13: Strength in Togetherness: How Unity Transforms Communities

Those people who felt like they weren't doing enough because they could only get a broom and push water out of a basement.

Yeah.

You know, all they could do was something little like remove water or take a broom and clean up some light dirt. That freed other people up to do the bigger things, which then freed other people up to do the even bigger things. And so he really pointed out how it's like a pyramid where everybody, even if you're doing something little, is helping the person the next rung up the ladder free their time up to do something that might be a little more broadly beneficial.

Hi, I'm Paige Nolan. Welcome to I'll Meet yout There, a place where heart centered conversations are everything. Living what matters is the truest thing, and sharing the journey is the best. Hi everyone, and welcome back. Well, I intended to conclude this first season of I'll Meet yout There with 12 episodes and I decided to add one. This is episode 13 and I'm sharing it with y'all at the end of 2024 because I really wanted to close out this year with a message of hope and the power of connection and community. I had the chance to do just that with my guest today, a dear friend named Carter Wood. Carter lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and when I spoke with him after Hurricane Helene hit at the end of September this year, I knew I wanted him to join me on the podcast. I wanted to ask him about his experiences in his community during and after such a disastrous situation. I'm always curious to learn how people come together before we talk about the storm. Carter shares with us how he and his wife trom landed in North Carolina and why they decided to raise their two children there in the mountains. And then we get into the details of how the hurricane chaos impacted their neighborhood and the challenges they faced as neighbors. Carter knows how to be a good neighbor. I know this firsthand because we grew up on the same street, one house apart from each other, in a suburb of New Orleans called Old Metairie. We were born in the 1970s, and as kids we rode our bikes everywhere and played outside for hours on end. Carter's mom, Nada, would stand in the front yard and hit the triangle with the metal rod to let us know it was time for dinner. It was a really fun and supportive way to grow up. Our families have continued to stay connected through all these years. In our conversation, you will hear Carter and I share what this foundational experience of community meant to each of us. We also talk about resiliency, perspective, generosity and how even the smallest amount of help that a person gives can have a massive positive impact. Carter's kindness is comforting. He's just good people, as we say in the South. And if you're like me and you've been craving bright spots of hope these days, this is a great episode to restore your faith in the innate goodness of people and in our enduring ability to come together as a community. Enjoy this conversation with my dear friend Carter Wood. I want to start with you arrived in Asheville. Tell us actually how you even got to North Carolina and your initial connection to the community and how people live there and what it's like culturally and help us understand before we go into what's happened more recently.

Getting to my journey to Asheville, it was long in the making. It actually started my senior year of high school. I had visited my cousins in Arkansas. Two of them were rafting guides on the Pigeon river, which is on the Tennessee, North Carolina border. I came over with my 10 year old cousin. I drove from Arkansas to Pigeon Forge, spent two weeks riding the river every day, spent a weekend touring and cruising around Asheville, maybe for one night, fell in love. Fast forward 15 years later, I'm finishing medical school. Maybe 10 years later, but finished.

Where were you? You were in Louisiana at the time?

I was in Louisiana, so after that I do LSU undergrad, LSU medical school, LSU residency, and my future wife was in North Carolina and I was finishing up in Louisiana and I applied for jobs all around the state but wound up taking a job in Asheville in 2005, four weeks before Katrina hit.

Wow. Did you go back when Katrina hit, did you go back to Louisiana?

Not for a good year, No, I did not. They send everybody up. Matter of fact, a huge exodus of New Orleans moved to Asheville in the months after the storm. My daughter's pediatrician was a New Orleans transplant.

So when you get to Asheville, were you partnered right away with Traum or were you single? I can't remember.

We. I was single. We were not married yet. She still had a year, two years left on her residency and fellowship. And so in 2007, we moved back to Louisiana because the job that she wanted or had trained for was not available in Asheville. We moved back. We married in October. And In December of 2007, just two months later, I got a call from my partner in Asheville that said the job tribe wanted was open.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

And it was in that moment that we really made the decision that we wanted to raise our kids in the mountains. Away from the life we had grown up with. She still had family in New Orleans, I still had family in New Orleans, and we made the tough decision to raise them in a different community. It was to me, it was everything Asheville had to offer that wasn't available down there.

Tell us more about that. Yeah. What drives what Asheville has to offer?

It's the outdoors, for sure. People come here for the beauty of the surrounding nature. The town has a quaint feel to it, but it doesn't have any of the amenities, the culture, the music. It has it, but not on the level that New Orleans has it for sure. But yeah, I came here to be outdoors in nature and have not regretted it. I also came here to escape a little bit of the institution about drinking in New Orleans, the partying, the all nights, for sure.

Did you always have that connection to nature? I know you and I grew up outside and we'll talk about that later, but did you always have that deeper seated, like, connection to outdoor trekking and like hiking? Early on I did.

We had the farm. We had our farm in Mississippi. Now that was mostly deer hunting and stuff, but yes, it was outdoors. It was me and my buddies pitching a tent and sleeping outside and definitely enjoyed the outdoors. I went to camp in Country Lad in Tennessee for a month every summer with all my friends. So definitely grew up canoeing, you know, those types of activities.

So yeah, yeah. And then when you got there, was it easy to get involved in that world? Did you have a balance between, you know, life outside and, I mean, you're a young doctor. I have to imagine you're working a ton and your first home was in the mountains. This, this home that you're in now with your kids is this second home. Right. That you've.

Correct. This is down in the valley. We outgrew the first home, but absolutely easy to get into. My career was roughly seven days on, seven days off.

Okay.

So I would work really hard for a week and then I would play for a week. And I spent those first two years just exploring everywhere I could explore. Got myself a half decent mountain bike and.

Yeah, and a dog.

And a dog. I had two dogs. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

What were the people like and what are the people like? What's the question?

Wonderful.

Does everybody know each other?

Not to the extent. The way we grew up in our hometown, I think that has changed permanently in most communities around the country. Certainly still pockets of neighborhoods that are like Brock and Bro. But in the mountains, everything's much more rural. I lived in a Very rural community. Our immediate group of neighbors were all tied together by an hoa. So involved on that level, for sure, but definitely people helping people out. My first few winners being from New Orleans, had little knowledge of what to expect, how to freeze proof your pipes, and so definitely received a lot of counseling education from the mountain man that live there. And the community was great. It was, you know, talk about luck of the draw. I moved to Asheville from New Orleans and my next door neighbor's dog got loose. One day I find him. I call the phone number. He tells me, nah, don't worry. I went out of town for two days. He's got enough food and water. Just let him roam. So I take care of the dog. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's. I love the dogs. Didn't have fences where I first.

Yeah, that's how we grow up. Yeah.

But he gets back home and he's a Widespread Panic fan. He's an Alabama fan. We have immediate things to connect us right off the bat. He's still one of my best friends in Asheville.

I love it. It's so cool. I love things like that. Meant to be. 19 years old.

Meant to be. Yep.

So did you have a sense when Helene was coming, when the storm was coming? Is this part of the culture with Asheville, to, like, prepare for a storm like we did growing up? Okay, so tell us, tell us. You get the news and you're in your community. You have your hoa, you have your connection to your enclave. So did you feel prepared? Were people surprised? Were there warnings?

Carter Wood 9:54

You know, it's funny, there were definitely warnings, but I think you could tie some similarities to Hurricane Katrina, because if you remember, I mean, 72 hours out, there were plenty of warnings, but it was only within the last 24 hours that it swelled up to the Cat 5 and caught new Orleans by surprise. Obviously, the levee failure was its own thing, but, yeah, I would say it was the same here. There was definitely three days. Heads up, storm is coming through heavy rains. They did talk about the weather sort of parking over us for a full 24 hours.

Yeah.

And Thursday evening, the first band of weather came through, and, no, we knew it was coming, but we were not at all prepared for the volume of water that was going to come through the creeks and the streams. My wife and I, we actually got haircuts and took the kids to dinner that evening and both went home on nearly empty gas tanks in our cars. I mean, this simple stuff. And, you know, we did survive. I would not say that what we did was irrational. But no, we did not prepare. We did not.

And did it rain all that night? Like did you wake up to it flooding?

Yes. So we knew the first band was going to come, there was going to be a break. We put the kids to bed that evening thinking that they had school on Friday morning. At 4:15am or so, our generator kicked on. We have a whole home propane, automatic start generator, it fires up. So I know the electricity has gone out in the neighborhood, sleep for another hour, wake up. And at 6:15, 6:30 I left the house in my car because my neighborhood has to cross a 80 foot single lane, steel girdered bridge. Been there for what, 40, 50 years probably. And I wanted to see if my wife could get off for work. And in previous heavy rains, the fields out where my bridge are have flooded multiple times over the last 10 plus years I've lived in this home. So it's not unusual to see water outside the creek in these expansive fields that are right along Cane Creek. But when I got to the bridge, there was two feet of water on the roadway leading up to the bridge, which I had never seen before in all the previous floods. And so I stopped my car, I walked up towards the bridge realizing I was in a current of 18 inch deep water. And I was like, if it's this deep here, I know it's 36 inches of water on the far side of the bridge. And there's no way my wife's getting to work through this bridge.

Yeah.

So I drive home and the morning was very chaotic. I get home and at, you know, 7:00am and prior to leaving I had checked on my basement downstairs. I get home and my wife says, you need to check on the basement. It looks like it's flooding outside. And so I go down and in only the half hour I was gone, I now have a inch of water in not my finished basement, but an unfinished portion that I garage door to the elements. Oh wow.

So yeah, you're realizing.

Yeah, yeah, it's happening. And so we're cleaning that out and quite immediately a neighbor comes and knocks on our door at now 8:30am and says, can you come to my house? My wife fell while walking the dogs and I think she's hurt her wrist. Yeah, I'm the doctor in the neighborhood.

Yeah.

And so I give the mop to my wife, she starts cleaning out the basement.

Yeah, I love that image.

So I walk down to my neighbor's house and his wife is sitting in the living room chair with her wrist already in a Cock up splint that her husband had prepared. And I touch her fingers, they were cold. She had cap refill, but it wasn't super reassuring. And I didn't even remove the splint. I just kind of gently touched her hand and she, you know, lit up off the chair.

Yeah.

And my immediate thought is I'm not an orthopedist. I know you need an X ray. It's probably broken.

Yeah.

I'm not reassured by, you know, these cold white fingertips. We need to get to a doctor asap. So me and the husband get in the car. Mind you, it's been two and a half hours now since I first went to the bridge.

Yeah.

And we drive out at maybe. Yeah, it's 10:30ish am so maybe a little longer. And we get to the road leaving our neighborhood and There are not one, two or three, but there are five 80 foot tall trees down across the road, 70 inch around trunk.

Yeah.

Right where I had parked my car to get out and walk through the water to see if the bridge was open. Like. Yeah, the timing of it. I could have been crushed by one of the trees where my car was parked. And at that time, there are already two neighbors with chainsaws. The rain is at this point letting up. The storm is over. The sun is starting to come out. And we walk up to the two neighbors who are chainsawing to let them know my neighbor's been injured. We need to get to the ER as soon as possible.

Yeah.

And as we're talking to them, our bridge separates from its foundation and just makes this classic sound. And you can see it sort of turn cockeye in the water flow. It was an amazing amount of water.

That we through there. And the reality of now, there's no way out. Right.

There is a back way. So there is no way out through that neighborhood. We have had experiences in the past where we've done bridge repair work where it'd be out for 12, 18 hours a day or two. And so there is a exit through a private. Two private properties, through their driveways, over a hill, around the backside to another road where there's a state bridge. We don't know if that bridge is good or not at this point because mind you, when power went out at 4:15am Cell phones went out. And when we awoke Friday morning, there was no cell phone, there was no text messaging. The only way to talk to your neighbors next door was to walk next door and talk to.

Isn't that a message for 2024? It was get out of your house and go talk to your neighbor.

It was like having your mother's on the only landline phone talking to each other for hours, and you had to walk over and find out if you had milk because they weren't going to get off the phone for you.

Our insane entire childhood.

So true.

So do you guys immediately go into problem solving mode? Is there a group dynamic that emerges? Like, is someone the leader?

Yeah, I would say it was multiple leaders. We have a neighbor who owns the private driveway that we had to get through. It just so happened that it all worked out because people were out of their homes trying to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. This landowner comes up and says, hey, can we get out your way? It's flooded. On my side, we tell him, hey, our bridge just went out. We're not getting out of here from months. And he says, all right, let's go over, because there's trees on my drive that we're going to have to eventually clear to even get over to see if this other bridge is. It wasn't all chiefs, no Indians, but it was more of a democratic solution, making everybody chipping in. It got a little hectic at times. I did. There's one specific memory I have of that day was I got my chainsaw. My kids are there. Yeah, there are six adult men, all with chainsaws, all working on this. It was a group of three trees, probably they were 80ft tall. They had fallen all together in one hot mess. And all six of us are working on at the same time. And I did stop. I paused and I said to myself, this is too much. There has to be more organization. So I backed up, I stopped. I waited for these guys to all finish up, and nobody got hurt. Everybody did well. But yes, it was definitely a situation of neighbors helping neighbors, people coming together, getting. Because it was just one step at a time, there wasn't. It was really hard to have a longitudinal plan of what to do. No text messaging, no alerts from the city. All you knew was what was the next task in front of you.

Yes. When you really can do that, when you can focus on just the task in front of you, it's so gratifying because you're not dealing with all the other bullshit.

You don't have to like my work. What about my work? It doesn't matter. I can't get there until this tree gets removed. So it does allow you to get rid of the fluff that stresses you. If you're capable of putting it aside. And just focus on the task at hand.

Yeah. Did you see neighbors step up in unexpected ways? Generosity beyond what you had seen in the past?

100%. We are a beautiful neighborhood, We're a friendly neighborhood, but we are not a connected neighborhood in the sense of what I remember. We all know each other. We don't hold a block party the way we did. Now, I'm not here to toot my own horn or anything, but being a nucleus type of a person, an enneagram, too. I throw a crawfish spoil every year. I invite all the neighbors every year.

You're relationship oriented, to say the least. Friends and family. Yeah. Rule your life.

Yeah. So it hasn't been every year, but over the years, I've had enough of these crawfish boils where people come, they get together and they get hang out in a general, relaxed sense. And we have a new neighbor that's been doing this as well since the storm that's had get together. It's coming up this Sunday, as a matter of fact. Yeah.

Yeah. And so how did you guys get out of the neighborhood? Did you have to go around to one of those other properties?

Yes. So we had to go through these other properties. We chainsaw through those trees. There was then a mudslide to get through on the other landowner's driveway, and that required heavy machinery. These particular neighbors happen to own the heavy machinery that they needed. And so it began a process of. I think the neighbor put it succinctly when he stated, those people who felt like they weren't doing enough because they could only get a broom and push water out of a basement.

Yeah.

You know, all they could do was something little like remove water or take a brim and clean up some light dirt. That freed other people up to do the bigger things, which then freed other people up to do the even bigger things. And so he really pointed out how it's like a pyramid where everybody, even if you're doing something little, is helping the person the next rung up the ladder free their time up to do something that might be a little more broadly beneficial.

Yeah. That really sticks with me because I feel like that's an invitation for all of us. And I often get stressed out that I'm not doing enough. I am also an enneagram too. Carter Wood. You know how that goes.

Yeah.

And so my impulse is to give or have the relationship be harmonious and do all the things to please, please and contribute. And I think sometimes it gets overwhelming because it's like, well, I really can't give that much, whether it's financially or time wise. And so it's easy for people to then withdraw or overthink it or not feel completely like joyous when they're doing it because it's like. It's just this, you know. So I think that's the. I love that your neighbor brought that up because it's so true. Whatever we can contribute on whatever level, it really does connect with what somebody else can give.

Yes.

And so you're all working together then. How long does it take for you guys to have a.

36 hours. 36 hours, yeah. So we were able to get the road cleared enough to the other state road that we could get out from. But on Friday, the day of the storm, the water was too high all the way through that evening to exit. It was an unbelievable volume of water coming down cane creek, 8ft higher than I think I've ever seen it before during previous.

And no rain. How does it. How does it drain? There's no rain for the next few days, I'm assuming.

Correct.

And then it. You have your natural draining outages in place?

Yes. For our creek, it drains into the French Rod River. And it was interesting because mountain weather is very common for you to leave your home and it's absolutely storming and Cloudy and drive 10 miles to your daughter's soccer game. And it's a beautiful day, you know. Yeah, it is. That is mountain weather. And so these pockets of rain that came down didn't hit the whole area, it hit in different pockets. And whatever watersheds those areas funneled into is where the worst damage was, which is why Swannanoa river took the brunt of the damage and destruction. Whereas the French Broad river, that runs. It's funny because the French Broad runs south to north through Asheville and everything past the Biltmore estate was relatively okay. But then where the Swannano river funnels into the French Broad and then proceeds through downtown Asheville near the River Arts District.

Yeah.

Total destruction and devastation.

Wow.

20Ft of water running river water through these areas that move buildings off their foundations and yeah, it's.

And I imagine closed all those businesses. Definitely. Like, is that area ever going to come back?

There will be somewhat of a shuffling of the deck. I'm not an economist, I'm not in city planning and all I do read the paper I keep up and I know that New Orleans. But, you know, I mean, it's like this shirt. Rebirth, right?

Yeah.

Everything happens for a reason at some level. And through destruction, there can always Be rebirth. And I believe that these areas will come back in some fashion. I believe that people have resolve, even those who don't choose to. They have this will to survive. I think that all given on some level, yes.

It's an instinct. I found that because I lived in New York City during 9 11, similar to you. And when you mentioned earlier about not having the gas tank full, even though something's coming. We didn't know 911 was coming, obviously. But I was in my apartment and I had the Today show on and I saw the plane hit. But you. From the image on the television screen, it just looked like a private plane to me. And that's what a lot of us thought like, oh, it was off course or whatever, and your mind just doesn't fully process it. And I continued to go throughout my day. I was in graduate school at the time, so I'm like, I should walk up to Columbia. The subway stopped running. But I didn't think anything of that. I was like, oh, okay, the subway's not running. I'll just take a long walk. And it's like, your brain doesn't compute right away. How to adjust to, like, the new reality. And then what I found in the days after 9 11, which I'm sure if there are listeners who were there, they would agree with me. It was the most powerful of experience of community that I've ever experienced. It's. People have a will to live. It is natural and instinctual for us to. To show up for each other. We're hardwired for life. So I agree with you. There is a rebirth, and it happens immediately. You're. Even though you're in the aftermath of all that change and heartache, you're watching your small business close its doors indefinitely. And yet there's all these things. There's all these solutions around you and people to meet and collaboration, and I don't know. I find it very inspiring.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So who did show up for y'all? Was there. I know I was watching the news thinking, okay, why isn't Asheville getting more attention? But we were in a political season, and as I mentioned earlier, I don't always watch the full news, so there was some coverage that I didn't see, but it felt like it happened and we kept moving, which is why I wanted to have you on and learn more about what your experience was. How did people show up right after? And was there help from other organizations?

Absolutely, there was help from other organizations in this sense of who showed up. I would definitely say the iHeartradio station. And maybe. Yeah, that's a factor of the national news is.

Yeah.

Too big. It's got too many inputs. There's always something dramatic happening. It's terrible what happened in Asheville, but the Ukraine war, the Israeli war, you name it. There were other storms, There was a hurricane and Florida just a month later. Not even a month later. So that doesn't rub me wrong one way or the other with the national media, but our local media did show up. And the iHeartradio stations, there's four or five of them in the Asheville area. I had never listened to them once before this.

Yeah.

Really? I mean, I take that back. I do listen to wncw, which is like their wwoz. Yeah, yeah. So I listen to all signs. Yeah, yeah. But they showed up with 24,7 on air coverage of people phoning in, whether they be local people once they had cell service or people around the country wanting to check in on local loved ones.

Yes.

And it was amazing. Amazing what they made happen. People would call in from California saying, hey, my grandma over in Black Mountain lives at XYZ Black Mountain Road. I haven't heard from her. Can somebody check on her? And literally within an hour, 15 people would show up at this woman's home wanting to know if she was alive and well and call back into the radio station. And so that mechanism was the glue to keep people's nightmare scenarios tamped down. Where is my loved one? Are they safe? Or. I need this thing. I need a chainsaw. Because some. A tree fell across my road and I can't get my car out. Can come out of some. Help me chainsaw this. And it started the KISS Country Chainsaw Crew. Five guys that were not chainsawers before Hurricane Helene. It organically occurred over 10 days. These five guys would just show up all day long at people's houses and chainsaw trees out of their driveways.

The best.

Just amazing. There are people out there. I mean, I think we all. You mentioned earlier, how do I contribute? I can only give a little bit of.

Yeah.

A little bit of time. And I think to myself, how can I contribute? And then you have these people come along that, you know, I don't know where they are in their personal lives that they can just uproot and come to Asheville for a month to chainsaw trees off of people's houses. Totally fact that people do that still. It just keeps me going with what little able I'm going to do. You know, if he did that, the very least I can do is call in, you know, and. And help a person, Which I think.

It's totally like a shot of hope for humanity. It's like whatever is coming down the pipeline, that we have no idea what's happening, how fast our world changes, how unpredictable it is, you know, how much tension there can be. And then you have that. You have like guys show up with chainsaws. You're like, okay, we're gonna be okay.

Right? Yeah.

I did what I could contribute, which is kind of laughable if my husband Boyd listens to this episode, which he may or may not. Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't. When all the footage of Hurricane Katrina was on the television, the dogs being trapped on the rooftops is what really crushed me. But I did not go to New Orleans. I was like, I cannot go in that environment. I feel like I would be more of a problem than part of the solution. Because I would be anxious, like overwhelmed. Yeah. And emotional. And so we rescued a dog, and he wasn't. He ended up being so in love with that dog, Farley, a German shepherd mix. But he was not ready for a second dog. And I was like, oh, we're going to go get a second dog. Because look at the television and all of these stranded dog. So that my contribution was adding a rescue animal, a local rescue animal to our family. But to this day, he swears that dog is like the number one dog in his heart. So it was.

Oh, that's very sweet. Yeah.

So did the hospital have much impact around this? Did you see more patients, less patients? Did the hospital community do anything specific? And I'm not even sure where the hospital is in relationship to where.

Yeah.

Challenge was.

I'll answer that twofold. Because I have recently transitioned jobs. I went from the large 700 plus bed hospital in town to the VA hospital here in Asheville, which is a smaller operation, but both of them were affected by power outages, water outages. And so quite immediately, that's uncomfortable for the patients. You're running on backup power. You don't have your H vacs on. They're handing out little 12 inch fans in the room to try to keep people cool, especially your people with respiratory problems, things like that. Because it was September, late September, early October, So not terribly hot in the mountains, but warm enough. The nursing staff likely had to stay in House for 72 hours, sleeping in rooms, pulling probably longer than their usual 12 hour shifts. I was not. If I had been working at the time of the storm, I would have been one of those Potentially, yeah. Sleeping at the facility if I had been able to get in. However, I was not. That was just the luck of the draw for me. I mentioned at the top of this, I'm seven on, seven off. And so after four days of doing what I could to get my house in order, I did go back to the hospital for my seven day stretch, taking care of the patients. Definitely more people in house than needed to be because you couldn't get anybody out. All the brakes got put on discharge planning. And I, you know, I had a. One beautiful moment. I had a veteran on my service that was basically. By the time I got to him four days after the storm, his acute illness had resolved. He had been ready to go home. He lived in a very small community about 30 miles south of Asheville, unaware if he had water, power, this or that. It turned out that this particular patient knew a friend of mine through his professional work 20, 30 years earlier. I even wound up doing a selfie with them, sending it to my friend. They talked to each other through my text message because they hadn't communicated in 15 years or more. So establish a connection. And you used the iHeartradio mechanism to find out if this veteran's house was in good enough shape for him to go home. Made a phone call, got somebody to call me directly through the radio station.

Yeah.

And I put those two people on, the patient and this person on the phone together. And it turns out the guy that called me knew my patient's next door neighbor and they talked about the house and this and that and it all worked out and the patient got to go home knowing that everything was set up.

Yeah. It's just that little extra effort to go and do something extra for somebody, I think is so powerful. And I think one of the reasons I'm moved by it also is because we have the opportunity to do that without a hurricane, without a terrorist attack, without the big event. I think it's just so important to remember when you have a third thing that enters the scene, it's not just you and me. It's the third thing, it makes people come together in, in such a beautiful way. And I think so often we forget that the third thing that we have every day, anywhere is just the threat of disconnection, the threat that we all face of feeling isolated or alone, which we know is a health problem, which we know is an epidemic in our country. I often think in my neighborhood, if aliens started walking down the street, not friendly aliens, because hopefully there are friendly ones, but if not friendly like Dangerous aliens start walking down the street. What would happen? How many people would work together? What would we do? And so to look up and make eye contact with people and know where people live and be interested in helping in these little tiny ways. I love that. Just checking on that guy's house, that probably meant everything to him. Don't you always love to go home? Like, I hate the feeling of like having to be somewhere and then the place that he has to be is a hospital. You're like, no, I want to go home.

Yeah.

So tell us about your kids. Like, what was your parenting move during this? What did you get them involved? Did you try to protect them from that? Were young people involved?

Carter Wood 35:46 - 36:14: Yes, absolutely, I tried to get them involved. That is harder than you think with a 10 and a 13 year old. 11. 11 and 13 year old actually turned 11 technically, right after the storm. I tried to parent through quotes, little snippets. So, yeah, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Was definitely one of the things I was going with getting them out there to do little stuff with brush. For example, my son loves. We have a one wheel, one of those skateboard things.

Yeah.

So I want him to clear the debris off the road after we did all the chainsawing. So I set him up, he gets the one wheel, he gets the electric blower and he goes out there and he's blowing the roads off just to brush. It's small, but it makes things look fresh because look good, feel good type thing. My belief is the better your community looks, even in the sense of the amount of destruction was overwhelming what was around us. And so, yes, I encourage my children to get outdoors, see what they could do to help other people.

Yeah. And I just think that look good, feel good, it shows that you care about the natural world. Like just the actual environment I think is so important to revere because like you just live through it can change. How do you feel about witnessing people's resilience? And I know in your life, I know from knowing you and even from this little bit that we've talked about the natural world, actually that part of the places that you go to feel stronger, to feel resilience in your life is nature. Do you feel that you've witnessed how people rise? I know you work as a doctor, I know a lot of your patients get out of the hospital. You've chosen that aspect of, of medicine for that reason. You want to see people healthier and go home. But tell us about. Yeah, any, any experience that you've had either in your own life or just in the community. Like as a group, watching people rise, watching people be strong.

Sure. Resilience, yeah, it's certainly a big part of life. There are times where you can choose to be resilient or choose to, to not be resilient. And certainly, I guess theoretically this is one of those times. But when you don't have a way to get out of your home and your community. I think there's a lot of us felt like we didn't have a choice. We had to be out, we had to be working, we had to be connected. We didn't have our cell phones to reach out to others for help. And so the resilience of my immediate neighborhood was excellent. It was people knocking on each other's doors, checking in, are you doing okay? We do have one neighbor who is a little bit disabled and wasn't going to be able to do all the things he needed to do. And the neighborhood rounded up food deliveries to him while power was out and making sure that at least somebody was checking on him two or three times a day. So in the immediate sense of my neighborhood, the resiliency was something that we felt we didn't have the choice to do. And we all worked very well together. I think the community at large has a strong sense of resiliency. The this is, we're just off the Shenandoah Valley, but these are mountain folk. They've got it in their DNA to live off the grid, off the reservation and fend for themselves and the community. The sense of community was very strong. I think where the lack of resiliency comes into all of this is something larger than just a storm. But America has a bunch of creature comforts. Yes, we all have things going for us that are better than most people in the world. And so when things don't go well, some people maybe they feel like they have a choice to not be resilient. And I think they turn to complaining. There were a lot of complaints about female not doing enough, fast enough, not being organized enough. And I heard the complaints. I don't agree with them necessarily. I think the whole thing's in the moment of the day in and day out of that first week or two after the storm, there was a lot of chaos. And even though I heard these murmurings of FEMA this, FEMA that, a FEMA truck showed up at our bridge within seven days of the storm, I want to say yeah, and carted off a 80 foot long, 10 foot wide steel girdered bridge that had to have weighed 300 tons.

Yeah.

You know, it took him three days to cut it up and haul it off. But I didn't call FEMA and ask him to do it.

Right.

Just came and did it. And so you have to have some patience. You have to give time. You have to just start with sweeping out your garage and mopping the floors because you're doing the little things, while other people give it time for people to do the bigger things.

Yeah. And it's perspective. We have our ornaments in boxes, and we don't have a lot of storage in our house. We use every inch of our home, and we have flipped the garage to be Boyd's office. And above his office space is, like, enough space for a few boxes. And so I'm climbing up there, and I'm. As I'm climbing up there and I'm moving all the boxes. I'm thinking to myself, we don't have enough storage. I wish we had a bigger house. Or I love our house. But just like, space wise, our ornaments get kind of dusty and crammed in there because it's not like. Well, first of all, I'm not super type A organized, but also, it's all kind of shoved in there because it's so limited. And as I'm pulling the boxes out and I'm passing them to my daughter Mimi, she literally says to me, God, we have all these boxes. This is amazing. She's like, you keep all those boxes up there. And she loves our Christmas decorations. And she's like, opening the tops to the boxes, and she's like, I can't wait to go through all this stuff. I love our ornaments. And it was exactly at the same moment that I was thinking, it could be nicer, it could be more organized. Half of our ornaments are, like, chipped because I haven't wrapped them properly. And they're like, nice delicate, or it's like, she loves elephants, and we pulled out the elephant, and two of the legs are missing, and she's like, no worries, no worries. Let's put the elephant on the tree.

That is so funny.

But it was literally, like, two perspectives colliding.

It shows you how kids speak the truth, you know?

And it shows me how entitled I am in that minute. I just love, like, kids don't have.

The baggage that we have from our whole life. No different.

Who cares, Paige, you do have storage. Like, you're actually clean. That's what you're doing. You're on a ladder getting boxes out of storage. It could be a lot worse, right? Could Be on top of the clock. I love bringing that forward because that's all of us. That's all of us have the opportunity to do that, reframe. Where do you find the strength in your own life because of how relationship oriented you are and how generous and giving? I mean, you have to show up for patients. You work as a physician, which I always think is such a unique path. Is it your faith? Is it nature? I mean, I kind of put those words in your mouth. Is that a part of where you go to restore your faith in humanity or just what you can give, replenish?

So I'll start with, say, my family more so than my faith. I get a lot of my recharging my batteries through my family. Being a nucleus for a lot of the vacations that we plan and the organization that goes on. That is a huge factor in my life. Both my immediate family with my wife and kids, but certainly the extended family on her side and mine would be a big part of it. I think my work, for sure. Yeah. You mentioned I'm a physician. I chose hospital medicine. My career has been in more acute care, where somebody comes in with acute medical illness. They spend three to five days under my care. They're better when they leave. They get more information about their illness. I send them on the path, hopefully improve. That's the goal at least. So being enneagram too, I receive a tremendous energy boost from that. Yeah, those two things. And then certainly nature and exercise over the last five years or more have been a bigger part of my life than they probably were when I was younger. Yeah, I definitely get out when we travel. I exercise before the kids wake up a lot. And so that'd be another huge one for me.

Yeah. What do you cherish about your family of origin? Like when you say family and you say, okay, of course you've built this amazing family because you had a very strong sense of family growing up. When you think about your Brockenburg days, which is the name of our street, which our listeners might have already picked up on our childhood homes, which your family lived for like, what was it like 40 years before your parents moved to Texas.

Yeah.

What do you cherish about that as a foundation for your life?

Yeah. The beautiful dysfunction. Right. Skeletons out of the closet. We are dysfunctional. Right. Aren't we all? Certainly. We talked about resilience earlier and talking about the loss of my brother Hunter, who took his own life eight years ago.

Now when I think about what I cherish about being neighbors all those years, especially our mother's deep friendship and love for each other. Family connection, for sure. But our mothers being very, very dear friends and witnessing how they leaned on each other through some of the harder years of their life was such a foundational relationship in terms of role modeling. Like, seeing that kind of support. And then I think just the togetherness of it all, like you mentioned earlier, running back and forth to see who has the butter, who has the milk all the time. We were always out of those things and just running through the house, nobody knocking. And the beauty of togetherness, like, you're all in this together. And so much of life is like waiting at the airport for a delayed plane. You know, like, there's so much about life that is, like, boring or annoying or irritating or, in your words, dysfunctional. Like, relationships are dysfunctional. And what you say to each other, what you don't say to each other and the history of family and all the things that come out, just the lineage of all those hurts. And then you're just in it together, and it's really, really funny. And the dog jumps on the counter and eats the turkey. You know, like. And that's what everybody talks about for the next 20 years. Can you believe Speckles ate the turkey? Like, that becomes it.

Still waiting for your mom to publish that book about Speckles?

Yes, same. So I'm going to tell you this one story. Are you ready for it?

Yep.

Okay. So I write a lot in December. I have this big push for gratitude in December, and some of my community joins me, and I do 31 days of gratitude. So I haven't written this out, so I'm sharing this with you because it's a brainstorm that I have. You know how there's a core memory, and that movie Inside out has kind of made this lingo with my kids.

Favorite movie ever.

Oh, good. So you know it. Okay, so the teenagers now will say core. I'm sure your kids say, oh, that's core memory. And I've really been thinking about that because we are the same age. And I'm noticing that my memory is getting a little fuzzy here and there. And I'm starting to notice that there are just these kind of anchored memories that I return to. And I'm starting in my own mind to call them container memories. And this is what I want to write about because they contain a multitude of moments that become who you are. And I have this one container memory that I've never shared with you because it just came to my mind. It was very private moment about your mom. And we had gotten balloons for your birthday, and I had gone down to your house. We were very, very young. So you are a year older than me. I could have been, like, you were six and I was five. I mean, it's a super early memory. And I was so excited for the balloons. And your mom gave me a balloon to hold, and I was on the front porch, and I let it go, and I was so sad. And so instead of dealing with my shame and sadness, I started running home. And she was very calm. Your mom taught kindergarten, so she knows what to do with a young person. But I have a visceral. Like, I was overwhelmed with watching this balloon that was going to be for you go up into the sky. Because I just either felt like letting it go. I don't know. Kids are weirds. Or let it go without thinking about it.

Didn't even know it was gonna float.

Yes. And she found me on our front porch, and she really kneeled down, and she really looked at me, and she was like, this is not a problem. I love you. Do not worry about it. It just warms my heart that it's not just about communities coming together for each other as adults. It's really for the old people and the young people on either end. And that we were raised in a community where adults really showed up for children and for each other in those more vulnerable moments. And that one little moment with your mom contains so much more about how supported I felt in old Metairie. All of the families around us, all of the parents who cared, and all the neighbors who showed up for each other. And that is possible. That is possible in 2024. It is possible when we have cell phones in our hands. It's possible when we have robots working, which is not that far off. It's possible because it's human. It's just our nature. So I thought you would appreciate that. I'm sure you were fine without your red bullet, by the way. You're doing fine. I hope it hasn't come up in therapy.

I can mirror your container memory with Daddy Bob stopping me on that old yellow moped. We had brought it down from the farm. We had it on Brock and Grove, and I was riding it up and down the street at not much older than, what, you're seven, eight years old and wearing no helmet, and Daddy Bob stopping me and being like, son, you got to go put a helmet on right now.

Yeah.

And I'm saying, sounds like, yeah, but. And that memory is why today I look at my children, I'm like, get your helmet on, because it is. You learn from the people around you. You are absolutely correct that we were raised not just by our own parents, but our friends, parents, our neighbors.

Yes.

And it was a beautiful thing. And I do think it happens in today's world. I don't think you can tell other people how to parent their children. Yes, but if their children are under your purview, you better parent them while they're in front of you. If their parents aren't around.

Yeah. And it's a great act of caring. It's like the ultimate act of caring to be in community like that. But I love that there's hope for all of us.

There's hope for the future. There is. It's going to be okay.

It's going to be okay. I loved how Carter spoke to families being resilient and communities being resilient. I think so much about my personal resilience, and I think a lot about a client's personal resilience. But my conversation with Carter got me thinking about resilient families and resilient communities. Being resilient as a group means communicating with each other, reaching out to intentionally connect, slowing down to be present to each other, caring and offering support to one another. These are all things we can do with more awareness inside our families and as members in our community. When we do these things as a group, it brings us together. The togetherness is what cultivates a sense of unity and helps us get through the difficult times. Carter and I didn't say the word unity, but unity is really what we talked about. People coming together for one purpose. To survive and ultimately thrive in healthy, meaningful lives despite the losses we must endure. And we cultivate more unity by doing exactly what Carter did alongside his neighbors after the storm, focusing on the task in front of us. And that task is connection. Connection through common kindness. Small acts of helping and it's okay if they truly are small acts and being generous and forgiving towards one another. Hope is a choice. It's rooted in perspective and grows from a commitment to show up for friends, family, and community. Our lives are beautiful dysfunction, to use Carter's words. And the best way to function well in that beauty is to share it. Thank you, Carter Wood, for sharing your life, your values, and your experience with us. I'm so grateful for our friendship and the time I got to spend with you in this conversation. Hope becomes an easier and obvious choice for us when we connect with people who believe it's going to be okay. Carter, you're not only a good neighbor. You're a neighbor willing to share your hope and we are all better for it. Thanks to each of you for being here and for listening. I'm so grateful we get to share life in this way. As always, full show notes are available@paigenolan.com podcast there you will find a full summary of the episode, timestamps and key takeaways and any resources sources mentioned in our conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love if you would leave me a rating and a review. You can do that by visiting paigenolan.com love your reviews, really do help people to discover the show. And if you know someone specifically who would enjoy this episode, I'm so grateful to have you all share. I'll meet you there with your friends. Lastly, if you have any questions or comments or if you would like to share any feedback feedback with me, please email to meetme thereagenolan.com I would love to hear from you. Thank you to the team that makes this show possible. Podcast production and Marketing by North Node Podcast Network Music by Boyd McDonnell Cover photography by Innis Casey okay y'all, that's it for now. I'll meet you there again.