DESTRUCTION OF MARSHALL
Over the weekend we drove into Marshall a couple of times. On October 2, Wednesday, I posted photographs that Susie sent me of the devastation in Marshall. But this time I got to see it for myself, in the intervening week much of the two feet of mud had been shoveled from the street and out of many of the buildings. Jamey’s second hand bookstore, where 250 of my photographic books that Jamey was evaluating had been buried in mud, along with 15,000 of his own books, was a shell of a building with the sheet rock stripped away. But the Asheville Jail Hotel and restaurant was standing and looked savable as did Zuma Coffee House which has seemed to me to be the center of town. But when we turned up the Main Street in the direction that the flooded French Broad River had roared down from Asheville, the buildings were simply gone.
The Depot, the old passenger station years ago, where on Friday evenings mountain musicians gathered to play their mountain music was gone, not leaving a trace. Lois Simbach’s house and studio where she created high fashion brought from her former home in New Orleans was scraped away leaving only a flat spot.
The post office was almost all gone. The local radio station in a train caboose was tipped over.
Joel, who owned and ran Zuma’s Cafe, lives across the river in an old cotton mill turned into upscale condominiums. From his third floor roof he looked across at Marshall and watched one building after another get ripped loose and carried down the river. At the other end of town was a huge pile of tree limbs with maybe 100 long white pvc pipes which had been washed down 20 miles from Asheville from the huge pvc factory on the bank of the French Broad River where they had been stored in high stacks, ready to ship. The horror of that night was just beginning to sink in.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 