October 28, 2024

Habitat has finished building and awarding the first two blocks of homes in a planned development in Nicholtown, a downtown Greenville, S.C., neighborhood. The owners are settled in their modest two- and three-bedroom houses and paying their mortgages.

Work has shifted to West Greenville, a mixed area of old colonials, boxy one-level frame houses, trailer homes ringed by chain-link fences, vacant lots, and industrial facilities. A railroad track runs through the area. A few blocks of Pendleton Street, the main thoroughfare, feature small businesses, cafes, and a coffee shop, conveying a vague upscale look. But around the corner, off Lois Street, the mismash resumes. Appliances and old cars sit in front yards.

Depending on your point of view, the area is depressed or filled with opportunity. For Habitat, the point is that the real estate is affordable for people who qualify for Habitat-built homes. Habitat bought some land on one side of Sturtevant Street. Sites were staked for nine houses.

Since 1985 HabitatGreenville has built more than 400 homes, helping low-income families achieve home ownership. Habitat families escape substandard rental housing, which traps them in crime-ridden areas with poor grocery resources and schools. Residents who live in their own homes, responsible for maintenance and upkeep and for paying mortgages, contribute to neighborhood stability and safety.

Habitat doesn’t give homes away. Applicants must be living and or working in the county for a year; be at or below the regional poverty level; have a minimum annual income of $45,000. The applicant also must be living in substandard or crowded conditions or paying excessive rent in relation to income, and be able to pay the monthly mortgage.

Applicants must be willing to complete at least 200 hours of Habitat volunteer work, what’s called “sweat equity,” labor on Habitat homesites or at Habitat’s thrift stores.

Nationwide, decent housing is unaffordable for low-income people. Property values in Nicholtown have increased, meaning qualifying for a mortgage is harder. Even with Habitat subsidies that limit mortgage payments to around 30 percent of income, the $45,000 income minimum may not be enough.

The Habitat neighborhoods aren’t lovely. One day on a work shift in Nicholtown, we heard gunshots. The supervisor waved the volunteers into a half-finished house. We hung around inside until the excitement was over.

I took a break from volunteering for a couple of months with some health problems aggravated by the summer heat. By July five of the nine planned houses were completed. Since then Habitat teams finished two more and framed two on the last buildable lots.  

I parked and walked past the now-occupied ones, where sod laid by volunteers had grown in thick and green. A few of the new owners had planted shrubs and flowers. The gardening gave the block a cheerful look, although the opposite side of the street was worn and overgrown.

Volunteers were busy on the last two houses. Painting was on the schedule for one, siding for the other. Habitat hires contractors for plumbing, wiring, drywall, and flooring. Volunteers do the grunt work: assembling and raising frames, installing siding, laying roof panels, painting.

Chris, the site supervisor, welcomed me back. He saw I wore painting clothes. A gang of tall young guys, most over six feet, waved brushes. “The Eastside High basketball team is here, I’ve got them painting,” he said. “Instead I need you and Matrice to put up the shutters on 121.” He introduced Matrice, who stood nearby. She smiled. “Thank you for helping me,” she said.

Matrice, the future owner of 121 Sturtevant, was putting in some sweat equity on her own house. She owned up immediately that she had never installed shutters. I recalled some experience, decades ago, putting them up on our Virginia house. It’s not as hard as heaving roof panels, but you have to pay attention.

We hauled the shutters from the truck bed. “Separate ‘em from the frame, oh, an eighth of an inch,” Chris said. He was watching a church group hammering siding next door on 123. “An eighth of an inch—the width of two quarters.”

Matrice’s house had two front windows, meaning four shutters, inexpensive but presentable, needing six screws each. We fitted the first one along the window frame, me on a ladder, she held the shutter in place. With the power drill I got the first screw in at the top edge. We breathed deeply. I finished the second one. We backed away and looked. It showed a full half-inch of separation. The shutter had slipped as I drilled.

Back on the ladder I reversed the drill and removed the screws. We repositioned it, eyeballing the gap. Matrice pressed against the base. The first screw went in, I started on the second then heard that telltale clicking. I stripped the threads. Gritting my teeth, I pulled it out with pliers. On the second try we got it right.

We were more careful on the second shutter, it went up looking okay. We got some water and sat on the steps. She said she had done stints at Habitat’s local thrift store. She talked about her two boys, how thrilled they’ll be to get into their own home after years of occupying crummy, overpriced apartments. “Plus, this is great, I work at St. Francis Hospital, real easy to get to. I know I’ll love living here.”

We stepped back and looked at our work. The shutters were flush with the top of the frame, but I thought the gap was a bit wide, still slightly more than an eighth of an inch. Matrice inspected them. “I think they look great, just right,” she said with a smile.

The early chill had faded, I took off my sweatshirt, she removed her jacket. We picked up the last two shutters. She climbed the ladder. We measured, leveled, then eyeballed the shutter-frame gap. I leaned hard against the base of the shutter. She got the first screw in, then the second. The midlevel and lower screws, reachable without the ladder, were easier.

We had the hang of it now, the last one was easy. The shutters looked right, although I knew they might be a bit off. “I hope you like your new shutters,” I said. She grinned, “I love them!”

Our shoulders ached. The morning shift was wrapping up, the painters washed brushes, the siding team tossed their hammers in boxes. We loaded gear into the Habitat truck. Matrice’s house still needed painting, the power hookups, the appliances. But she had her shutters. She’ll move in in December.

October 21, 2024

Five years ago Saturday, October 19, a urological surgeon removed my left kidney at Sentara hospital in Woodbridge, Virginia. The procedure, performed with an advanced tool called the Da Vinci system, took six hours.

The kidney is the most complicated organ in the human body, packed with veins, capillaries, and channels that carry substances like myoglobin and creatine, products of muscle exertion, from throughout the body to the kidneys to be treated for removal. The kidneys are the body’s sanitation system.

The procedure is a ureteral nephrectomy, the standard for kidney cancer. If the tumor is located near the surface of the organ, the doc sometimes can reach in and snip it away. Your kidney will recover. If the tumor is a deep “renal pelvic mass” like mine, then no discussion, it comes out. The kidney is too complex and too dense for surgical acrobatics.

The Da Vinci system, which can be used for many minimally invasive operations, consists of a computer console, a sidecart with several interactive arms, and a 3D camera. The surgeon manipulates the arms, which are fitted with surgical instruments, to perform incisions, observing his work via the camera.

When you lose one kidney the other one takes over. Kidney care means hydrating, sixty ounces of water per day. I’m still trying to get that right.

It took more than a year to get to that October day. In June 2018 our family doctor did some tests, then sent me to the local urology practice. The urologist wanted more tests, which were no fun, no fun at all. Then he wanted an MRI.

I got the MRI at a local imaging place the morning we left on our cross-country road trip. A couple of hours later we were on the highway. We headed out on U.S. 50 from Woodbridge and crossed into West Virginia. That night we camped at a state park just east of Parkersburg, an old industrial town on the Ohio River. The next morning we drove into Ohio.

Three days later we crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis. We rode the elevator to the top of the Arch and looked out at the city. Then the cell phone rang. The nurse practitioner at the urology practice said they needed a biopsy. She gave me a week.

Instead of turning around and driving home in a bad mood, we pushed onto historic U.S. Route 66 just west of St. Louis. We followed the Mother Road through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. We camped and saw some interesting stuff: the World’s Largest Rocking Chair in Fanning., Mo., the Blue Whale in Catoosa, Okla., the Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo. We took a detour to see Sedona, Ariz.

We left the van with daughter Kathleen in Las Vegas and flew home for the biopsy. Two weeks later we were back in Vegas. The kidney situation ended the road trip. We picked up the van and headed for home, but did stop to see the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, Galveston, and New Orleans.

I wondered, we all wondered. In June I had just finished an ultra-trail run. Sometimes after these things there’s bleeding. After a mountain race four months earlier I spent three days in a hospital with rhabdomyolysis, a condition caused by dehydration that stresses the kidneys.

Home from the road trip, the medical stuff took over. Cancer? I thought I was in pretty good shape. This was a “high-grade” urothelial carcinoma, which is one of the reasons folks lose kidneys. The surgery was set for October. Then in late September, the chest pain, the ER visit, the new diagnosis: “thymic carcinoma,” a mass in my chest. The urologist canceled the nephrectomy.

In December a cardiovascular surgeon at Arlington Hospital Center opened my chest and cracked my sternum in a mediastinum “resection.” He found the mass next to my heart and aborted the operation. “You need further treatment,” he said.  

Our son Michael, a radiation medical physicist, arranged visits with surgical and radiation oncologists at Penn Med in Philadelphia. My insurance didn’t work at Penn, we ended up at Virginia Cancer Specialists for 30 days of radiation and then chemotherapy, which flowed through a chest port. The radiation blasted my lungs. I lost weight. Then eight months of recovery.

October 19 arrived. Staff people wheeled me into the Sentara surgical space. Six hours later I woke up. Getting better included a couple of ER visits. I got acquainted with my right kidney.

A year later, in September 2020, we sold the Virginia house and packed for South Carolina. The day before the closing I saw the Virginia oncologist for the last time. “You need a biopsy ASAP,” he said. “We’re moving out of state tomorrow,” I answered. It was all I could think to say.

The doc said, “I have a med school classmate who ended up in Greenville. I’ll call him.” We shook hands, I left. We had the closing the next morning, then got on the road to the Palmetto State.

In mid-November PRISMA Health in Greenville called. The new doctor ordered the biopsy, a PET scan, an appointment with a surgeon. Before Christmas I was in the operating room.

It turns out that the 2019 nephrectomy did not go smoothly. Urothelial carcinoma cells migrated and reconstituted along the ribcage. So another operation, another month of radiation. A year flew by. In late 2022 a scan found a recurrence of the thymic carcinoma in my liver and pleura, the lining of the lung.

The doc assigned a year of immunotherapy. No progress. In January he switched me to oral chemo, six milligrams, or two pills per day. I keep a chart, most days I remember to take them. A CT scan this week will show what’s going on.

I recall: October 19, 2019 was crisp, cool, clear. From the hospital room window the sky was an iridescent blue. I shifted in the bed stiffly. The temporary stent stung when I moved. Five days later I was out of there.

I’m doing better with hydrating, not easy. So far, Mr. Right Kidney is OK. Still getting out to trails.

We may look back on five years, any five years, as a rush of moments of joy or regret, some we create, others are created for us. With cancer there’s no choosing. We become witnesses, seeking meaning, understanding. We learn, we persevere. We move on.

October 14, 2024

Folks who live hundreds of miles from North Carolina are insisting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is out of hurricane relief funds because it gave money to illegal immigrants.  They get their information, I guessed, from the internet or right-wing TV shows. Or from Donald Trump.

FEMA maintains a webpage to counter Hurricane Helene rumors. Among them, in addition to the one cited above: FEMA is demanding donations from victims; FEMA provides only $750 to victims; FEMA is denying assistance to Republicans; FEMA is confiscating property of hurricane survivors.

Also: FEMA is restricting airspace for recovery operations; FEMA is distributing aid based on demographic characteristics, e.g., race, religion, national origin, gender preference, disability.

Then too: towns destroyed in the storm will be bulldozed and the land taken by the government. FEMA helicopter contractors prevented delivery of relief supplies. The Biden administration used satellite technology to create Hurricane Helene to punish Republican-leaning areas.

Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the government may have a way to control the weather. Someone proposed that North Carolinians form a militia to confront FEMA officials.

Under FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, the agency provides grants to state and local governments and non-profit organizations to support “non-citizen” immigrants released by the Department of Homeland Security who are awaiting immigration hearings. This program is separate from FEMA’s disaster relief funding, for which it received more than $35 billion from Congress.

Trump, though, said and still is saying that “Biden and Harris stole a billion dollars of disaster money to give to illegal immigrants.”

Republican Tennessee governor Bill Lee rebutted stories that FEMA or state agencies are confiscating relief funds. He added though that “there’s some belief and understanding that the root of the misinformation is ‘foreign sources’ just to confuse on the ground what’s happening here.” 

Kevin Corbin, a Republican North Carolina state senator who represents a district hit by Helene, wrote a Facebook post: “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods? Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.” Dozens of other North Carolina local and state officials condemned the rumors.

FEMA is coordinating a force of some 8,000 personnel on the scene in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia. Last week federal aid already approved came to more than $344 million.

As of last Wednesday the agency had provided $60 million to 52,000 North Carolina households. Some 800 FEMA staff are on the ground, and 1,200 search-and-rescue personnel have rescued more than 3,200 people. On Oct. 7 President Biden sent 500 more active-duty troops to the state.

The five other Helene-affected states show similar numbers. As of midweek FEMA had provided $77 million to 97,000 South Carolina households and $5 million for 900 households in Tennessee. Some $87 million was provided to 13,000 Florida households. More than 76,000 Georgia households received over $59 million. Some 700 Virginia households received more than $1 million.  

These statistics are provided by guess who—FEMA. But then, people who believe the lies aren’t going to believe FEMA’s figures.

Why the lies? Some are repeated because of ignorance of how FEMA operates. Others are calculated, based on prejudice, bigotry, or wishful thinking. Millions believe anything Trump says. Belief has become more important than truth. In a bizarre twist of how human beings perceive reality, reporting of objective truth—facts—only binds the believers more firmly to the lies. Facts that contradict the rumors, even when provided by federal, state, and local officials, scientists, and policy experts, are rejected.

Fear of immigrants is a central Republican campaign theme. Many Republicans, North and South, believe Democrats want to hand the country over to illegals. The Helene rumors attack the federal response, which is led by Democrats. Some of them, like Trump’s charge that immigrants are getting Helene relief money, are tainted by racism.

The journalist W.J. Cash, in his epic work, The Mind of the South, published in 1941, argues that racism was an element of Southern culture well before the Civil War. Poor White Southerners who did not own slaves scratched out their livelihood far from the affluent coastal plantations. Yet slavery reassured them that despite their poverty, another class—Blacks—stood even lower on the social scale.

Fundamentalist Protestantism replaced genteel Virginia Episcopalianism in poor Southern communities. Backwoods preachers pushed a doctrine that slavery was the God-given destiny for the Black race.

Cash observes that during Reconstruction many lower- and middle-class Whites believed the new privileges of citizenship of former slaves threatened their own economic and political status. Southerners joined the Ku Klux Klan. Racial violence and Jim Crow spread in the South. The migration of Blacks to northern cities stoked Northern racism. In the 1920s the state with the largest Klan membership was Indiana.

Beginning in the 1950s, Republicans, by consciously appealing to racist Southerners, won political power in the South. In 2005 the Republican National Committee apologized to the NAACP for targeting White voters and ignoring Blacks. Republicans still control all Southern state legislatures.

It’s not a long leap to recognize brown-skinned people are now targets of racists. Last week we learned that Helene rumors are targeting Jews, including Asheville mayor Esther Manheimer, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and FEMA public-affairs director Jaclyn Rothenberg. The rumor machine spun faster. Then Hurricane Milton came ashore.      

October 7, 2024

We were still in New Hampshire when we saw Marie’s tree video. The foot-thick trunk—we thought it was a tree trunk—had crashed through the next-door neighbor’s fence and crushed four ten-foot-long sections of ours. The broken branches extended half the length of the yard and twisted 20 feet into the air.

The Southeast is living the horror of Helene. Greenville County, S.C., doesn’t have North Carolina’s network of mountain rivers, which obliterated communities. The impression here is of numbness. The damaged and destroyed homes, the road closures, the massive stacks of debris, show the results of the collision of 70mph gusts and ten inches of rain with suburban landscaping.

Since we arrived here I said I wished the street had more shade trees. The subdivision was put up thirty years ago when builders leveled everything that grew. They left a few at the far end of the block. Many of those now are bent and broken.

We stared at what looked like two fallen trees. One appeared to be cut almost cleanly from its base, the branches extending into the tangled remains of our fence. The second, which leaned from the next-door neighbor’s yard, showed one end shorn off like a savagely amputated arm, the other end entangled with the first one.

The guy next door explained that we weren’t looking at tree trunks, but at two foot-thick limbs from a tree two doors down. The wind had ripped them from the tree and launched them across two backyards into ours. One was at least 40 feet long, easily weighing several thousand pounds.

He added that if it had blown north instead of west it would have crushed part of his house. The impact of limb on roof—no contest. We squinted at the towering tree two doors away. Two jagged gashes show where the limbs had separated from the trunk.

Hell broke loose here while we enjoyed our trip. At the storm’s end the internet was down, restaurants and gas stations, those that were open, couldn’t process card payments. Vehicles waited for gas in long lines, recalling the historic shortage of 1974. 

Traffic signals now are working. Supermarkets are open, although some shelves are empty. Schools are closed because buses can’t maneuver around mountains of debris piled along roads. Churches and charities are still handing out food and bottled water. Some residential neighborhoods are jungles. One block from our street a row of cypress has been mowed down. A quarter-mile of fence nearby has crumpled under the fallen treeline.

I shuffled through the yard picking up broken branches. The neighbor behind us, Jackie, waved from her side of the fence. “I’m sorry about this,” she said. “I’ve got a guy coming this afternoon to cut the stuff close to the house. I can’t get a regular tree service, they’re all overwhelmed. I’ll get him to take care of all this, if he can.

“The sound of the wind and rain last Thursday night was terrifying. I heard thunder, then crashing and popping, like transformers exploding. It was the tree limbs coming down. Then we lost power.”

I walked back to the house. It was sweet of her to apologize for a weather disaster. Our insurance adjuster said it was an “act of God.” No human being is responsible, not Jackie, not the guy next door. The fallen limbs had been alive. If they were dead the property owner would have been delinquent for not taking them down.

The Upstate news is that thousands of homes are still without power. The local utility reported another half-dozen subdivisions are back online. We drove past a field where giant machines were turning mountains of yard cuttings into mulch. The mulch piled at least fifty feet high.

Jackie’s guy, O.J., showed up with his chainsaw. He tore through the fallen limbs, kicking the cut stumps toward his truck. I lugged the clippings to the curb. Four hours later Mother Nature’s mess was picked up. Only the shattered fence pickets and spars remained.

We walked the block for a closer look. Across the street two huge full-growth trees were uprooted, one clipped the house. Behind a half-dozen homes trees slanted at crazy angles, down but not flattened. Down the street an entire hedgerow had been ripped out. And so on.

It was pouring rain when we flew out early last Thursday. The plane ascended into low clouds, which we now know was Helene’s advance guard. It rained harder in Charlotte. In Manchester, a thousand miles from Upstate, the heavens opened, the northern fringe of the monster. Then it was gone. Friday was clear and cloudless.

In winter we glance at New Hampshire weather reports and shiver. The mercury drops below zero, the snowdrifts pile up. The sundry store in Errol stocks racks of heavy arctic-capable insulated parkas, mittens, boots. We browsed, feeling the thickness of the sleeves and hoods, the face-covering balaclavas. You don’t see this stuff in South Carolina.

We left Errol invigorated by the crisp autumn air. On U.S. 16 we crossed the 13-mile woods, a stretch of thick virgin forest that bounds the wild Androscoggin River, passing “Moose Crossing” signs. We retraced our northbound route, through Milan, Berlin, Gorham, Franconia, Woodstock, Concord. Manchester was chilly, warning of winter.

Sure, they have power shutdowns, tree falls, and road closures up there. They know about winter. I’ve been telling friends that the Blue Ridge, as it inclines southwest from North Carolina into Georgia, protects northwest South Carolina from the hurricanes and tornadoes, the storm surges and torrential rains. Weather treats us gently here.

Then the act of God: we got ten inches of rain. Buncombe County, N.C., which is Asheville, and points east past Black Mountain, and north and west to East Tennessee got close to 30 inches. The torrents gushed down the mountains and across the Southeast piedmont. The rivers rushed through civilization. God is saying: Be ready. This will happen again.