FOSCOE — Sherrye Trice pulled up to the store five minutes before it opened, holding a box of diapers with her phone on speaker.
She unlocked the front door, flicked the lights on and made her way back to the storage rooms. After sliding the diapers onto a storage shelf, she began quickly moving bunches of bananas into a new container for the produce section up front.
She froze and covered her mouth when the person on the other end of the phone told her they planned to make a sizable donation, and to match others’ donations for a time.
“You just made my day,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. After a minute, she hung up the call, took a deep breath and picked up the box of bananas. Shoppers were already waiting outside.
“Good morning, everybody!”
‘A safety net for the high country’
Trice had two volunteers this Wednesday morning.
Luke Barber, a freelance journalist-turned-Appalachian State student, planned to help Trice with everything tech and media. Michelle Daoust, a crisis counselor with the state’s Hope4NC program, comes by weekly to lend a hand.
“You, young man, are going to get to follow me around and chase me today,” Trice said, motioning to Barber. “Because that’s the only way I can get anything done.”
Daoust turned to help the first visitors of the day. They each grabbed a one-gallon white bucket — the store’s version of a shopping cart — and began to walk down the canned goods aisle.
At Foscoe Home Team’s Storm Relief Store, groceries are free. And customers are limited to those living in Ashe, Watauga and Avery counties, all hit by Hurricane Helene. Almost 80 households who are among the store’s frequent shoppers still don’t have reliable running water — still relying on bottles to cook, clean and bathe. “A safety net for the High Country,” is how Trice described the store to the donor on the phone.
Helene hit on Sept. 27, 2024, an unthinkable storm that flooded and buried homes and livelihoods in the mountains. The needs of many are now less a matter of life and death, but for Trice they are no less urgent.
So the store stays open — accepting donations and handing out food, clothes and other basic needs — five days a week. And for the next few hours, a steady parade of cars arrived at the white-sided building in Watauga County, tucked below the Grandfather Mountain.
‘I’m the one who lays awake at night when we don’t have enough’
Trice isn’t keen to talk about herself. “I’ll text you the interviews,” she said, dashing off links to a previous radio hit and Facebook video about her and the store.
The short version: She’s an Army veteran whose family has lived in the area for generations. She began collecting donations just days after Helene, at an Avery County community center. Now she has a formal 501(c)(3) for Foscoe Home Team and a two-year lease in the building off N.C. Highway 105, a 15 minute drive from the town of Banner Elk.
She doesn’t take a salary, and donated the amount that would’ve been her pay for the first year back to the nonprofit.
Pen and paper govern the store — workers jot down first-time customers’ info on index cards and verify it with their drivers’ licenses. Trice is “hopeless” with technology, by her own admission. But she’s very familiar with the voice-to-text function, and is constantly dictating text messages to volunteers, friends and neighbors as she dashes around the store. Her iPhone is, it seems, permanently connected to a portable charging bank.
One veteran’s description of Trice running the store: “Not unlike a base commander in a combat operation.”
Wednesdays are usually a bit less busy, and there was a bit of free time between customers. Daoust and Trice took a quick inventory: canned meats are running low, and shampoo and body wash remain big needs. The store doesn’t have any corporate donors, but Trice said they’re “dying” for them: “we’ll take pallets.”
Trice needed to run by Food Lion and the bank. But the errands will have to wait; she doesn’t want to leave the store for too long.
The summer has brought some reprieve. “Nobody is freezing to death,” Trice said. “People have power back. Even if they don’t have drinking water, they’ve got showering water.” But another chilly mountain winter looms. “When this weather changes, we’re going to be in trouble again.” In the back of the store, two boxes are labeled for adult and children’s gloves.
The store is a charity, but there are rules. Verifying your identity and address is non-negotiable. Food and other items have strict limits per person. Each shopper gets one white bucket — and it can’t overflow.
“I do feel bad sometimes,” Daoust said quietly, about the per-person limits.
“It’s not personal,” Trice replied. “I just remember that I’m the one who lays awake at night if we don’t have enough.”
‘They need to be able to talk to somebody’
Zane Tester backed his car up to the front of the store. He waited in the driver’s seat while his dog Sammy impatiently pawed around the back, and a couple plastic bags of essential goods were dropped in the trunk.
Tester was the police chief up in Boone for decades. In the years since, he’s served as a pastor at churches around the area — a “country preacher,” he calls himself.
“It was tough on us, tough on everybody,” he said of Helene. “The little church I pastor, it tore the fellowship hall to pieces. It got the furnace in the big church.”
“A pastor needs to be there. I couldn’t be there.”
Tester is fighting Crohn’s disease. He’s been told time and again to stay home and take care of himself. But dozens of churches in the region still lack regular pastors, he said.
“If we ever needed guidance, a lot of people need it right now,” Tester said. “A lot of people are so discouraged, have so much anxiety, they can’t do nothing. They need to be able to talk to somebody.”
‘I might not have it, but I’ll find a way to try to get it for you’
Jacob Roninger comes by the store most days to pick up the trash and cardboard.
He works just a few minutes away, where he manages the barn and tends to Grandfather Stables. That’s where he was when the flooding began, washing away the fencing and forcing him to bring the horses in.
Roninger spent three weeks after the storm fixing the fences and cleaning. His mother also lives nearby. The small creek by her home had washed out the foundation of three separate buildings.
“I’ve noticed that when it rains now … it don’t take much for it to start flooding,” he said.
Months ago, Roninger saw a sign Trice had posted along the road and pulled into the lot. He’s been a regular since, hauling away garbage bags and folded-up boxes in his truck.
“I do the best that I can,” he said. “I help whoever needs help.”
As he drove around the area after Helene, he recalled seeing mobile homes washed away, leaving some living in tents and others totally homeless.
Marcia Grimes counts herself among the lucky ones. She and her husband stood on top of their 43-year-old mobile home as the water rushed through a year ago, she recalled as she walked back to her car from the store.
Grimes lives in a mobile home community behind a Walmart in Boone. Before the storm, she estimates there were more than 100 homes there. Now there are about 20.
The slanted street their home sits on prevented total loss, but their new SUV suffered some water damage. As she remarked several times: others had it far worse.
“There’s people … who still don’t have anything,” Grimes said. “I’m a people person, I’ll talk to anybody. I might not have it, but I’ll find a way to try to get it to you.”
‘It ain’t junk in there’
Boxes are stuffed like Tetris pieces in the back of the white SUV now sitting in front of the store. One of its four passengers walks in to find Trice, while the others begin unpacking the trunk.
The group of men come from American Legion Post 48 in Hickory, an hour south. They’ve made donation trips to every county in the west since Helene, and multiple trips to most of them.
One of them, John Harden, loaded up his car days after the storm: warm clothes, quilts and blankets, canned goods. His wife died eight years ago, and he had plenty to give that he’d never use himself.
“We had a lot of winter coats that looked like new,” Harden said. “I just cleaned them out.”
The 90-year-old has made dozens of trips around the mountains since, alongside his fellow veterans, though he admits that now he’s “slowed down” a bit.
Wednesday’s boxes were packed with, among other things, winter clothes and candy. “Good stuff,” one of the veterans remarked. “It ain’t junk in there, let me tell you what.”
The delivery didn’t come at the best time for Trice, who was also juggling multiple customers. “Next time guys, please call,” she pleaded. But it was hard for her to be too annoyed as she began to hang flannels and jackets on the clothing racks outside the store.
Harden recalled one trip they made around Easter, with boxes of toys. A boy approached him and asked if he could have the last toy left — a doll.
“I said, ‘you play with dolls?’” he remembered asking the boy. “And he said, ‘no, but I want to give it to my sister.’”
Trice ducked away from the SUV and approached another car, a blue Jeep that just pulled up. After a moment, she walked back into the store holding an Amazon Prime box.
“A friend of mine is a production manager for Trevor Noah,” she said, grinning ear to ear. The box was full of signed copies of the comedian’s memoir. She’d be auctioning them off at the store’s fundraiser in weeks.
‘We’ll be waiting here’
Connie Aldridge starts helping unload the boxes from the American Legion car. She’s a neighbor — the next road over bears her surname — and a veteran, like Trice.
“Just by the grace of God, I met her,” Aldrige said. “And she didn’t stop. I had to get a job to pay my bills, so I went back to work. I stop by randomly, and she puts me to work. She’s good at it.”
She had returned to the region from military service just before Helene struck. She remembered seeing people on the other side of surging rivers and creeks, asking if she could get them food.
They’ve made strides in the year since, despite all the frustrations that remain. And Aldridge is hoping to soon see a steady stream of visitors again — for travelers and outsiders to come re-discover the stretch of the mountains they call home.
“Come see what’s hiding behind that next knoll,” she said. “We’ll be waiting here. Lots of us were taught to suffer, in silence. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
This story was originally produced by NC Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes SC Daily Gazette, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Galen Bacharier covers North Carolina politics and government for NC Newsline.
