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Letter to the Editor: Time for change! Jackie Warner runs for School Board District 4

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Tuesday, 08 October 2024

Written by Cynthia Lee

I have lived in Cumberland County and I have been a teacher for Cumberland County Public Schools for over 6 years.
As a teacher, my desire is for all students to be able to attend public schools that have a safe environment conducive to learning. This requires change and new ideas. With the election approaching, I decided to reach out to some of the candidates to hear their perspectives for change.
I recently spoke to Jackie Warner, she is the candidate running for School Board in District 4, my school district. I knew that she was the Mayor of Hope Mills for several years but I didn’t know that she used to be a teacher and a principal for Cumberland County Public Schools! As I spoke to Ms. Warner, I realized that she has a lot of insight into the present condition of the public schools and that she has the knowledge needed to help make the changes everyone desires.
Ms. Warner has a passion for students, a passion for parents and she has a passion for teachers! Most importantly, she has a passion to serve our community! I want everyone in district 4 to know that they should vote for Ms. Warner because she is a candidate who cares and who is ready to make a difference.

—Cynthia Lee, Cumberland County Resident

Meat Camp, neighbors fled rising waters, landslides

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Tuesday, 08 October 2024

Written by Ella Adams, The Assembly

The following article about the devastation in the small town of Meat Camp provided by The Assembly is an excellent report by Ella Adams. She describes Hurricane Helene’s massive carnage, and one family’s race for survival. This article describes the horrid devastation and loss of life currently being experienced by tens of thousands of people in countless dozens of towns and cities across Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee and Georgia.
It is the hope of this hyper-local community newspaper that our state and federal governmental response to this horrific catastrophe continues to be swift and effective. The health, welfare, and safety of every citizen should be America’s Number One priority.
—Bill Bowman, Publisher, Up & Coming Weekly

The creek rose fast once Helene hit—first four feet, then five. Twenty-three-year-old Abby Winkler had seen all she needed to before jumping in her brother’s truck Friday morning. Her family’s home sits at the back of the property, farther from the quickly rising creek than the other homes on her street. She headed out into the storm, hoping to convince her neighbors to come with her.
The mountain community of Meat Camp, about 10 miles north of Boone, was quickly becoming a scene of devastation. Floods, landslides, and sinkholes swept across the rural community of 2,300.
The Winklers had seen the creek rise to the road in previous storms, but nothing like this. It had been raining for three days before the worst of the storm hit Western North Carolina and the water consumed their yard and neighbors’ homes. By Friday morning, Abby Winkler said, she couldn’t watch any longer.
“My brother’s girlfriend looked out the window at the water and she said, if you’re going, you have to go now,” the Meat Camp native said.
Alone and plowing through the rising flood, she drove to her neighbors’ homes. She pleaded with one to evacuate.
“I looked at him and I said, listen, we can’t stop the water. It’s coming,” said Abby Winkler, a social worker in the area. Convinced to leave his home and belongings, he climbed in the truck with her.
Kristin Farmer and her baby were among the passengers on her first trip. She drove less than a half mile through more than three feet of water to get back to her house.
She returned into the raging storm for more people, this time accompanied by Farmer.
“You guys have to run,” she said she told her neighbors. “I drove as fast as I could and I could feel the truck shifting underneath me.”
Gina Winkler watched her daughter arrive home around 10 a.m. with the second group of evacuees.
“We were thinking she’s not going to make it,” the mother of four said. “But she made it through. I was never so happy.”
The Winkler house, where the four siblings and parents all live, became a refuge for some. Seven neighbors and their pets, plus seven Winkler family members, safely rode out the storm there.
Will Winstead said when the creek reached his front steps, he knew he needed to leave his brick home. The 2020 Appalachian State grad decided to evacuate when Abby Winkler knocked on his door.
He said the community is in disbelief.
“No one has seen anything like this,” Winstead said. “Some folks have all been here their whole lives. Some of them 60, 70 years and they just never seen anything close to it.”
The Winkler sons, Tyler and Caleb, serve as firefighters in the Meat Camp Fire Department. They were at the fire department during the storm. The firefighters trained for disaster response, but Helene was unprecedented. It was “chaotic,” Tyler Winkler recalled.
Since the storm, they have spent long hours at the firehouse, their days full with search and rescues, wellness checks, distributing supplies, and recovering bodies of people who died in the storm.
“It’s just catastrophic, there’s no other way to describe it,” Tyler Winkler said. “It’s nothing that you can put into words. It’s the once in a century flood our grandparents told about or something like that.”
Meat Camp resident and Appalachian State student Daniel Schweppe lost his home to the flood. He said he and his roommate narrowly escaped with a few belongings, driving to a friend’s apartment in downtown Boone before the creek’s surge filled their home and eviscerated everything inside. Their home was near Howard’s Creek, one of the Meat Camp areas most devastated by the storm.
“I feel like I ought to shed a tear, but it’s all been numb,” Schweppe said.
The roommates returned to what was left of their home on Saturday. Climbing over rotten logs and soaked debris to access the house, Schweppe stood in front of the ruined structure.
“And then I realized our neighbor’s house was gone,” Schweppe said. His next-door neighbors were out of town when a landslide hit, he said. The landslide missed Schweppe’s home.
Others on Schweppe’s road did not survive. A landslide early Friday morning annihilated a family home, killing people inside, including a young child. Two neighbors who asked not to be named said they saw the fire department recover the bodies. The fire department declined to comment.
The two neighbors pointed out a pile of debris that they said was once the home, now lying at the foot of the mountain. A child’s teddy bear was among the wreckage, soaked in floodwater and mud.
“People have told me that, ‘Oh, we’re so lucky or fortunate, or whatever,’” Schweppe said. “It’s not fair that we were ‘fortunate’ and other people, like our neighbors, lost their lives.”
Plots where homes had stood lay bare under the gray Appalachian sky. Meat Camp Creek bore scars of the flood, with tangled branches, home appliances, furniture, clothing, and debris strewn on its banks.
“We watched the creek turn into a literal river,” Gina Winkler, Abby’s mother, said this week as she watched as ATVs weave around car-sized potholes near her property, hauling water to homes up the mountain.
Now, Meat Camp residents, mostly families and a few college students, are left to pick up the pieces of their community.
From Boone, there is only one road in and out of Meat Camp. But after the storm, the bridges and the roads were impassable. So one neighbor used his personal excavator to make the road and two bridges passable in a single day, Gina Winkler said.
“I’ve seen neighbors I didn’t even know we had,” she said.
The road to rebuilding will be years long until infrastructure and homes in rural North Carolina are fully repaired, said Richard Hardin of Episcopal Relief and Development.
“Just love our community,” Tyler Winkler said. “That’s all we can do right now.”

(Photo: Intense flooding has caused dozens of holes to open up across the rural North Carolina community. Ryan Rudow for The Assembly)

Greek Mythology musings: Weddings ain’t for sissies

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Tuesday, 08 October 2024

Written by Pitt Dickey

Right now you are probably asking yourself why so few people hunt hummingbirds with sawed-off shotguns? The answer is that it takes too many hummingbirds to make a decent hoagie sandwich and a hummingbird with a shotgun could shoot back. Now, we shall move on to discussing why wedding nights can be fraught with unexpected issues.
Like most puzzlements, the answer to the question of troubled weddings can be traced back to Greek Mythology. That’s right, boys and girls, we are going to spend another 2 minutes of your life recanting yet another story from the Grecian Formula of life. Today we shall examine the tender star-crossed love story of the Danaids who were the fifty lovely daughters of Danaus the King of Libya.
Danaus had a twin brother Aegyptus who was the King of Egypt. Aegyptus coincidentally had fifty sons. Back then there was no cable vision so instead of binge-watching true crime shows, Royalty was into binge procreation of young ‘uns. Aegyptus wanted to be King of Libya as well as Egypt. He came up with a proposal to have his fifty sons marry Danaus’ fifty daughters which would ultimately bring Libya under his control. Danaus didn’t much cotton to this plan. The Goddess Athena then told him to build the first boat in history. Danaus and his daughters skedaddled on the Love Boat to Argos to escape Aegyptus. Unfortunately, his evil brother found out where the Danaus family were holed up. He showed up with an army and made Danaus an offer he could not refuse. Either the Danaids came out and married his sons or he would kill all of them.
Danaus chose life and the marriages were scheduled. Danaus was a crafty fellow. He had a plan to snooker his evil brother. Being the Father of the Brides, it was Danaus’ responsibility to pay for the weddings. He arranged a giant wedding feast with an open bar. There was a mighty hoorah of a party. Embarrassing toasts were given. Gossip was exchanged over the seating arrangements. The wine was flowing like wine. Drunkenness and loudly off-key karaoke singing split the night. A splendid time was had by all. The only fly in the ointment was that Danaus had secretly given each daughter a silver dagger and ordered them to kill her husbands on their wedding night. If you watched the Red Wedding episode of the Game of Thrones, you have an idea where this is going.
Forty-nine of the fifty Danaids obeyed Daddy’s orders. After their loutish newly minted husbands consummated their marriages and promptly fell asleep, they chopped off hubbies’ heads. The next morning the Danaids presented Danaus with forty-nine severed noggins. His oldest daughter Hypermestra did not kill her husband Lynceus as she was smitten with his good looks and because he respected her desire to remain a virgin. She warned Lynceus to escape during the night. In the morning, Daddy Danaus found out Lynceus had cheesed it out of town. He was mightily angry at Hypermestra for disobeying. Danaus put her on trial. The Goddess of Love Aphrodite herself appeared on Hyper’s behalf as a character witness. Aphrodite testified Hyper’s actions were made out of love and that no one should be punished for love. Hyper was duly acquitted.
Danaus now had to find new husbands for his daughters. Foot races were held with the winners getting to pick which daughter they wanted. It is unclear if Fan Duel was there to take bets. Eventually Hyper reunited with Lynceus and they lived happily ever after. For the other Danaids, trouble awaited. When they eventually died and went to the Underworld, a special punishment lurked. Breaking their marriage vows by killing their husbands, they were to wash away their sins in a special Rinse-O-Sin bathtub. They had to fill it with water from jugs from the local Underworld well. Naturally, there was a Catch-22 involved. The bathtub where they were to bathe had no bottom. The jugs leaked as well. No matter how many trips they made, the bathtub could never be filled. To this very day, the Danaids are still futilely pouring water into a tub that will not fill up.
So, what have we learned today? Unlike the 1950s TV show, “Father Knows Best,” in this case Daddy Danaus didn’t. His decision ultimately condemned his daughters to a fate worse than Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill, Prometheus having his liver eaten daily by an eagle, or a Presidential Debate moderator trying to fact-check the Former Guy. The Danaids are eternally fated to always have dishpan hands without the benefit of soaking them in Palm Olive Liquid. Now, your problems don’t seem so bad, do they? At least you’re not a Danaid.

Democrats got post debate bounce

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Tuesday, 01 October 2024

Written by John Hood

Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was likely to lose the 2024 gubernatorial election to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein before the September 19 CNN piece tying him to a series of grotesque posts made more than a dozen years ago on a pornography site.
In five September surveys of likely North Carolina voters taken before the story broke, Stein led Robinson by an average of nine points. A subsequent Siena College poll, done in partnership with the New York Times, included interviews on September 20 and September 21. It put the Democrat’s lead at 10 points.
As the general-election campaign unfolded, I never thought Stein could win by double digits. North Carolina’s recent history of competitive races for governor argued strongly against it. I still find such an outcome hard to believe, even though most of Robinson’s campaign team has departed and national actors such as the Republican Governors Association and the Trump campaign will be keeping their distance from now on. The electorate remains highly polarized, after all.
But if the Robinson candidacy — the vulnerabilities and risks of which I’ve written before — ends in a Josh Stein blowout, Republicans may be significantly hampered in their ability to compete for other statewide offices on the ballot this year.
The richest polling data on this question can be found in the Carolina Journal/Cygnal survey from mid-September. Across a wide range of races, it generally showed a pro-Democratic bounce after the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate on September 10. In August, the CJ poll had the presidential race at Trump +3.1 points. Now, it’s essentially tied at Trump +0.3. During the same period, Stein’s lead for governor grew from 4.4 points to 6.3 points.
Continuing down the ballot, the latest CJ poll has Democrats leading by at least a point in the races for state superintendent of public instruction (Mo Green +4.1 points), supreme court (Allison Riggs +2.5), secretary of state (Elaine Marshall +1.7), attorney general (Jeff Jackson +1.5), and lieutenant governor (Rachel Hunt +1.5). In most cases, their GOP opponents had slight leads back in August.
Republicans still enjoy modest leads in races for agriculture commissioner (Steve Troxler +3.2), state treasurer (Brad Briner +1.7), and insurance commissioner (Mike Causey +1.4). In two other contests, the candidates are separated by less than a point. For labor commissioner, it’s Democratic Braxton Winston at 41.3% and Republican Luke Farley at 40.9%. For state auditor, it’s Republican Dave Boliek at 38.9% and Democrat Jessica Holmes at 38.3%.
Finally, the poll poses “generic ballot” questions for Congress and General Assembly. Republicans lead in the former by 3.1 points and in the latter by less than a point.
With the exception of the gubernatorial and superintendent races, the spreads are smaller than the 3.99% margin of sampling error. More importantly, 15% or more of likely voters remain undecided in most of these matchups. With even the leading candidates polling in the low 40s, there is still plenty of “play” here.
Democrats could end up reclaiming a solid majority of Council of State seats. Or late-breaking voters could give Republicans a near-sweep of them. Election Day is still six weeks away. We’ll see many more political stories between now and then.
On second thought, perhaps “suffer” would be a more fitting verb than “see.”
A final note: some readers may feel disinclined to trust polling data from Carolina Journal, since its editorial page leans rightward. Naturally, as its founder, I don’t feel that way. But there’s no need to take my word for it. Over its long history, what is now called the Carolina Journal Poll has always attempted to model North Carolina’s electorate accurately. Survey research for public consumption is costly. If the results routinely differ from reality, the investment is wasted.
In the 2022 race for U.S. Senate, for example, the last CJ Poll gave Ted Budd a 3.8 point lead over Cheri Beasley. He won by 3.2. No other public poll was closer to the final result.

Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).