We have the pleasure and privilege of hearing from one of our Gen Con staff members about how board games are an integral part of her life, especially during the extremely difficult time when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina last year.
Ash Freestone is our Convention Operations Specialist, who you’ll see running around Gen Con Indy, making sure everything runs smoothly. We appreciate Ash’s vulnerability and heartwarming love letter about how tabletop games helped her and the Asheville community during a very difficult time.
Trigger Warning: flooding, trauma, fear, hurricane
Hi Friends,
For better or worse, 2024 was a monumental year for me. I began by starting a new job with my dream team, a role that I have been building toward for nearly a decade. By spring, I celebrated a milestone birthday, found a family in a group of friends, and played games at every opportunity I could find. My summer was filled to the brim with the excitement (and anxiety) of organizing and attending my first Gen Con.
Then Helene came.
I have this immense privilege to tell you how proud I am to live in this part of Appalachia and how I found comfort and support in being a part of the Asheville tabletop community in the aftermath of a 1,000-year flood.
Friday, September 27, 2024, will be remembered as the day the planet attempted to wipe us from the map. This “perfect storm” was devastating for several reasons, which many scientists—much smarter than I am—understand better than I do. However, I’ll do my best to summarize what I’ve learned about the storm we survived.
Before Helene hit, our little part of the world had already received over a foot of rainfall, and our rivers were already full. We had lost power and internet throughout parts of the city the day prior. We knew that the worst was yet to come and that flooding would be imminent, but I can confidently say that we never expected the unprecedented damage that we were about to endure because no one living in the mountains of Western North Carolina or Eastern Tennessee prepared for a hurricane.
At 3:20 am that Friday, we received our first emergency notification for life-threatening flash flooding. I was already not sleeping well due to the anxiety of being an Asheville transplant and never having weathered a storm like this before. (My preparedness training had been mostly curated for blizzards, forest fires, and all the general mountain survival skills that I learned while growing up in Colorado.) I lay awake until the sun came, and then, by mid-morning, we lost cell reception. My fiancé and I spent the rest of that day playing games together – Set, Mancala, and the SpongeBob SquarePants Special Edition of Uno – and getting creative with pantry food. The day passed quickly for us, and we now know just how privileged we were to be blissfully unaware of all that happened that first day.
Saturday came around and we still didn’t have power, internet, or cell reception, and we also discovered that we no longer had running tap water. So, we went out hunting for answers. We slowly pieced together the gravity of our situation in the following days through daily radio broadcasts, community message boards, and talking with friends and strangers. While all those bits of information were helpful, the sheer weight of this tragedy didn’t fully sink in until we finally saw a part of the flooding ourselves. I now know that what we saw that evening, as we drove downtown to be with friends for the night, was a history-making record of 24.67 feet of water that engulfed our beloved River Arts District.
After being uplifted by friendship, warm food, and a night spent playing Hues and Cues, our next step was to gather resources. With $50 in cash and no ability to use debit cards during this outage, my fiancé and I spent our Sunday venturing out to find whatever we could. It was quickly evident that gas stations were out of fuel and so we hopped into line for Harris Teeter at about 8:30 am along with hundreds of other people. While I am no stranger to long lines with long wait times as both a convention-goer and a convention organizer, this felt different.
We managed to make line friends and helped to keep each other’s spirits up by playing guessing games and sidewalk Hangman over the four hours we spent waiting to buy water. While this camaraderie was like convention energy, this line didn’t buzz with the excitement or the frustration of anticipation. Instead, this line was tired, scared, and growing increasingly hungrier and more dehydrated as the minutes ticked by in the hot sun. If Liberty House Coffee and Café hadn’t shared whatever free food and beverages they had with us that miserable day, this story could have ended differently for us. Although we had to split two croissants and a small bottle of Perrier between us and our five friends, those little morsels of food and water made a difference that day. I will cherish the kindness of these businesses and those humans for the rest of my life.
In fact, we have continued to feel grounded despite everything we’ve gone through together through similarly profound acts of kindness and unity. We quickly went from a society of intermittent pleasantries to showing up for each other with chainsaws in hand to personally clear driveways and unblock roads, to lifting cases of drinking water and buckets of flushing water up hills and flights of stairs for neighbors, to sharing and pooling together resources, and generally just looking out for one another.
Between all these moments of support, I remember those weeks after the flood feeling oddly quiet in a loud sort of way. The city was almost silent when we went out to gather resources or check on friends and neighbors. It reminded me a lot of those eerie days we experienced during the pandemic, where you don’t realize how loud people are when they’re just outside existing and living their lives until life is interrupted in a big way. I often found myself questioning if everything around me was safe, but without having the ability to verify that information. To top it all off, it was additionally unnerving to see various tangible and intangible infrastructures fail throughout the city while having the constant backdrop of emergency sirens and flying helicopters. Everyone and everything was also filthy, without access to water for basic needs and sanitation. It felt strange and apocalyptic.
Once resources started to trickle in and we were able to find brief moments of cell and internet access, we were finally able to tease out the bigger picture. We had all banded together to provide what we could with the resources we had on the ground, but chaos had continued to fester. Decentralized and disorganized lists of missing people, delayed access to emergency and military resources, and massive misinformation continued to pile on top of everything else.
We also started to see Helene and Katrina used in the same sentence, and that was difficult for me to comprehend why at the time. I do understand why Katrina has become the comparison to what has happened here now, but I hope that people understand that both disasters were devastating in their own unique ways. Tragedy is still tragedy, no matter the details. We can hold space for both catastrophes.
In our case, Hurricane Helene dumped an average of 20 – 30 inches of rain onto Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, which is roughly 40 trillion gallons of water. Not only did our mountains and valleys act as funnels for all this water to pool, but it also caused nearly 2,000 landslides – which wiped out our cell towers. We saw water lift entire streets of homes and businesses from their foundations, erode massive chunks of roads, and claim the lives of 103 people in North Carolina alone (so far). The water and landslides were catastrophic, but we also sustained severe damage brought on by extreme wind gusts, which caused thousands of downed trees and various debris to cover our city. Hurricane Helene is the deadliest and most destructive hurricane to hit the United States since 2005. Even as a person who is actively living here, it’s startling to have to associate the two disasters together. This is a club I never wanted to be a part of.
The survivors of this geological event persevered through a massively violent act that has left us living with traumas that continue to be constantly present in our everyday lives. I want people to know that you can’t understand the power of community until you’re faced with ensuring each other’s mutual survival. We have endured a profound experience together, and I have learned that everything feels overwhelming when your sense of safety and security has been so deeply violated. I think it’s easier for people to comprehend people-on-people violence as just a “normal” part of human existence, but planet-on-people violence hits differently.
It’s hard to articulate how upsetting it is for the earth to look different, for places that held memories and meaning to just no longer exist, and for businesses that were built from grit and dreams to be left decimated. Lives and livelihoods were lost, and that knowledge feels debilitating some days. This event has forever changed my brain chemistry, and it has been challenging to swim my way back to reality through the mental fog this storm has left inside of me.
Although we were handed a smackdown from the planet, the united community response hit back harder, and that’s the part of this account I want others to take away. What we’ve come to experience since Helene is a communal feeling of relief, guilt, and gratitude for having survived this catastrophe together. It has also been grounding for me to know just how right we were about this place when my fiancé and I decided to lay down roots here. We have reaffirmed that while a home is a place, it’s also a community.
Months have passed, and I still wonder if any of this is real. What we have witnessed here has shaken us to our core, and this experience has forever changed us. If our kindness and selflessness can hold strong, though, I think we’ll be okay.
Hundreds of organizations and thousands of people showered us with countless acts of support. We were part of a faith so strong in our fellow humans that it held up against atrocious odds. And we now have a responsibility to move forward into the healing part of this process. Life is stabilizing. We will regrow and rebuild. In the meantime, we can continue to support each other, remember to put the bad moments aside and have fun.
When our world collapsed, and fear took hold, physical media reigned king. I saw people reconnect with each other in a way that reminded me of childhood. We found comfort in replaying classic board games, piecing together puzzles, storytelling, and connecting with one another. Our local board game café, Well Played, opened its doors despite not having power, water, or the ability to serve food and beverages to the community. But they had games. They did what they did best and became a respite from the madness of life. Well Played was already an Asheville gem, but their people reaffirmed how lucky we are to have them. I hope that more folks living here see this and remember to support them as they support us.
Games have always brought me comfort. They’re sometimes a way to escape and sometimes a way to feel challenged, but they’ve always been a way to bring joy. I can’t wait to be back in Indianapolis this August and to continue to do my part in bringing you a safe and successful con week. As we walk into organizing another rendition of our event, I hope you know that the team behind Gen Con sees this opportunity as an annual homecoming for tabletop gamers. We’re so honored to be a staple event in this community.
I vehemently hope you never have to empathize with what our Appalachian community has suffered. But if tragedy does strike, I hope that you’re the person who checks in on your neighbors, who drives across chaos to check in on a loved one, and who leaves handwritten notes posted in public spaces with information and aid resources. And most of all, I hope that you’re the person who offers space for anyone at your gaming table and that you hold space for unity through survival. Games foster connection and a chance to offer comfort and distraction in times of need. Gamers are a community, and it’s our duty to support and uplift each other.
Be kind, stay safe, and don’t let the hard days win.
With Love,
Ash Freestone
Convention Operations Specialist | Gen Con LLC
10th Level | Halfling Aberrant Mind Sorcerer (5e)