On a recent summer day, rain poured outside climate scientist David Easterling’s home in Hendersonville. He made his way through the garage toward a door in the back.
“It's a standard 4-inch rain gauge. You can buy them, but it's kind of quasi-official,” Easterling said by way of explanation as he stepped out on a wooden deck, where a plastic contraption a bit like a pitcher gathered the drops.
It’s a warm July afternoon. The rain from this storm has barely covered the bottom of the gauge. Nearly two years ago, Hurricane Helene brought unprecedented destruction to western North Carolina. At the time, Helene’s rainfall nearly filled the gauge.
“I measured like 7.9 and 7.8 inches over two consecutive days,” Easterling said.
Easterling is one of several Helene survivors who collaborated with comic artists and writers to create “Islands in the Sky,” a graphic novel anthology that tells the story of the storm through brightly illustrated panels, shaky lettering and onomatopoeia. It also reminds readers that a 1,000-year storm could happen again in our lifetimes.
Now retired, Easterling worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He modeled future climate simulations, with an emphasis on how extreme weather would change as our climate warms. His story, “A measure of stormy weather,” recounts living through one of those extremes.
“Somebody actually asked me that after one of my talks. They said, ‘Well, that's a 1,000-year event. We won't see another one in 1,000 years.’
“And I said, ‘Oh no, that's just a way of presenting a probability. We could have the exact same thing happen next year.’
“It’s just that the odds of that happening are very small,” Easterling said.
It’s more like a dice roll than a time constraint. Imagine rolling a 1,000-sided die every year. A storm the size of Helene appears on only one face. But those odds are changing as global temperatures rise. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can translate to heavier rainfall — thus, more sides of the die would feature stormy weather.
“We're looking at maybe warming up three or four degrees by the end of the century,” Easterling said. “That creates the possibility of even more of these events, just because there'll be a lot more moisture in the air.”
A chance to ‘dramatize the conflict’
The novel’s creator, Andrew Aydin, said climate change is a big part of the “why” behind this project. He said it’s a problem that isn’t going away.
“I think many, many people out here who have turned a blind eye to climate change, they can't do it anymore, and they know it, and it's changed people's perceptions of it,” Aydin said.
Aydin is the founder of the Appalachia Comics Project. He previously worked with the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis on the comic series “March,” an illustrated history of the Civil Rights Movement. Now, Aydin’s turning his focus to telling stories from the mountain range he grew up in.
Aydin said he was inspired by “Hillbilly Talkback: Co‑Creation and Counter‑Narrative in Appalachia,” a master’s thesis written by Elon Justice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Justice argues that there is a lot of media about Appalachia, much of it produced by people from outside the region, and much of it is harmful to its inhabitants. Part of the solution, Justice says, is “co‑creation,” which brings together collaborators across mediums to tell stories that more accurately reflect their subjects.
In the case of “Islands in the Sky,” co‑creation meant uniting survivors of Hurricane Helene with comic book artists. Aydin, who remembered buying his first comic at the Hendersonville Piggly Wiggly, described it as “the people’s medium.”
“Our goal ultimately is to empower the people of the region to tell their own story, and, in doing so, to take back their power over the destiny of this region,” Aydin said.
The writing process connected Helene survivors Jim and Allie Bourdy with author Greg Pak, who wrote “Planet Hulk,” some of the source material behind the 2017 Marvel film “Thor: Ragnarok.” Illustrator Josh Adams, who has worked on projects such as the “Doctor Who” and “Battlestar Galactica” comics, gave shape to the Bourdys’ story on the page.
“It's just wild how little that I kind of gave him besides the script, and he was able to nail it really well,” Jim Bourdy said about his collaboration with Adams.
No more climate havens
The Bourdys’ story spawned one of the novel’s starkest visuals: a scene in which the marooned couple watch from their roof as the flood carries a fleet of rubber ducks past their home. For Allie Bourdy, it highlighted the absurdity amid the trauma they experienced.
“I remember, me and Jim were holding onto the gutters, trying to get on the roof. And Jim said, ‘Well, you get a new fridge now,’” Allie Bourdysaid.
Prior to Hurricane Helene, there was a pernicious myth that Asheville was an “eco haven,” as Jim Bourdy put it. But no matter where you live in North Carolina, the climate is changing as humans continue burning the fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere.
“If we do not start using opportunities to dramatize the conflict — as John Lewis used to say — to show people how climate change is [not just] costing us money but costing us lives, then we're missing an opportunity to help save ourselves,” Aydin said.
He said he hopes that the novel will teach readers about climate change and natural disasters, both about the causes and the experience of living through something like Helene.
For Easterling’s part, he said he hopes more people will pay attention to their local forecasts.
“We could have one next year, just like Helene,” Easterling said — though he thought it unlikely. Still, each year is another roll of the climate die in a warming world.
