By Kim Mayer, Journal contributor.

A dozen women sit high and dry reading in their living rooms month after month on an island in the Salish Sea. As a book group, we travel together by way of our book selections, be it fiction, nonfiction or historical fiction — and lately an armload of books were set in the Appalachian Mountains: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver; The Last Castle, by Denise Kiernan; and The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson.

So when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, then rolled up to the southern Appalachian mountains hitting there the hardest, 2,500 miles northwest the bookgroup was hit too. Land we had come to know was washed out. The hallows and canyons in Demon Copperhead. The healing properties of the cool forests in Asheville, North Carolina, when George W. Vanderbilt first arrived. Creeks now turning to rivers, and rivers overflowing. Trees giving way in the saturated soil and winds. Bridges tumbling down like Tinker Toys, and roads destroyed.

When we travel by way of literature our consciousness aligns with that of the book. Indeed, art and life came together like a thunderclap when I saw coverage of Mountain Mule Packers, an organization, delivering food, water, etc., to remote areas in North Carolina. Such was the method of delivery in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, over mudpacked trails on steep mountainous terrain, bringing books to remote hill people in counties that had no library (Roosevelt’s Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, 1935-43, a part of The Works Progress Administration program).

“Since the historic storm swept through the southeastern United States,” reported Citizen Times, a daily newspaper in Asheville, “a train of mules and their riders has trekked through the chaos from dawn to dusk, delivering essential supplies to people in hard-to-reach-areas .… From cleaning supplies to hygiene products, blankets, clothing—and even a teddy bear with a note of support from a young donor—the mules have tirelessly carried load after load, shouldering the burdens that people of Appalachia can no longer bear.”

Perhaps book groups help carry some of that burden too.