MARSHALL, N.C. – Everything in this riverside town is still covered in mud.
Lots of mud.
It slops from either side of the road graders trying to scrape it off Main Street. It fills homes, the church and storefronts. The floor of an untouched art studio looks like a rippled riverbed, which – like everything else in downtown Marshall – it was.
Bryson Effler took a break from shoveling mud out the broken window of a natural foods grocery store to sum up the collective feeling of many in western North Carolina in a single word: “Damn.”