Light Where the Canopy Broke Open

What survived the storm was not the same river — and neither are we

I have been floating this river since 2006. Long enough to watch it change slowly. Long enough to notice how the current kept rewriting small parts of itself season after season. I used to tell my kids it was incredible — a river could remain the same river while constantly changing. There was comfort in that.

Then Hurricane Helene came.

That was not slow change. Roads turned into riverbeds. Buildings folded into mud. Entire areas disappeared. Debris lodged itself high into the trees. They are still rebuilding. That sentence sounds hopeful. I don’t mean it that way. I mean: they are still digging out.

This past Memorial Day, I drove back. The landscape was still trying to recover, though “recover” is probably the wrong word. It felt more like the landscape was still trying to figure out what it was now.

Before we touched the water, I saw changes. For years, this had been a crowded tubing attraction. The company has stopped offering tube rentals. The current had become too unpredictable. What had once been a lazy float now demanded something sturdier.

Then we reached the river. I did not recognize it.

The thick canopy that once stretched over both banks was mostly gone. For decades those trees had cast long shadows across the water, enclosing the river inside a deep green corridor. The mountains revealed themselves only in fragments through the branches, and the river felt separate from everything beyond its banks.

What threw me most was the light.

Sunlight spilled across the water without interruption now. The ridgelines stood fully exposed beyond the river, and the entire landscape felt larger than I remembered, as though someone had unfolded it while I was away. The river was no longer sheltered. It was naked and raw, like a wound that hadn’t been allowed to scar.

As we drifted, I looked for the old rope swing. For years, that tree marked a ritual: climb, grab the rope, run three steps, launch out over the water. The plunge always knocked the breath from my chest, and I came up laughing anyway. But the tree was no longer there. I kept looking, convinced it would appear around the next bend. Instead, the shoreline kept moving, and the river continued past without a eulogy.

A few bends later, I searched for the sandbar — that shallow island where we always pulled our tubes up and spent longer than we intended. Exposed roots pushed through the shoreline. Storm scars cut through the banks. The place still existed, but not in any way that resembled what I remembered.

Then it really sank in that something else was missing.

Back then, the river felt crowded in the best possible way. Families floated together. Conversations began when tubes bumped into each other, then dissolved when the current pulled us apart. Nobody exchanged numbers. Nobody made plans. The shared moment was enough.

Now there were long stretches where we saw nobody at all. No laughter. No voices. The river felt haunted, as though past summers had never fully left and were still lingering somewhere beyond sight.

More than the missing swing or the missing the people, I missed the comfort of knowing exactly where I was.

I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of safety came from recognition, from the quiet reassurance that the map inside my head still matched the world outside it.

I kept searching for the river I remembered. But the longer we floated, the harder it became to ignore the truth. The river moved faster now. Water slammed against the rocks. Drifting was no longer enough. You had to work. You had to pay attention.

That’s where the revelation started. I wasn’t just looking at a damaged river. I was staring in a mirror.

There were years when I did not recognize my own life. Years when I woke up inside brokenness and betrayal. Years spent staring at circumstances I would never have chosen, wondering how I allowed myself to get there. Years when everyone else seemed to move forward while I stood ankle-deep in the carnage of my life.

I felt like the world had battered me and left me lifeless.

I remember waking up every morning hoping I would feel different and being disappointed when I didn’t. I carried the weight of it everywhere, into work, into conversations, into moments that should have been enjoyable. The world itself seemed drained of color, everything around me tinted in shades of pain.

I was convinced that I was broken.

I replayed the same conversations over and over, convinced there had to be something I missed, some detail that would explain how everything had unraveled. I was exhausted by my own thoughts and still unable to escape them.

I grasped for things familiar. I waited for certainty. I wanted life to start making sense again. But no matter how hard I clawed, that familiarity never returned. The old version of myself, the old plans, the old assumptions — the things that made me recognizable to myself — were gone. Some disappeared slowly. Others vanished all at once. For a long time I believed healing meant finding my way back.

The storm didn’t reveal anything beautiful at first. It just destroyed what felt like everything. And I had to keep living inside the destruction. The part where nothing looks the way it used to, and nobody can tell you when that stops hurting.

That’s what the river reminded me of. The silence where the rope swing used to be. The emptiness where the sandbar used to be. The feeling of searching for something you loved and realizing it isn’t coming back. Not because the universe is teaching you a lesson. Just because. Storms don’t care.

The river wasn’t beautiful in the way I remembered. It was scarred. Stripped bare. Unfamiliar.

And yet there was something else there too.

The river wasn’t beautiful in the way I remembered. It was scarred. Stripped bare. Unfamiliar.

And yet there was something else there too.

The canopy that once blocked the sky was gone. Light fell where it had never fallen before. The river simply flowed, no longer sheltered, no longer hidden, finding its way through the terrain that remained.

The storm took things from me. But somewhere beneath the wreckage, I discovered that I could still move.

The landscape had changed.

And along the way, so had I.

Life is worth living now in a way I couldn’t have understood before the storm.

I am still forgiving. I just don’t let things take from me the way I used to. I protect my peace. I protect my love. Not out of fear, but because loss taught me what both are worth.

Some storms alter the landscape permanently. The work is not rebuilding what was lost. The work is learning the shape of the river after.

And I am still here — unhindered, like the river, moving toward whatever comes next.