Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
I was twenty-five years old and living with my mother in Athens, Georgia when Robert Daniel offered me a job as the low man on a residential construction crew. Though my utility to him was limited to a valid driver’s license and the ability to speak Spanish poorly, I accepted. I had nothing else going on and I thought I might learn a lot from him. I told him that and, with a North Georgia accent like a gentle wind carrying the rumble of summer thunder, he replied, “I think you gon’ learn you need to go back to school.” As he was in many things, Robert Daniel was right. But before I eventually went back, he taught me more concrete lessons than I would ultimately find in the halls of academe, particularly the importance of choosing the right tool for the job.
On my first day, Robert took me to a hardware store where he bought me a tool belt and invited me to pick out a hammer. As I got out of his truck, he gestured at my new 20-ounce framing hammer, “When you know what you’re doing with that, we’ll add anutha’ tool to your belt.”
For weeks I hammered, building T walls and window and door headers when I wasn’t muscling stacks of lumber or digging holes. I went home dirty, worn blunt by good, honest, calculable work. I slept hard and fast and rose sore to do it again, barely noticing the weight of the steady additions to my belt; a speed square, measuring tape, pry bar, nail punch, razor knife, and chalk box adding up to something approximating competence. Increasingly I had, and was, the right tool for the job.
In the years since I collected my last paycheck from Robert Daniel, $242.00 a week after taxes, my skills have become about words and ideas, about trying to convey them in a way that will matter to you. Watching Hurricane Helene, I held my breath for friends and family in Florida’s panhandle, never expecting that the folks I needed to worry about live four hundred miles inland of sailboats and surfboards, to say nothing of mandatory flood insurance. I grew up in the foothills of the Blueridge Mountains. I have a lot of love for a lot of folks in Appalachia, folks now desperately in need of the right tools for an incalculably massive job. I feel useless in a situation where my abilities to run a chainsaw or the excavator Robert Daniel taught me “walk” on its spades twenty-five years ago would be of more use than my very questionable mastery of the semi-colon.
I hope to offer the Robert Daniel kind of help in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, friends already are. Jud Watkins, a brewery owner here in Wilmington, NC, headed west immediately after Helene wrecked Asheville, the home of craft beer in the eastern United States. Doug Keisewetter, a North Carolina citizen soldier, answered the call of a friend from Banner Elk, NC on day one and has been ferrying supplies from central NC to the mountains since. Kristin Smith saw a post I made on Facebook and six hours later coordinated the helicopter rescue of a family stranded on a mountaintop from her home in Ohio. She has not stopped since. Local, regional, state, and national charities and governmental organizations are working to make something tolerable out of something horrific. Most of all, the people of the region are doing what they are known for, taking care of themselves and each other. They are a proud, self-reliant lot.
The day after Helene, I spent three hours at a truck stop in Thomson, Georgia, staring at gas pumps inoperable without electricity and waiting for a cousin to bring me gas. I had failed to consider the lack of power along the I-20 corridor and become part of the problem. Sometimes, not contributing to the problem is help enough. And though sending money never feels like enough to me, someone given to doing something, when I ask about the right tool for the job, the consistent answer is cash. You can help by donating to any of the following organizations recommended to me by folks on the ground in Western N.C.: Samaritan’s Purse , World Central Kitchen, Team Rubicon, and The American Red Cross.
A career spent in crisis operations convinced me that emergencies require precise communication, feel free to email me at EAL @tombeckbe.com.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe
