It's hard to know what to say, brother. Not so much about this piece, which is beautifully conceived and expressed. But about the situation itself.

Did you realize I took my bike and biking gear? I biked through Clyde last week and saw firsthand the destruction caused by the Pigeon River. The trailers especially got me: they were tossed, gutted, and gone. Yesterday I read a story in the NYTimes about the vulnerability of mobile homes in natural disasters, and it told the story of a man from Clyde, with a photo of the very road I had biked the week before. He barely escaped his trailer when the waters rose, and his wife did not. He is, and she was, younger than we are.

I haven't driven through the hardest hit parts of Asheville yet on any of my trips back. I have to remind myself that the degree of the destruction is not identical to the degree of loss.

And they're both incomprehensible.