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Just a few inches from the front steps of Fred’s General Mercantile in Beech Mountain — the highest incorporated town in the Eastern United States — stands a 12-foot snow pole. Its weathered wooden face bears decades of snowfall marks, like the notches on a doorframe where parents have charted a child’s growth. Each faint line tells a quiet story, a testament to years passing steadily by.
Here, on this mountain, seasons leave their own kind of record. Some winters bring a modest snowfall — like the 26 inches in 2001-2002. Others arrive full-hearted, as in 2009-2010, when 137.6 inches blanketed the land. Each mark on the pole serves as a visual chronicle, a witness to winter’s gradual yet insistent settling, and, in a way, to time itself, layer upon layer. One day, you look back and see just how high it’s all piled up.
Fred Pfohl remembers every one of these winters since he opened his store 45 years ago. At this elevation, people are used to measuring things: snowfall totals, of course, and firewood stacks — how many cords to cut to ensure enough warmth through winter. They measure wind gusts and temperature drops. They note the length of ski runs and the depth of snowpack needed for a good season. They track the time between frosts and the pace of spring’s green as it inches up the mountainside after the thaw. They tally the miles to Banner Elk or Boone when a doctor’s visit is needed and keep a close eye on the hours between storms, gauging when it’s safe to venture out and when it’s best to hunker down.
This past fall, no one in the mountains expected to measure rainfall from a 1,000-year flood. No one imagined counting the inches — feet — of water that would split entire roads, cleaved by torrents rising higher than anyone could’ve ever anticipated.
Fred kept his store open through the deluge, even without water or power. His employees worked by the glow of headlamps, guiding neighbors who came not just for supplies but also solace — itself an essential necessity. All across western North Carolina, people measured out acts of kindness in the aftermath, reaching out to one another in ways no scale could quantify.
The truest measure of a place, and of people, comes when the easy days give way to the hard ones. We measure what matters not by inches or degrees, but by moments of grace that surface when the worst storms come.
As a new year dawns, fishermen on the coast will measure the tides by sunrise and the weight of their catch by sunset. Potters will watch their shelves fill with jugs and vases, a tribute to the clay that sustains their craft. Farmers will track rows of crops, acres tilled, and bushels harvested, each one a measure of promise and plenty.
In North Carolina, we measure our lives not by what we accumulate but by what we share, not by what we gather, but by what we give. Season after season, we celebrate what makes us stronger, what lifts us up, how high we rise.
Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief
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