Once the storm had subsided and the worst of the wreckage had been cleared, the two launched into their water bottling effort. Word of mouth and social media posts brought a steady stream of helpers, from children assembling cardboard boxes to an 81-year-old man with a walker feeding the machinery with empty jugs. On the first night of the operation, creamery staff and volunteers stayed up until 3 a.m., packing 40 pallets of water, with each pallet holding 100 to 140 gallons depending on bottle size.

“We’ve kind of been helping everybody else so we didn’t have to think about our problems,” Beam says with a modest smile. He and Green both lost power at their homes for several days, and he had to clear a tree that had fallen on his own house. “It’s a lot more fun.”

The effort grew as Big Bottom’s web of connections sprang into action. Sofia Lilly, a friend at nearby Overmountain Vineyards, spearheaded nearly $50,000 of fundraising to keep the creamery humming. Green tapped his contacts in the packaging world, temporarily buying his suppliers out of gallon and half-gallon jugs. Beam, who co-chairs a Farm Bureau committee for young farmers and ranchers in the region, talked with colleagues across the state to identify the most critical needs and supplement water deliveries with other essentials.

Among those beneficiaries was the Buladean Volunteer Fire Department, roughly 100 miles northwest in Mitchell County. Fire Captain Jeremiah Swann and his crew had spent days cutting fallen trees, clearing the route to the nearby Tennessee border before unblocking residents’ driveways and conducting wellness checks. They were running low on supplies when a truck from Big Bottom showed up, bearing three pallets of water, over 300 gallons of fuel, and a healthy amount of milk.

“It blesses all of us up here to know that people are rallying around, willing to help us and bring us stuff to get us through a hard time like this,” Swann says. “I would travel 2.5 hours to go get their milk—one, because it’s some of the best milk I’ve ever drank, and two, they’re willing to chip in and help us up here.”

Cooking Out of a Storm

“We thought it was going to be more on a vacation basis,” quips Collis, WCK’s chief relief officer.

Instead, McDonald and Bear’s co-owner Cheryl Antoncic partnered with Collis’s team to transform their restaurant into the command center of WCK’s Helene response. Bear’s is closed to the public, but on a sunny Monday morning, its courtyard buzzes with food deliveries, a meal-packing assembly line, and several giant stainless-steel skillets stir-frying vegetables and chicken.

The Bear’s interior is a logistical war room, complete with a massive map outlining deliveries of roughly 30,000 meals per day to more than 160 distribution points. Collis says needs are constantly shifting, but he expects WCK to remain in the region until widespread potable water returns, which could be many weeks away.

The majority of the meals are cooked on site, but many have come from other Asheville restaurants that have shifted operations toward relief, such as Chai Pani, Curate, and Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack. (WCK pays local restaurants per meal, allowing them to retain staff and be better prepared to serve the public when conditions allow.)

Antoncic is proud of her restaurant’s flexibility and use of local connections in the face of the unexpected. She points to how its freezer capacity saved 1,000 pounds of meat from storm-damaged purveyor Hickory Nut Gap Farms that was distributed through WCK meals.

Just as importantly, Antoncic continues, Bear’s has catalyzed relationships beyond the meals themselves. Through Linked4Life, a mental health nonprofit supported by the restaurant, she’s helped local counselors reach impacted communities at food distribution sites. And she recently held an event where people wrote messages of hope, attached to carabiners symbolizing connection, that will be sent out into the community in the days to come.

“As much as food and water are basic human needs, I really do believe that connection is a basic human need as well,” Antoncic says. “If you do have a crisis, whether it’s in your own personal life or in a community at large, having those support networks is what’s going to get you through it.”

Spreading the Support

Some regular festival vendors lost everything in the storm. The building that housed Asheville Tea Company floated down the Swannanoa River in a video featured on Fox News. Others, including Chamberlain’s own fermented food company, Fermenti, which sells kimchi and sauerkrauts, have been unable to reopen or manufacture products due to the area’s ongoing water problems. All face greatly reduced sales during the normally thriving fall tourist season.

In response, Chamberlain is using the November 3 festival to raise support for both small-scale food businesses and Western North Carolina residents in need. The in-person event is still happening, with its footprint slightly adjusted due to water damage at its location; only one of roughly 40 planned vendors dropped out, even though some have little to sell.

“It’s important right now to anchor a sense of normalcy in the community, because we have been lacking that,” she says. “For our mental health moving forward, it’s going to be important to help create those connections before we’re shuttered away in the winter.”

The festival is also now tied to an online fundraising campaign, which will go toward purchasing products from the festival’s roughly 40 vendors and donating them directly to local food banks. Chamberlain flags Beacon of Hope Services, a food bank in Marshall, as one recipient, noting that this community was hit particularly hard.

Chamberlain notes that while a lot of food, water, and other goods are arriving at distribution centers right now, “a lot of it’s not going to be here in a couple weeks. I’m not a first-wave responder, but I’m a second-wave responder, and I can be here to help do this.”

This kind of locally based effort is crucial for small food businesses, Chamberlain argues, because they’re likely to fall through the cracks of federal and state assistance. On Oct. 15, for example, the federal Small Business Administration announced that its disaster loan program had run out of money, and Republican leaders in Congress have refused to consider further aid until their regularly scheduled return to Washington November 12.

“I would challenge people to make relationships with food producers that they can connect with and look at eye to eye,” she says. “Now is the time.”