Squidders

A conversation with Russell Hudson

June 4, 2019

The bell rings when I open the screen door and the afternoon sun has created a warm glow inside. There’s a beach pail filled with peanuts on the front table and a customer is browsing the shelves deciding which candy to pair with her Mountain Dew. A singer is crooning on the radio in the background. Russ, the store owner, beams a smile in my direction and greets me with crinkled eyes, “What’s up Izzy?” His Southern twang drawls out so it sounds like “Izz-eh.”

Those who have volunteered with All Hands and Hearts in North Carolina know that Squidders is essentially part of the welcome tour. It’s the only place within walking distance (5 minutes down the street) to purchase goods. His small but diverse selection of items ranges from chips and cigarettes to fishing gear and pickled pigs feet. Further decorated with old school bar games and a microphone, the bait shop doubles as a pop up karaoke venue for volunteers looking to unwind after hours.

Nine days after Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas on September 14, 2018, the All Hands and Hearts Response team set up camp in Vandemere, North Carolina. Soon after settling into base, Ed and Dan, two volunteers from the Response team discovered Squidders. When they stopped in, Russ was still cleaning up the wreckage from the flood. Before the storm hit, he’d rented a small UHaul trailer and packed away the most valuable items. He moved whatever would fit to the highest shelves and enlisted his neighbors’ help to lift the counters with jacks and cement blocks. Still without a means of lifting his industrial fridges, he lost them in the storm. His vending machines, ice machine and ice cooler all broke loose when Hurricane Florence hit. They floated up the street, up to the Methodist Church parking lot several blocks away, resulting in a big financial loss for the business.

I ask Russ what it was like growing up in Vandemere, preparing for floods every year. “Well we can’t predict the damage they’re going to do overall but we do know that we’re gettin’ water comin’ in town. We know how to prepare for em – tie things down, put things up, and we just wait for it to blow through. When we were kids it was a lot of fun but we didn’t know the preparation that went into it. It’s a lot of work. Ya know, you lose business, and you lose personal belongings. Things get wet – family pictures… heirlooms… they get destroyed if you don’t really think about everything. There’s too many things to think about.”

It’s true. In many of the homes being worked on, personal items are mixed in with the debris. Crinkled family photos hang from the molded walls. Children’s toys are left behind and moved into corners when volunteers come in to gut the homes. Having seen and experienced the damage firsthand, Russ understands the importance of his shop. “After Ed and Dan first stopped by, they just kept coming back and they entertained themselves. They just needed a place to get away because what you guys do got to be heartbreaking at times to see. Families lives destroyed and all their personal belongings scattered about, the houses torn up – so it’s gotta be traumatic. I guess this is a way for them to come down here and relax and forget the day.”

While it often seems like the workday never ends for a volunteer — from nightly meetings to constant socialization and talk of tomorrow’s work, Squidders is a place to change out of muddy steel toe boots and release the work mentality. It is a space to connect with the community through shelling peanuts and off-key renditions of Johnny Cash rather than conversations focused on loss. It is a reminder that although natural disasters will continue to strike again and again, it is the resilience of the community, the reparative energy of the volunteers, and the shared connection between both parties that rebuilds homes and spirits.