Safe at home Friday afternoon in Illinois, Matthew Cloyd knew the hurricane that had slammed Florida’s Big Bend overnight was due to keep up its brutal churning through the Southeast.
Never in his mind, though, could that possibly include his parents’ home near the Nolichucky River – some 500 miles due north of where Helene made landfall – in far northeastern Tennessee.
Tropical systems, of course, can plunder coastlines. And perhaps, if the gusts are strong enough, snap trees 50 miles inland. Or, if they stall out, maybe they dump rain in the same place for days, filling basements and streets like bowls of soup.
But even if a storm like that made it to Matthew’s parents’ neighborhood, their house rests on a mound. In the Appalachians. About 1,700 feet above sea level.
And it certainly couldn’t happen with Helene, Matthew figured, even as the one-time Category 4 monster showed little sign of cooling its rage.
Then, his phone rang.
It was his mom.
“Your dad’s in trouble.”
‘I think the house is alright’
Hours earlier, Helene had unfurled a nightmare across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas: debris rested everywhere, homes tilted off their foundations, cars festered in the muddy water of swollen creeks.
Some people already were dead. Many, many others had gone missing.
And the storm was still plodding north, toward East Tennessee, saturated in recent days by at least 4 inches of rain from a separate system.
Drizzle from Helene’s outer bands had settled before dawn Friday over Keli and Steven Cloyd’s community before building to a steady, then heavy rain by 8 a.m.
Still, Keli headed out to her job managing a beauty supply store about 20 miles east in Johnson City. Her husband of 36 years – and exactly one week – stayed home with their 2-year-old goldendoodle, Orion, named like the huntsman placed among the stars by a god, and their black Jeep in the driveway.
Anyone who’s met Steven would agree he’s a tough guy, their son later would say. And as Helene’s bands disgorged more and more rain, he kept his wife updated via calls and text messages, including a video of a growing puddle amid a grass field near their home.
“Ummmm isn’t there another front coming through???” Keli asked. “Safer for me to come home??”
Soon enough, though, water began to saturate the pavement.
“I think the house is alright being on the mound it’s built on,” Steven wrote, “but the drain outside …”
Before long, the creeping waterline had almost reached the garage. And by then, the tough guy seemed to understand more clearly what could be in store:
“Uh oh,” he texted Keli with another video showing water near his Jeep. “You’re not getting home right now.”
“OMG,” came her response. “I SHOULD HAVE LEFT.”
“You wouldn’t have made it,” he said. “Sh*ts getting real.”
The next few videos Steven sent showed murky beige water inching closer and closer.
“This is not good,” he texted his wife. “It’s going to get the upstairs if it keeps up. Basement is a goner.”
“We are … Trapped in the house,” he soon wrote. “Basement is filling fast …”
View this interactive content on CNN.comIn between their texts, Keli and Steven also talked on the phone.
She’d never heard fear in her husband’s voice like in those calls, Keli would later say.
View this interactive content on CNN.comKeli called Matthew in Rockford, Illinois, where he and his brother had grown up before their parents – just three years earlier – moved to the Tennessee mountains.
“Your dad’s in trouble,” she told her 35-year-old son.
“What do you mean Dad’s in trouble?” Matthew asked her.
“Your father just called me and said it’s flooding really bad,” Keli said.
“The home is flooded.”
Matthew got his younger brother and a vehicle. And they set off – 700 or so miles – to find their dad.
Hunting online, in fields and in riverbanks
GPS says the trip from Rockford to Jonesborough should take 11 hours, 8 minutes, straight-through. But after Helene, it wasn’t a straight shot.
By the time Matthew and his brother arrived Saturday evening, the nightmare storm scenes that had seemed impossible in East Tennessee had materialized.
Debris lay everywhere. Homes sat torn from their foundations. Bridges rested apart from the land they were supposed to connect.
The brothers hunted and hunted, finally finding a bridge they could cross. They linked up with their mom.
By then, across Helene’s zone of destruction, police and firefighters, friends, spouses and children also had struck out on their own searches. In canoes, in high-water vehicles, on foot and online, they went hunting for people whose cell phones were ringing straight to voicemail.
Who’d never shown up.
Who weren’t where they were supposed to be.
Together, Keli and her sons found Steven’s Jeep in a field about a quarter mile southwest of the couple’s home.
Its removable roof panel wasn’t there.
Neither was Steven. Or his goldendoodle.
The family took to social media, pleading for any information about their missing husband and dad – and his dog. Soon, a lady reached out to say she’d found Orion alive.
She lives 3 miles down the road.
Now, nearly a week after Keli professed – in that 27-character, frantic text message – her deepest love to her spouse of 36 years, the Cloyds feel “helplessness,” Matthew told CNN.
They, like untold other families, have contacted authorities to report their loved one missing. On social media, the Cloyds keep posting new pleas about Steven, hoping someone will reply to say he’s safe.
Matthew wants anyone who lives along the Nolichucky River to check their backyard and surrounding areas to see if anyone has washed up along the banks. It might his father, he said. Or maybe someone else.
Everybody, he said, deserves to be found.
Once this is all over, Matthew wants to meet up with other people set by Helene on an unthinkable hunt, unrelenting even as the stars have emerged night after night since the storm blew away.
“I think right now we are the only people who know what each of us is going through,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel real.”
CNN Meteorologist Mary Gilbert contributed to this story.