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Listening Day_Zellner_Jim_Joyce_Mixed.docx
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Good morning. My name is Mark Coltrane and I'm here today with Jim Zellner and Joyce Zellner.
Great. Thank you Jim and Joyce. It is 1044 on September 20th, 2025 and we are recording this
interview at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The
interview is part of an oral history project documenting personal experiences and memories of
Hurricane Helene, which happened about a year ago. Thank you both so much for taking time to
share your story with us today. So just to begin with, tell us or tell me a little bit about
who y'all are and your ties to this area. Well, we came here 13 years ago and we live
four miles from Boone and four miles from Blowing Rock on a part very close to the Coma State,
the Bytrought Lake, so that we are our our property has Flannery Fort Creek going through it
and we have about a thousand feet of the creek bordering our property. And we came here and fell
in love with the area because it has everything we want for nature and peace and tranquility and
beauty and kindness and friendships and all the good qualities. Where did you come from if you
don't mind? Came from Florida, from the west coast of Florida in the Tampa Bay area.
Came up here to see the leaves change one fall and stayed a while. Okay, great. Good, well we're glad
you're here. So what do you what's your first memory of hearing about Hurricane Helene coming?
Not even before it got here, but what do you remember about? We watch hurricanes from the
very get-go. I can tell you where they are right now out in the Atlantic because I was born in
Florida. Joyce lived there for 40 plus years and we have been hurricane watchers forever.
But we also have family in Florida and so we watch the hurricanes. In fact, we have an app for a TV
station in Tampa, Florida that anytime the news is live we can watch it live on our TV up here. So
we tell them where the hurricane is when their power goes out. Nice, okay. So we knew where it
was coming along. And we also know that we get impacted by storms from the Gulf coming up this
way. So we were very aware that it had a potential to be here and we also were very aware that we
were very saturated. Our area had had so much rain and that was a concern and the Wednesday night
before the storm even hit we had a horrific electrical storm that hit our whole house
generator making it non-functional for the whole time of the storm and lasted six months because
we couldn't get someone to come and fix it because they were all busy. Yeah, I bet. We anticipated
the water level. We overlook a pasture that has our barn garage whatever in it and we actually
when we built it we built it up about four feet and we have had water from high water
times in the past up into the pasture but at peak probably six or eight feet lower than what it
actually did this time. And so knowing it was coming we we have a footbridge which is removable
and we removed it because we knew it would be high water just not knowing so we anticipated
some high water nothing like what we had of course. So that you lead into my next question
about any preparations you made when you heard the storm was coming so you removed the bridge is
there anything else that y'all did ahead of the storm? Well we had no idea we did not live in a
flood zone so we had no idea that we would be impacted by this but and we are going to have
companies so we had gotten our we call it a party barn and it's all tin and barn wood it's very
lovely and we've gotten it all set up for the party and entertaining and as we start to to see
the water coming in a little farther than we we have ever seen it before we rushed down to
roll up all the oriental carpets and raise it I don't know where we got the adrenaline. Every
barn should have an oriental carpet. Right we raised all of those carpets and they're
they're 14 by 14 carpets there's there's multiple carpets. We put them up on chairs
thinking that would keep them dry in case water seeped underneath the doors. Yes and so we were
thinking sandbags but we had no sandbags. Right and so then we went back up to our house after doing
all this preparation but seeing the water coming closer and closer to the barn Jim decided that
he would go back down with a car and turn off the breaker in the barn but when he got down there
the water was coming in so fast and so furious it was up to his knees at that point and if this was
tran all of this happened of the rise of the water and the leaving was about three hours.
And it rose 10 feet so that he got out of the car and he said I can't go into the barn it's
just too dangerous and he came back up and then we watched what was floating down including a truck
200 pound propane tanks, logs you name it. The neighbor slip bridge. Yes 20 foot dock you know
it was amazing to see all this and then all of a sudden the truck absolutely positively disappears
because it's wedged in our trees our willow trees along the creek and it disappears and we're just
watching this abundance of water swirling with all of its power and might going by with
and it was just frightening and then we went down because we realized the footbridge was not
at a level that was protected so the two of us. We went down to move further up the hill.
77 year old moved those scaffoldings again back up higher on the on the hillside but it was so
frightening to watch the power of the water because at the same time you had waterfalls that
were coming down on all the hills we had five waterfalls that were coming down trees were falling.
Did you experience any landslides or anything like that? Not directly. We lost a number of trees
but no and they all fell away from the house it was amazing up one of them fell uphill to be away
from the house and I scratched my head about that how that happened but it did. We were so isolated
at that point in time because there's three ways to get to our our neighborhood on Flannery Fork
and all of them were blocked and so there was no way to get in or out and most people didn't have
they had trees blocking their driveways so in the process of that afternoon and the next day we
were going around asking people if they were okay or and we had the lucky we were very lucky because
our neighbors have humongous equipment and they came and rescued us but the real significance
that I think that we experienced out of this was not just the fact that when the water receded we
were left with nothing but mud and the aftermath of the trauma to our personal belongings but it
was still not life-threatening stuff that we experienced. The real thing for me was two-fold
the isolation for a month because we had no internet and we had to once the roads were open
we could drive to Boone to get internet to let people know we were okay or to find out what was
going on anywhere and that was a select hour because you had so much to do back at your property.
So it was isolation but it was also then with the repair and the cleanup of all of this it was
too traumatic for me to deal with my stuff he could deal with the methodical cleaning and
which took well as you can see a year. Probably two thousand hours okay we both worked
equivalent of a half-time job for a full year we just finished in July and I want to be very clear
nothing happened to our house so we were extremely lucky everything that happened
happened to a party barn and things that were in that party barn were things that either didn't
go in our house or we didn't want in our house so the emotion around the flood for us was so
different than it had to be for people who lost everything who had a mud slide through their house
we were so fortunate and as Joyce said she had to get out and I was working on other people's stuff.
She was volunteering and going out and volunteering while I was sloshing around in the mud
shoveling it out. Our neighborhood was so great they they would tell us where to go so it went
down and helped with the first arrival of all the supplies coming from Winston Salem from Raleigh
at the Baptist Church so it was just the influx and it was overwhelmingly emotional to see how much support
we were getting but then another area was a house that had completely had been mudded
a landslide had gone through it I was delegated to go over and then just get trash bags full of
their belongings and wash them but I couldn't wash you can't wash mud in your washing machine
so we had the creek and I went back to the olden days of stones and the current to wash the mud
out of people's stuff including taking mud out of children's shoes and then letting them dry out
and then trying to use mink oil to rinse but you knew that this was a nice family that cared about
children because they had winter coats they had all this stuff and and it was amazing I could use
the fence posts that was left in our property once I rinsed them then you could put them on
the fence post to dry them out and then sometimes we use the power washer to do things once the
electricity was restored I think it was out four days for electricity well we had we had no water
is in the well we were on a well and our electricity was out it was interesting it
went out on that Wednesday before the Friday that it hit in our area and we camped we had a travel
trailer that was in the barn had three feet of water in it and I went down and got my little
Honda generator and brought it up to the house and so if the power goes out our generator's shot
we've got to be able to keep the refrigerator going well it would have been flooded if power
hadn't gone out that day but in doing that you just think back and say well what if this had
happened instead of that and so on you know one thing I thought was somebody said well what would
what would you do next time with your with your travel trailer and I said well I'm probably
parking under a tree little did I know it was the only thing we owned that was insured
and because it was insured I got a check from my insurance company that helped to pay for the
damage that we incurred I had already started stripping the inside of it and restoring I
bought it back from them but I still had money left over which helped us to pay for some of the
coffee because we had to take all the insulation out of the back out all the insulation out and of
course we called one of the salvage companies that does that kind of work and they couldn't get to
us we were down on the list there were people that had houses to worry about not barns and they
called us about three weeks later saying we might be able to come out next week and so thank god for
friends because we're way ahead of you we don't have mold and so forth and we were still physically
able to do it at our ages that first Monday after the storm power came on Sunday afternoon
so we had water and 400 feet of garden hose because we had a garden out in the pasture
that we used to run the garden hose to so we had enough garden hose to get down to the barn
to hook up the power washer too and it never starts it started on the second pull and we had
water and we on that Monday we hosed out we first of all we shoveled out with snow shovels all the
mud it was about two inches of mud we had 13 people show up several of them we didn't even know
they just came by and saw what we were doing and stopped and came in and and and just one little
girl we had a box full of champagne flutes oh yeah and dishes and she washed every one of those
dishes so that we could take them up and put her in the dishwasher wash them in the creek first
and then she brought them up to the house too but we had never met her and i guess she was probably
13 14 something like that and she was with her dad and they stopped and they just came in and
said what can we do and that's amazing yeah yeah and was it well compromised and a lot of people
it was not we lucked out the well was well it's about 800 feet deep so that's rare that it would
get compromised and it was also way up high about probably 75 feet of elevation above the creek
so we didn't have any problem with that fortunately and what do you remember
about the first maybe trip in where you could get cell or internet service
what do you remember about maybe talking to friends or family outside who were worried about
you can you remember can you remember any of those those conversations or any of the i just
remember how emotional it was driving in stop well we we both i mean she'd be online to
her children i'd be online to mine and so on and so forth and because they all heard about it
and but they had no idea that they knew where the area was but they hadn't heard nothing from us for
days you know when you say it was emotional because of the loss of connection or because
of what we saw around you or driving into town was emotional um going anywhere in the neighborhood
was emotional i think the walking down to sky valley um the zip line which is right across
from us we were worried about our neighbor down there because it's quite a ways down and when we
got down there we were just horrified to climb through a tree to try to get through to see him
then he was coming up but the man was so incredibly distraught because his entire road had gouges of
six foot deep trenches through there was no and he was nearly in tears at the time telling us he said
my business is shot there is no way that i can get this road passable he'd also lost two bridges
for his mountain retreat but our neighbors down the street had all this big equipment and i
saw them when i walked up and i said let's go to jacks and within a day i guess it was all
but it was those gullies were frightening to look at to realize the power of water
because the creek comes very gently by us normally and then it just keeps dropping and
we are not and that whole area that flooded is not in a flood zone but the bridge that goes across
has two eight foot diameter culverts under it to carry the water when the water is high
and they were totally inadequate and the bridge itself then became a dam and so the water came
and it just backed up behind that dam and you know it would have been a hundred years ago
it wouldn't have been there it would just washed on down it would have been somebody else
downstream that would have had the flooding problem and i think that's probably been true
in a lot of areas where people on that side you know the the upstream side of the bridge got
flooded that you know maybe it never would have happened otherwise but development happens people
i mean that's part of the difference i think in 1916 or 1940 is the number of people the number
of buildings and so on and so forth that are here now versus then yeah it's a big difference
so this is the obvious question and i have to ask i'm sure you've been asked it before
coming from florida and your awareness of hurricanes did you can you talk a little bit about
did you expect to experience anything like this here and and did you do you feel like i guess a
follow-up would be do you feel like you were maybe mentally or emotionally more prepared
having grown up and lived in florida for so long with the number of storms that you experienced
down there we have certainly experienced storms down there but nothing that affected us
i've got a little different perspective on it because i lived in lexington virginia in 1968
and i think it was 68 hurricane camille came through mississippi and if you look at the
history of nelson county virginia i think there's still 97 people who have not been recovered from
the same kind of a flood that we had here with hurricane haleen and so i knew what could happen
in the mountains when a hurricane came through with camille it was probably two feet of water
in 24 hours and but i didn't anticipate it but as it was happening i knew exactly
what one could have anticipated if you connected those dots but um i didn't have that perspective
because we had nothing i even debated on whether or not to pull the bridge up
i mean the bridge is a couple of walk boards they weigh less than 100 pounds a piece
but i debated on whether or not to even pull it up we did fortunately because they would have been
somewhere downstream and uh but um i think the thing that prepared us the most of all
in dealing with this was our camping because um you have some survival ideas of you have the
batteries you you have the the flashlights in our case we had a bat of the little generator that
saved us um but um and i've always filled up water tubs with water i'll always done those things down
in florida but i've never experienced what we saw as once the the community opened up
nothing prepared me for what the loss you'd have and i've seen loss in florida but it's all flat
loss it's not what you'd see here in the mountains where you don't expect this but you know the last
few years we've had in florida some serious flooding from hurricanes and we never growing
up in florida thought about flooding from a hurricane it was wind and and yet that seems
to be now the most destructive thing even in florida the floods seem to be the more destructive
how do y'all feel like you were changed by how when looking back over the last you know
nine ten eleven months now twelve months how much just coming i know when there's a storm i have
post-traumatic stress i do know that i i don't have the strength to deal with what we went through
as minimal as it was in the sense of no life loss no no significant material loss but there's still
financial loss but it's the emotions that are just raw to see so much pain that people have suffered
ours was so minimal and yet we felt it we're still dealing with it but to watch what other
people went through and then also to watch the generosity and the abundance people just
threw at us all it was overwhelming in all aspects whether it was the loss or it was the
abundance it was an emotional roller coaster still is i think about how long it's taken us to get to
the point where we can look at everything and other than fixing the section of the fence
for three sections of the fence maybe everything's back to normal we don't have a garden where we
lost the top soil but yeah it's taken a year and then you think about bat cave or swananoa or some
of the places west of here or the loss of life well that obviously but just in terms of where
they are in recovery there's they're still years ahead of them of what we went through
it's it's just hard to imagine what they're facing still yeah it seems like a fitting place to end
anything else you want to share before we shut off the recorder no but i'm thankful you're doing
this well thank you yeah i'm thank you thank you for sharing the ulcer experiences that's really
it's really helpful thank you thanks very good yeah
