I used to work at Unto These Hills in Cherokee NC, just down the road. Spent summers acting and doing backstage work at the outdoor drama about the Cherokee Nation. That’s where I met my wife; she was a dancer and choreographer there. It’s also where I first came to know Asheville; we’d drive up on our day off just for a change. Always thought it was a cool little town in the hills.

It was a pretty good deal working there. You didn’t get paid much - so mostly the cast and crew were people in college or just out of it. The theater is on a hill - and out of view of the audience on the same hill are cabins for the more senior staff, dorms for the rest (a boys and a girls), a cafeteria that serves two meals a day, a pool where people like to skinny dip, a canteen where dance, theater, and music shows are put on every Saturday night, a grotto with a stream running through it where parties are sometimes thrown - pretty much a little self-contained community. (This should all be past tense - they’ve made some changes since I used to work there.) But at the time it was like a little hippie artsy summer retreat. The actual job at the play was only 4 hours a night so you could sleep as late as you wanted and there was a lot of free time. You could just hang out and explore the town and the mountains with people you’d just met who had the same interests that you did. If you felt like it, you could do creative projects in your spare time. It was an idyllic sort of life for a young person in the arts. All year long I’d look forward to being back on that hill with the hill people. You couldn’t wish for much more.

The only thing left to wish for was rain. A lot of rain. Rain in buckets. If there was enough rain, the show would be cancelled and we’d have the night off. But it took a whole lot of rain for that to happen. Often we’d be doing the play sopping wet under the stage lights and the audience would have ponchos on and umbrellas up and the show would go on. During intermission we’d sit backstage and smoke cigarettes and watch the rain fall and wonder where all the fireflies had gone to. On the PA system would be the intermission music and we’d half listen, just in case they said the rain was going to win tonight.

One night during my third summer, I was sitting out there on the porch backstage while the rain came down in sheets. Intermission was about over, it was almost time to get back to work. Suddenly, I heard a commotion and a couple of my friends came running down the steps and grabbed shovels and rakes. The PA said there would be a slight delay before the play resumed. What he didn’t say was why: the latrines had overflowed and there was a river of raw sewage coming down toward the stage. It had been a big audience that night and the combination of them all using the restrooms during intermission and the heavy rain had made the septic tanks overflow. I said Holy Shit, grabbed a rake and ran after them.

It was dark on the side of the theater, just across the rail from the audience seating. The house lights were on and the crowd was still milling about - most of them didn’t know about the overflow. It hadn’t got to us yet at the bottom of the hill but we could smell it through the rain, knew it was coming. So we got in its likely path and started quickly digging a trench to divert it away from the stage. I’ve never seen people work so furiously, moving with the speed of dogs, throwing up dirt. I guess trying to avoid being covered with raw sewage will do that. I joined in. There wasn’t much talking - no need for it. As I dug, I didn’t often look up but could hear the sound of others, working all around me in the darkness, digging into the hill. The foul flow came closer and we saw that it wasn’t going to hit our trench, we were slightly off - so we rushed even faster to create an intermediary channel to the trench. The closer the river of shit got, the faster we dug. The murmurs of the crowd wondering why the show hadn’t started back up yet, the stage lighting not quite reaching us as we worked in the dark, the rainwater falling from the trees overhead, the muddy earth flying through the air, the desperate sidelong glances to see if it was here yet, the sounds of metal scraping into dirt - it seemed to go on forever. A couple of times I almost got my foot shoveled into. It all lasted maybe 10 minutes.

Eventually we managed to turn it to the side, most of it. But we’d had to step in it a couple of times - no one escaped unstained. After the show we took off our shoes and walked back up the hill to the dorms in our bare feet. First stop the washing machines, second stop the showers.

The stage was cleaned up good as new by the next night. No sign of what had happened the night before except the new trenches on the hillside. The play continued as before. It’s a good show; I recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet. But if you do go and if it’s raining, please - try to hold it.