We Save Us

Y’all. I was going to start writing about hope.

After a summer filled with malaise and despair, I was returning to this space to practice hopeful world-building. And I will. I promise. I have so many nature adventures to share with you, prepped and ready to go for the coming weeks. So much wonder blooms amidst the fading year. So many hopeful imaginings.

But after a week of absorbing the testimonials and videos of the devastation in southern Appalachia, hope feels bitter right now.

There are no words to describe the destruction from Hurricane Helene spread across Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. No words to describe the grief for the unimaginable loss of life. The homes and memories washed away. The bodies fished from trees and mud. The hills collapsed. Rivers and lakes polluted. Electricity and water cut. Civil infrastructure pulled to its breaking point.

There are no words for the worst severity of impacts always falling along the lines of societal oppression and impacting Indigenous, Black, Latino, immigrant, and disabled communities in Appalachia the hardest. For the disgust at a governance system that allows FEMA to face a budget shortfall while countless bombs are sent across the world to indiscriminately murder children. For the rage at fossil fuel companies who turned Appalachia into a Sacrifice Zone and now lie far from the extreme storms that are the direct repercussions of their greed and inhumanity. For the utter despair at systems that seem designed for maximum cruelty for some and maximum profit for others while the narratives that normalize them hide all the costs.

But there are so many words for the community that is rising.

Neighbors in trapped highland communities left with almost nothing yet pooling resources together. On-the-ground mutual aid organizations opening up tool libraries and organizing hikers to take supplies through the impassable roads. Self-organizing volunteers dropping off generators and fuel to families. Mule trains bringing in insulin to those trapped in the hollers. National Guard members and volunteers staging kayak rescues and making helicopter drops. Storytellers from across Appalachia tirelessly broadcasting news and resource links and hope.

For if I know anything about Appalachia, it’s that we save us.

It’s not heartwarming or hopeful. It’s not pessimistic either. It’s an inclusive mantra of community-led survival and resistance that will get us through the next disaster and the next act of exploitation by our own corrupt officials or some outside corporate profiteer: we save us. We save us. We’ve been doing it a damn long time. We’re f*cking good at it by now.

We can get through this storm. And the next. And the crumbling infrastructure that we know is already all around us. We’re immensely creative and immeasurably kind. We can save us.

And if our ruling class was ever able to confront its own baggage that it continually lays at Appalachia’s door - their whiteness, their greed, their inhumanity, their ignorance - then maybe we could save them too.

Want to help? Appalachian Voices is keeping a running list of where you can donate money or relief supplies. Apodlachia and Mergoat Magazine have been curating news and resource lists on their social media accounts.

For Appalachia

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe will mend our hearts with slug trails
And stitch the hills with silken wings
And when all the world we love is gone
We will darn our hope with fungal threads
And one day
I promise you
It will be enough

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.