A round, plastic, orange juicer stands upright, burrowed in a quarter inch of dirt and silt as the edgewaters of Peeks Creek gently flow and break around its surface. Five feet away, a metal spatula pokes out of the mud.

The kitchen stands open, its exterior wall ripped off like the lid of a soup can. The cabinets are still there, and the counter tops, and the tan colored refrigerator with all its contents.

But the house — the entire structure — is pinned against the mountain at an upward 30-degree angle, its foundation a bed of decaying trees and debris. It was ripped from the ground by the force of the neighboring house slamming into it, as it was thrown downstream in the raging debris flow that carved a gulley through the bed of Peeks Creek as Hurricane Ivan hit on the night of Sept. 16.

“If we were down here, we would have been killed,” said Larry Morris, who along with his wife Nancy, spent Saturday afternoon, Jan. 8 — the couple’s 46th wedding anniversary — wading across Peeks Creek to rescue a few last items from their house.

Indeed, the Morrises are among the lucky ones. Five Peeks Creek residents died as a result of the disaster, which left 17 families displaced, 15 homes destroyed and $1.7 million in damage. Now the community is attempting to rebuild, a process that has been slowed by red tape and uncertainty.

The Morris’ home was a second residence, originally belonging to Nancy’s father, who moved to Peeks Creek in 1974. Over the years, Nancy and Larry would come from their Michigan home to spend the winters with her father.

When Nancy’s father died in November of 2000, she was not yet ready to sell the home that held so many memories, so she and Larry held on to it. They spent up to nine months of the year there. The couple would return home to Michigan to be with their children for holidays.

“I should have sold it,” Nancy said.

This past September, Nancy and Larry planned to return to Peeks Creek, but a doctor’s appointment delayed them in Michigan. As weather worsened and reports came across the news of high winds and heavy rain the night of Sept. 16, the Morrises grew worried that a particular tree might fall on the Peeks Creek home. The next day, Larry tried calling the neighbors.

“Of course, no answer,” Nancy said.

They called the man who cut their grass.

“They said Peeks Creek was no more,” Nancy said.

In the night, a slab of dirt, boulders and trees about the size of a football field had come loose at the top of Fishhawk Mountain. Picking up speed and debris along the way, the slab plowed down the creek bed for more than two miles, destroying everything in its path. A team of researchers has called the incident a debris flow.

“You hear all kinds of things,” Larry said, about the explanations for the disaster.

Within a week of the disaster, Larry came down to see what was left of their home. The earth bore the pungent odor of upturned dirt, large trees lay scattered like an overturned box of toothpicks and boulders the size of cars loomed over the landscape.

And the tree the Morrises worried about falling? It was the only one that remained standing.

“I was in shock, it was hard to believe something like this could happen,” Larry said.

Nancy came down in October, and together the couple tried to salvage pictures, decorations, furniture, whatever they could. The house, however, is unstable, and angled so severely that moving through it is nearly impossible.

“I went in it one time,” Nancy said.

And while she has heard the stories and read the accounts, Nancy said she can’t begin to understand what it was like to be there.

“I want to know what they experienced,” she said. “I can only imagine.”

Residents who were there that night heard a noise like a train roaring down the mountain. Others insist it must have been a tornado. Insurance companies, however, have issued a blanket statement that whatever it was they don’t cover it.

“They just denied our claim,” Larry said.

The reason given was like that given to so many grief stricken Western North Carolina residents whose homes were lost in the hurricanes — no flood insurance. Not that the homeowners necessarily were advised to have flood insurance. Not that their homes even were identified to be in floodplains. Not that those flood plain maps, most of which were last updated in the 1970s, were correct.

So the couple put in a claim for personal loss.

Now, it’s a waiting game. The Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn’t make allocations for secondary homes. The state has allocated $90 million to hurricane relief efforts so far, but throughout WNC unmet needs total more than $350 million.

County officials have said that they hope to be able to buy damaged homes, but no agreements have been reached yet. Clean-up efforts have been stalled as officials wait for bids, meaning that while the road through Peeks Creek has been cleared, most of the residue remains.

Residents expected the county’s clean-up process to begin next week; however, before a contract may be awarded it must go before county commissioners, said county management officials. Commissioners are not scheduled to meet again until Feb. 7.

Really, little in Peeks Creek has changed in the four months since the disaster.

What has changed is the community itself.

It’s quiet, almost too quiet. What remains of homes stands empty, a clear view through broken windows, across barren rooms and out vacant doorways. Belongings perhaps once held dear — a red drum set, a typewriter, Christmas decorations — are buried under muck and mud and trees and bricks and twisted metal.

A coverless, waterlogged copy of author Helen C. White’s The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience rests on the edge of a debris pile, where a dirt road has been cut through to access the homes up above, the ones that were safe. The book’s type has bled, it’s words become impossible to read, except for one corner of the index where the topics “martyr” and “Mary, the Blessed Virgin” still peek through.

The community used to brim with life. Pear and plum trees, rose bushes and bird houses lined the road. In the winter, snow would cap split rail fences and cause evergreen bows to hang low in their owners’ yards.

“That’s what it used to look like,” said Nellie Carpenter, her well-worn hands sorting through an envelope of photos.

One of the photos shows a small house, mostly obscured by trees. The house stood just across the creek, from where Carpenter sat with her nephew, Gilmer Watts, and his son, as they took a break from repairing the family’s old homestead Saturday afternoon Jan. 8.

Today, there is no evidence of the home across the creek ever having been there. It’s gone completely. Only the broken end of a septic pipe sticking out from the earth bears witness to civilization. Otherwise, rocks abound. And the creek, which once ran alongside the road, now forks in two. Here is where the Peeks Creek community lost lives.

Gilmer’s brother, James Watts, and James’ wife, Kathy, were two of the Peeks Creek residents killed the night of Sept. 16. The couple often was referred to as being from Florida. However, Peeks Creek was James’ original home.

“We were born up here,” Gilmer said. “We played here since we were little.”

Gilmer’s aunt and mother were sisters, growing up in the house the trio was working to repair Saturday. Gilmer’s mother and father moved to Florida after their children were born, but kept a house in Peeks Creek, along with the old family homestead. James would come up a couple times a year.

In the storm, the house was destroyed and the homestead damaged. The homestead wasn’t insured and now repairs are coming out of pocket. The family is hoping for financial assistance from the state and one day to be able to build a memorial, perhaps a community picnic shelter, on the site to honor those who died.

Despite their losses, the family says they aren’t afraid.

“It could happen anywhere in the world,” Gilmer said.

And while the face of the community has been forever changed, the spirit of togetherness has been renewed.

“Everybody got reacquainted since this happened,” Gilmer said.