
Hurricane Helene: A Seed Saver’s Sorrow and Jim’s Ballad
October 11, 2024 | Source: Mergoat | by Veronica Limeberry
The Blue Ridge Mountains are the most beautiful place on earth. I’ve said this numerous times over the last three decades. I was born in Candler, near West Asheville. I’m old enough to have went to Venable before it was Sand Hill (if you know, you know). I graduated from Enka, marking my place and ancestry in Western North Carolina. I first left WNC to work in Jonesborough and Johnson City. This region is my home, and home to the stories of my family, my friends, our lands, our waters. I’ve spent endless nights breathing in the mountain air, under hot summer stars, and oak-swept wind.
This October I was supposed to take my 16 month old baby on her first drive to look at the leaves of the Blue Ridge Parkway. A drive I’ve been on every fall since I can remember. Now, I-26 between Erwin, TN and Asheville, NC doesn’t exist. I-40 on the border has been washed away too.
How do I begin this story? The one that starts with the rage of water, flooding beyond every historic line in recorded history. The one that marks the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ so painfully clear; a path of shattered houses, ancient trees, old bridges, entire lives battered and destroyed, left on receding banks of toxic mud? Honestly, I can’t. I can’t tell you what it feels like to drive home on an emergency mission to heal whatever impossibly small rifts I can; to look at these highways and roads and bridges as arteries that fed our hollers, that brought our communities together…these arteries and bridges that have been ripped up and washed away, taking with them stories and ancestry and cultural connections. So I’ll tell you what I did and who I met and what they did. That’s all I’ve got right now.
My mission to Celo community in Burnsville was because of Jim Veteto; a seed-saving elder, who for almost forty years has worked across Appalachia with mountain folk and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, collecting our ancestral seeds and the stories that go along with them. He is the founder of the Southern Seed Legacy and the Appalachian Institute for Mountain Studies (AIMS). He holds some of the last remaining varieties bred by many Native, Black, and rural holler folk in this region; he has their voices on old CDs; in at least one case, he was the last person to speak with someone before they passed from this world.