Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise, is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Narrator] There's something strange and stubborn about Asheville, North Carolina.

It's a mountain town that doesn't behave like one.

Tucked deep in the Blue Ridge, it's not hiding from the world.

Instead, it openly seeks to make itself known-- weird, wild, and defiantly alive.

It's like someone combined Austin, Texas, with mountain culture and gave birth to this enigma.

To me, it feels like a place where the line between art and life is so blurry you stop trying to find it.

But people come here to find their tribe, to find themselves.

Politically, it's a blueberry floating in a tall glass of strawberry lemonade-- the kind of place where kombucha flows like water and the coffee shops double as debate stages.

It's eccentric, it's woke, it's complicated as hell-- a liberal enclave surrounded by old-money conservatism and stubborn Appalachian tradition.

And that friction, it's real.

It's the soundtrack of the city-- banjos and backbeats, conversations and open mics.

But let's not romanticize too fast.

Growth here isn't some neat upward arc.

It seems messy.

It claws, and it costs.

The rent's up, the soul's at risk, and the people who carved this place into something strange and wonderful are sometimes the ones getting priced out.

Progress is here, but it's wearing a crooked smile.

And then came Helene.

The kind of storm that doesn't just blow through, it has left a devastating mark that I'm not even sure time will fully erase.

Roads turned to rivers, homes took in water.

Asheville, it didn't flinch.

It refused to sink under the weight of it.

That's not the kind of spirit that embodies this place.

The community rallied like it always does-- scrappy, stubborn, soaked to the bone, but unbowed.

There's resilience in these hills-- the kind they don't bottle or sell; the kind you earn the hard way.

Asheville's not tidy.

It's not perfect.

And thank God for that.

It's a contradiction wrapped in a mural, chasing a food truck, quoting Kerouac between beers.

It's still figuring itself out, and that might be its greatest strength.

You might not find what you came looking for here, but maybe you'll find something better.

-[Joshua Deels' voice] They say the place you're from shapes you-- maybe it defines you.

I've always thought you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

I'm Josh with PBS Appalachia.

In this series, I'm going from town to town, exploring the places people still call home-- their hometowns.

From Appalachia to the rest of the country, I've found we share more than we think.

But it's the details-- the food, the voices, the pride and traditions-- that make us different.

This isn't a story told from New York or L.A.

It comes with roots embedded in Southwest Virginia, an often overlooked, misunderstood corner of the map.

That perspective matters, because the character of America doesn't just live in its big cities.

It's the small towns, the back roads, the kitchens, and the bars where people gather.

That's the lens I bring to this journey, because the character of America isn't written in headlines-- it's lived in neighborhoods, on porches, at kitchen tables.

And this season, we're pushing past borders into communities far from here-- into new towns, new kitchens, new homes-- searching for what home means here and everywhere.

-Asheville is probably the most Appalachia and the least Appalachia place in Appalachia-- all at one time, in such a beautiful, eclectic, fun, interesting, unexpected way.

And that's one of the reasons I love living here.

I love the fact that Asheville is right between two of the tallest mountain ranges in the Appalachian Range.

I love the biodiversity here.

I love to be able to walk up a mountainside and see, you know, as the change of elevation happens, all the different species and all the different plants and animals and everything.

-[Joshua's voice] Not only is Benjamin an internationally recognized artist, with pieces on exhibit from the Smithsonian to the Natural Museum of History in London-- at his core, the man's also an entrepreneur with a passion for conservation.

He's mountain-born, mountain-made, and he's not waiting for permission.

And in this way, he embodies the spirit of Asheville.

-Part of that is, you know, I'm from a really humble family, and I just knew that if there was any way forward for this thing that I had fallen in love with, I was gonna have to invent a way forward.

-Some people may look at an area like Appalachia and think that that's a handicap.

We have something-- oh, well, you've got that going against you, you know?

You just didn't win the lottery on where you were born, this type of thing.

Is it a handicap to be from here?

-On the surface, absolutely.

But in essence, no-- not if you can flip it, right?

I think that being from Appalachia and being an Appalachian native, there's a certain amount of just stubborn "I can" that is certainly ingrained in our culture, and that's certainly part of me.

There's not a lot of permission- asking in Appalachia.

You know, one of my college buddies at Appalachian State University said, "Somebody forgot to tell Benji he couldn't do that.

And then he went and did it.

And now everybody's trying to figure out how the heck he pulled it off."

And I think that that's not just me--that is, you know, being an Appalachian native.

That's certainly the culture I grew up in.

It's, you know, you want to get it done, well, roll up your sleeves, let's do it, you know.

It's not everybody else's problem, it's my problem, and I'm going to solve it.

-[Joshua's voice] It wasn't just talking with Benjamin that tipped me off.

There was a pattern here, a rhythm I kept running into in Asheville.

People who don't just talk about ideas-- they do things, real things, with their hands, their time.

Folks who roll up their sleeves without waiting for someone to hand them a blueprint.

I was lucky enough to speak with another Asheville native who not only grew up inside Asheville stories, she became a New York Times best-selling author, sharing those stories with the world.

And what better place to meet than a local watering hole where libations mingle with the written word-- to talk about life, writing, and this strange magnetic place that raised her.

-My parents are from Asheville, my grandparents, my great-grandparents.

There have been a lot of stories told.

There are a lot of tall tales, a lot of music, a lot of ballads, a lot of ghost stories.

And I think the idea of a story with a veil of something is so real it could almost be true, but it's really a tall tale that your grandmother told you.

I grew up in stories, enmeshed in stories, enmeshed in music, enmeshed in, I don't know--the idea that everything is a story.

I think the beauty of Asheville, one of the many beautiful parts of Asheville, is the old ways are being preserved in outside of Asheville, but newness is happening in Asheville.

So we get the best of both worlds.

But I think there's always some dissonance, I think.

-[Joshua] Sure.

[Joshua's voice] As Sarah talked, something else started to surface.

This place doesn't just make people like her-- it attracts them.

There's a gravity here, quiet but unmistakable.

Like calls to like.

The dreamers, the doers, the beautifully restless, the ones chasing something just out of reach-- they find their way to Asheville, maybe by accident, maybe not.

Call it what you want-- fate, luck, the law of attraction-- but Asheville's got a way of drawing its own.

-Our most famous native writer son, Thomas Wolfe-- and I think he's probably the founder of, unintentionally, he was the founder of the literary community in Asheville-- because he sort of put Asheville on the map in literature with Look Homeward, Angel .

Shortly after that Fitzgerald came, and O. Henry, and Carl Sandburg, and so it became a sort of haven, and I think they were attracted to the beauty of the place.

So several factors came into sort of the foundation of the arts community, or the literary community in particular.

Once that became known, how writers were here, more writers came here.

And they found a community in which like attracts like.

Sometimes--writing in particular, visual arts as well, it is a solitary endeavor.

And it's--it's-- -It is.

-It's an isolating kind of thing.

So even if you never meet the writer who's down the street or the writer who has an office downtown, you know that someone else is going through what you're going through.

And I think that's part of, um... what happened here in Asheville.

♪ And I wish I knew that ♪ ♪ Those were the good old days ♪ ♪ Somehow you always knew ♪ ♪ That we'd be okay ♪ ♪ Let's watch the sun go down ♪ ♪ On this lonely ♪ ♪ Neighborhood ♪ ♪ And laugh again ♪ ♪ The way only we could ♪ -Asheville, as you look at it, it's a resilient town.

It's a beautiful city.

But there's so much hurt and loss there as well.

I think the people are mountain proud, and I mean that in a good way.

But sometimes with that, people don't want to ask for help, because mountain proud means "I can do it myself."

-Right.

-And, um... in a storm like this, though, everybody needs help.

Everybody's going to need help.

-[Joshua's voice] You don't really know what places are made of, like Asheville, until something tries to tear them apart.

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene came through with teeth bared.

A brutal, uninvited guest, it didn't just knock on the door; it kicked it in.

The storm slammed into western North Carolina with the kind of fury that will be talked about for generations.

Roads vanished, homes swept away, entire neighborhoods held their breath.

The damage was ugly.

Heartbreaking.

But that's not what defined the city.

Asheville rallied-- not in some cinematic, Instagram-able way, but the real kind.

Quiet knocks on doors, strangers sharing food, tools, time.

Folks realizing that the people they'd passed on the street for years were now shoulder to shoulder in the same fight.

Grief, grit, and grace all under the same ruined sky.

In the wreckage, something held--something human, something that doesn't go down easy.

Edward Graham's roots run deep in western North Carolina, Asheville especially.

He didn't just show up when the cameras did.

When Hurricane Helene came ripping through, it was Graham and Samaritan's Purse at the front lines-- first in, last out.

No fanfare, just boots in the mud, getting it done.

Long after the winds died down and the headlines moved on, they stayed.

Because that's what it means to actually give a damn.

-I love the city of Asheville.

I have many friends, I have family that live there, and so it was personal, and it was personal for my father to make sure that we responded to western North Carolina in general, but to make sure-- there was a lot of attention that came from the federal government onto Asheville, and everything--that was kind of the epicenter of all the work and volunteer organizations, so our job is also to make sure that the remote areas don't get forgotten.

But we used it as a logistical hub, so helicopters would land there at a church as well and at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove, which is just right outside of Asheville.

We would land there, pick up supplies, and then take them out.

If you go down in downtown Asheville, it looks fine.

You go by the river-- it's decimated.

-[Joshua] Like the Arts District, through there?

-[Edward Graham] Yeah, down with all these pottery stores.

There was a lot—a lot of those old factories had been converted into antique stores or art galleries, and all that's gone.

The Biltmore Forest area was heavily damaged.

It's a beautiful area, and it's got a big art district down there, and it was completely destroyed.

Buncombe County alone has a lot of homeless that live down by the river and down the creek.

And when you get to Swannanoa and Asheville area and you see the damage and what it did down by the river, it breaks your heart.

People are going to be hurting.

As life goes on and the news cycles go elsewhere, the news doesn't change here for western North Carolina.

People will still be hurting and grieving over the horrific loss.

-[Joshua's voice] The River Arts District got hit hard-- flattened, gutted, soaked to the bone.

Helene didn't spare much.

But the Radical, a defiant little hotel with a taste for art and rebellion, managed to hold the line.

Its owner, an advocate, an art lover, the kind of person who doesn't just talk about community-- she builds it.

When the storm hit, she turned her hotel into a hub for police, relief crews, anyone trying to stitch the city back together.

The place took on water, but it never lost its soul.

She was also my host during my time in Asheville, and like the city itself, she showed me that resilience here isn't just a story, it's a way of life.

-You know, in this district, we've got artists of all age and strength and character or whatever, and there's just people just like really working physically very hard-- some of them, you know, in their '70s--you know, cleaning this mud out.

Just watching that, I'll never forget it, you know?

I'll say here at the hotel, you know, we're not in the floodplain-- this hotel's not in the floodplain-- so when the water rose, of course, rose to-- we're watching the river gauges and the water level just going up, and the projected water level just kept going up, and we're like, man, no way, you know.

And sure enough, the water came over the railroad tracks, started getting close to the hotel.

And so our team, some of them were here, and they dammed the doors with plywood and tape.

And the doors actually held.

Like, we could see the water going up the plywood.

You know, you could kind of see just a little water coming in-- and then they were kind of squeegeeing it into a drain.

And then the drains-- The water came up the drains because the whole area was just so full.

But we had guests here, and there's nowhere for them to go-- nothing has power, there's no cell phone signal, there's nothing.

And one of our bartenders, Anderson, took some of them home with him.

They stayed at his house, because there was just nowhere for them to go.

So, you know, that's hospitality for you.

[laughs] -Yeah, it is.

-I think within a few hours, the city attorney texted me, said, "Can you house some first responders?"

And I was like, "We have no power, we have no--okay," you know.

-[Joshua] Right.

We have beds.

-Yeah, we have beds.

We can't launder them, but you can send them.

And so we had police officers in here for about a month.

And they were great guests, bless their hearts, obviously.

They had no--no-- -Sure.

-No linens, no water.

-Right.

I mean, so we had some porta-potties set up.

They had places for them to go shower somewhere.

It was quite an operation, but we were just grateful that they were in our neighborhood helping, and that we had something to offer them.

-Helene was devastating to everybody in southern Appalachia, and no one was really expecting it.

Like, people didn't even go gas their cars up.

No one was expecting the level of devastation.

-No one was expecting it to be this big.

No one was expecting the amount of rain coming off the mountains to take out our water system-- because we didn't have running water in Asheville for three weeks, and then after that, we couldn't drink it for seven weeks.

No one was expecting that.

When Helene came through with this monumental amount of rain, it just flowed down the hills, taking, you know, the ground with it.

But then it all--it had no place to go but into our rivers-- into the French Broad River, into the Swannanoa River.

And it turned these old, old rivers-- the French Broad River is the third oldest in the world-- and it turned these old, sort of lackadaisical rivers into these monsters.

And it decimated entire communities.

We knew it was going to be bad, and we had had floods before, but this was like nothing we'd seen before.

Generations of people are going to talk about how affected we were.

-Do you think this was one of the worst?

-It is the worst natural disaster Asheville has ever seen, ever.

And we were always known as a climate haven.

You know, we don't get too hot, we don't get too cold.

We rarely get tornadoes.

We're sort of protected by the mountains.

When we do get tropical storms from the Gulf, you know, they've weakened by the time.

-Yeah, they've slowed down considerably.

So it's sort of, now we're not so known for that.

-It's one of the places I was worried about after the storm too, being where you were located.

-Yeah.

-You are on the down in the River Arts kind of area?

-Yeah.

-We are on the river a little bit north of the River Arts District, and we did have some flooding in the facility, a couple inches, but we were very fortunate that we didn't lose any of our product, but we were offline manufacturing for about two months.

-We suffered a devastating impact here.

Everyone from people who lived here who lost their homes, flooding, lots of tree damage.

You know, Asheville didn't have potable water for about 11 weeks.

We lost power.

Fortunately, we here at Citizen Vinyl, we never lost power and we were able to keep our internet.

After the hurricane, we very quickly responded to helping to support our community, so we offered our Wi-Fi, our public Wi-Fi services, to the community.

Because we had power, we ran extension cords out to the front of the building.

Many people here in town had no way to get in touch with loved ones to let them know that they were safe.

We were serving over 1,500 meals a day, a day out front for several weeks.

And, you know, we really wanted to live into our name, Citizen Vinyl.

You know, we take, you know, being members of this community very seriously, and we're in recovery mode here now.

But this community is very resilient, and we really stepped up to support one another.

-We're still dealing with some inventory backlogs and that sort of thing, but most of the way back, getting back little by little.

Yeah.

Yeah.

-News coverage kind of hit out over the next few days because I don't even think they could actually get the video footage out.

And so it just felt like it was actually getting, you know, like the full gravity of the situation wasn't really realized for multiple days, as you know.

-I literally was at people's houses every day, and I would hear the same exact thing: "Oh, if it wasn't for my neighbors cutting down the trees in my driveway, I wouldn't have been able to leave."

-[Joshua's voice] The storm hit so hard that I watched a grown man break down in tears, not just from the wreckage he saw, but from the people.

He was from Miami, used to getting lied to, hustled, hardened by it.

But Asheville, different, honest, humble.

It hit him so deep, he quit his job, packed up and moved here right after the storm.

Now he's known around town as the food guy, some Facebook foodie pulling locals out to restaurants that he reviews.

Dozens and dozens of people will show up, even crowding restaurants beyond capacity.

He found something here he didn't know he was missing, a community worth belonging to.

-The sense of community is ridiculous here, and that's what I've completely fell in one with.

I've worked in like 34 states, I've been everywhere around the country.

But this sense of community is how they came together after the storm and how they continue now.

-[Joshua] It's about-- -It changed me.

I was at one house, it was an elderly house in the middle of nowhere, like literally in the mountains, like...and they were a older couple, and I guess the man had dementia.

That morning, right after, they had 14 people just shoveling mud away from the house, their neighbors.

Nobody called them.

She didn't call them.

They just showed up.

Like, that's not something you see in Miami.

Miami is like dog-eat-dog world, like big city, like take care of myself before everybody else.

But this community, like, it moved me.

It literally moved me to move here.

-[Joshua] Yeah.

-Like... -[Joshua] It literally moved you.

-It literally moved me here.

Like, I'm in love with this place.

I love these people.

Bounty and Soul is... it's just an incredible group of people that, uh, I don't even know exactly all they do, but I know they were in Black Mountain that got really hit, like Swannanoa area that just got wiped out.

And they come in with trucks and they just give out farm fresh vegetables and stuff like necessities, you know, and so I started volunteering with them.

-[Joshua's voice] Tony's not in it for the credit.

No speeches, no spotlight, just a guy who shows up every week to do the work.

Volunteering with Bounty and Soul, he helps get fresh, free food into the hands of nearly 30,000 people still reeling from Helene's aftermath.

This isn't some feel-good side project.

It's real need, real hunger.

And the people behind it, they're the kind of quiet heroes this world doesn't deserve.

-We were boots on the ground day of the storm, and that this vehicle, you know, Bounty and Soul vehicle, was seen out on the roads.

And, you know, we have a resident who has shared with me that, you know, two days after the storm, when everything was like a war zone, she saw the Bounty and Soul vehicle coming down the street, and she said, "When I saw that vehicle, I knew we would be okay."

The hurricane really put the organization into a place of service, you know, great service, but also really at the forefront of like what can a community do together?

What does it mean to be a resilient community?

And when there was not a lot of support in the beginning coming from the outside, it was neighbors helping neighbors and, you know, people walking into our facility, literally walking with, or riding their bike, to say, "How can I help?"

-Prior to the storm, we had, I think it was, we had five community markets.

Now we have 10 markets like this per week.

-Wow.

-And then three more going out sort of by satellite to three more communities, neighborhoods.

So we're serving about 25,000 people a month from about 7,300 households a month.

-[Joshua] Wow.

-It's just gonna take time, and I'm not leaving, so I'm gonna do everything I can for this place.

People are joking like, "Oh, you're gonna be the next mayor."

I'm like, "That's so stupid."

-You'll be the unofficial mayor.

-I don't wanna be the mayor.

I wanna be the unofficial mayor.

Like, I will fight for this place, I will die for this place.

I'll do anything I can to regrow, to regrow a city I didn't know.

-Asheville's home.

I've moved around quite a lot in my life being a chef by trade.

I'm all over the country.

And as soon as I got here, I'm like, "Something's different here."

So I never really wanted to put down roots.

I thought we would continue to move around.

And I've just like, [inhales deeply] plans are dead.

Doesn't matter.

I'm here.

-Asheville is where I bloom.

Because my family goes back so many generations, I'm so deeply rooted in this place.

-Asheville to me is a place for the strong, for the weary, for the weird to be yourself and to be accepted.

-[Joshua's voice] Storms come.

They wreck things.

They expose what's weak and what holds.

-Asheville took the hit, but it didn't fold.

Here, rebuilding isn't just nails and lumber.

It's people showing up for each other.

It's food, art, stories, and stubborn hope.

The storm moved on, but Asheville stayed.

Scarred, maybe, changed, definitely, still standing, absolutely, and still making something beautiful out of the chaos.

♪ And I wish I knew that ♪ ♪ Those were the good old days ♪ ♪ Somehow you always knew ♪ ♪ That we'd be okay ♪ ♪ Let's watch the sun go down ♪ ♪ On this lonely ♪ ♪ Neighborhood ♪ ♪ And laugh again ♪ ♪ The way only we... ♪ Nestled in the heart of Appalachia.

The University of Virginia's College at Wise, is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.