and as another poet once said, things take the time they take.4
If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, then I have spent my life weeding the fence lines; planting the garlic, harvesting the collard greens. I have spent my life baking chocolate cakes and sweet potato pies to take to my in-laws’ for Thanksgiving and to potluck meetings with earnest writers, angelic punks, trying desperately to stop the slaughter of the innocents. I have spent my life waiting at the bus stop, at the subway station, on the train platform. I have spent my life trying to quiet my mind at the altar of mugwort ash and turkey feather, orange sunrise dripping down the walls.
I’m letting it wash over me: the sunrise, the frustration of not being able to produce writing on a schedule, the election, the hurricane, the genocide. I’m surrendering myself to the helpless wonder of it all, and in doing so, somehow, I have lost my fear, my panic, my anxious rumination: a spontaneous remission of hyper-vigilance into a free fall of some kind of joy and love and abandon born of giving up and letting go; a kind of hope born of hopelessness. So, come what may, let us never stop doing this, let us never stop feeling this wonder, this aliveness, let us never stop being astonished.
Home.
This year, in honor of what might be my favorite holiday—New Year’s Day, that feast of the gods of fresh starts and new beginnings—I am excited and honored to organize a raffle to support the work of two organizations, Rural Organizing and Resilience (coordinating mutual aid in Marshall, NC in the ongoing Hurricane Helene climate crisis), and Many Lands Mutual Aid (providing cash and material aid to displaced families sheltering in an UNRWA school in Deir Al-Balah in Central Gaza). From the French Broad River to Palestine, all our struggles intertwine!
Raffle entries are $5 each with unlimited entries. Entries can be “purchased” by making a donation to ROAR here or MLMA here. Take a screenshot of your donation receipt page, and email it to me here, along with your name, contact info, and which item raffles you would like to enter.
Raffle items currently include:
A tattoo from @kerryburketattoos (formerly of Asheville, now in Philly, lucky me!)
A tarot reading from moi 🔮
And many more to come! Do you have an item or service that you would like to donate to the New Year’s Day Raffle? Please let me know! Names will be drawn and winners announced on January 1. Raffle details will be continuously updated here!
The World.
What I’m reading:
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. A memoir about the power, poetry, and travesty of being made into a crazy bitch by this crazy bitch world. Beautiful. Stunning.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire. Dialectical theory that will free your mind in the here and now:
The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for [the oppressed’s] critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization. Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake.
Home + the World observes the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Jodi Rhoden is a proud signatory of the Writers Against the War on Gaza statement of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Visit Home + the World on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, and—of course—healing, self-help, and social justice. If you purchase a book through my shop, I will receive a commission and so will an independent bookstore of your choice. Find it here!
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Emily is a public historian who shared this with me: “I am presently working with Buncombe County Special Collections on creating a crowdsourced digital archive about Helene. We plan to have the site up next month that will have a platform/portal for people to upload photos, or otherwise digitized documents, and we have plans to engage with some students to create some sort of GIS component, and we're going to start collecting oral histories in March, with plans to train volunteers on trauma informed interviewing. As the archive grows, so will the site, as we will create different ways to exhibit the collection - timeline, narrative focused, image focused, etc. I am also working with some folks in Hendersonville creating a digital exhibit about the Kingdom of the Happyland in conjunction with the release of a historical fiction about the community by Dolen Perkins Valdez titled Happyland. They were a group of emancipated people that established a community near Tuxedo/Zirconia area. They came from Spartanburg County, SC. They shared resources, created their own rules/laws, had a King and Queen that were siblings. An inspiring story of mutual aid during trying times! The site will be live in March.” Keep an eye on Emily’s website for updates!
From Wikipedia: According to the traditional view of Thrall and Hibbard (first published in 1936), seven qualities distinguish the picaresque novel or narrative form, all or some of which an author may employ for effect:
A picaresque narrative is usually written in first person as an autobiographical account.
The main character is often of low character or social class. They get by with wits and rarely deign to hold a job.
There is little or no plot. The story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes.
There is little if any character development in the main character. Once a pícaro, always a pícaro. Their circumstances may change but these rarely result in a change of heart.
The pícaro's story is told with a plainness of language or realism.
Satire is sometimes a prominent element.
The behavior of a picaresque protagonist stops just short of criminality. Carefree or immoral rascality positions the picaresque hero as a sympathetic outsider, untouched by the false rules of society.
In the English-speaking world, the term "picaresque" is often used loosely to refer to novels that contain some elements of this genre; e.g. an episodic recounting of adventures on the road.
A perennial favorite from Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.
How many roads did St Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
-Mary Oliver
Always so poignant and beautiful. I hold onto the idea of viewing life as a picaresque.
Also, the morbid hilarity of dying laughing. I snorted. Love you.
You and I have many "crossroads". My parents lived in Skyland for a few years, when I was in college. My dearest friend from childhood, is a retired 3rd grade teacher at Fairview Elementary school. I spent many summers, as a child, at conferences in Montreat. Going to AVL is a trip back in time for me. As such, I haven't been able to go since the storm, too afraid. But time will come. In the meantime, I donate to local charities and pray. Thank you for the visuals.