Still Searching

Peggy Williams remembers warm summer mornings on the porch, watching her longtime partner Lenny Widawski whistle to the birds.

She remembers cold winter evenings made warm by the soaring notes of his fiddle as they danced around the tiny log cabin in Green Mountain, a community in mountainous Yancey County. He’d make up words and tunes that he’d “turn into a damn good song,” Williams recalls. She remembers traveling to cities near and far, where Lenny and his violin never failed to wow a crowd. Even after more than 25 years together, the two were still enamored with each other.

Now that life is gone, swept away in the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene. A stone chimney towers like a headstone on the mud slab where the cabin once stood. A small wooden cross stands nearby, a circle of rocks collecting mementos left by friends and family. An old fiddle is tied to the crossbeam, a message scrawled across it in white paint: “RIP Lenny. May you find a tune in heaven.”

“When we lost him, we lost the world,” said Williams. “That’s how I feel, anyway.”

Lenny, 78, vanished on the morning of September 27 as the normally placid Toe River swelled to an unimaginable torrent. Williams was out of town at the time, but a neighbor told her he saw Lenny, wearing a life vest, go back into the house for some final item—his violin, maybe?—moments before a surge of roiling water rushed in and ripped the house off its foundation. Another watched from across the river as the house bobbed on the water for a few moments before disappearing forever.

It’s been nearly three months since Lenny vanished into the floodwaters, but he’s not counted among the 103 people in North Carolina confirmed dead in Helene’s aftermath. He remains one of the missing.

In the early days of the disaster response, the United Way of North Carolina managed a help line through which people could report anybody they believed to be missing. With widespread devastation and downed communication networks, roughly 4,500 names poured in, said N.C. Division of Emergency Management spokesperson Brian Haines. As a taskforce that included local police and emergency management, nonprofit organizations, state departments, and federal agencies worked to locate each person on the list, the number dropped over the weeks that followed. 

Many were never missing at all—just temporarily without phone service and unable to communicate. Other reports were the result of out-of-date contact information, displacement, or transportation issues. And some people were found deceased.

Initially, teams from all over the country traveled to aid the search. But as the bulk of the missing persons cases were resolved, first responders had to go back to their regular duties. Updates to the statewide database of missing people stopped at the end of October, and local law enforcement took over. Fewer than a dozen cases remain. 

Lenny is one of three people still unaccounted for in Yancey County. Neighboring Mitchell County still has one case, Avery County has two, and the City of Asheville has one. 

Yancey County Sheriff Shane Hilliard said his department stands ready to investigate any leads. But recovery efforts have been complicated by the rugged terrain and the unprecedented scale of destruction. The bodies of some people initially reported missing were found all the way across the state line in Tennessee, about 20 river miles away.

Many places downriver can’t be reached by road. “They’ve been searched numerous times, by boat, by foot, by dogs,” said Hilliard. And while the dogs would frequently alert on debris piles early on, often leading to recoveries, they are no longer doing so. “It could be that maybe they’re underwater, under silt or mud, areas where the dogs can’t even get a scent.”

One Dig at a Time

The pile of debris rises from the middle of the Toe River like a mountain, and that’s how Charlie Pritchett and his crew scale it—searching for handholds, testing their footing, scoping out routes. 

Even Pritchett, 36, a muscular man of six-foot-two who everyone knows as “Chainsaw Chuck,” looks small in this landscape of felled trees, ground-up branches, and displaced I-beams and two-by-fours. Disjointed remnants of human lives pepper the mound, a macabre analog to the flowers and shrubs that dot real mountains: an old VHS tape, its black ribbon half pulled out; a stuffed duck, its vest torn and yellow fuzz turned brown; a weathered photograph of three cows on a grassy hillside.

Pritchett takes a picture of the photo, which will be posted on a Facebook group dedicated to uniting Yancey County flood victims with their possessions. But that’s not the main reason the crew is out under the cold, gray November sky. Like nearly every day since they first heard his name, they’re out looking for Lenny.

“All of us, I think, kind of felt the call in our stomach,” Pritchett said. “I just felt like I had to be here.”

When Helene hit, Pritchett was two months behind rent at his jiu jitsu gym in Almont, Michigan, with a $2,500 bill to pay before he could get his truck out of the shop. But as videos of the destruction began flooding in, he felt a compulsion to go help. His community responded—Pritchett’s dad paid to get his truck out of the shop, and friends on Facebook contributed $2,000 that Pritchett used to buy a load of donations and gas to get down to North Carolina. 

He drove through the night to reach Swannanoa, where he spent his first four volunteer hours organizing toilet paper at a supply station for flood victims. Then, he heard that somebody needed a chainsaw. Pritchett, who is also an arborist, volunteered his services. The job, it turned out, was to follow a team of cadaver dogs, chopping up fallen trees on the places they alerted into pieces small enough for excavators to lift out.

That’s where he met Adam Lunsford, a general contractor from Cherokee County, South Carolina, and another member of the team of five to 10 now working on recovery efforts in Yancey County. They’re supported by multiple organizations, including Savage Freedoms Relief Operations, a nonprofit formed by special operations veterans to aid the Helene response, and Element Rescue, a “consortium of rescue professionals” based in Greenville, South Carolina.

As they got started in Swannanoa, Pritchett and Lunsford found they had a knack for the work. Once, Pritchett said, they discovered a man’s body in a place that official search teams had already cleared. The gratitude his wife expressed affected Pritchett deeply.

“I was just like, well, it’s on us,” he said. “This is what we’re here to do.”

As the list of missing people shrank, the crew shifted their focus from searching any debris pile where a dog had alerted to looking for specific missing people. That’s what led them to Lenny.

After they heard about his case on October 24, the group spent five days compiling videos and eyewitness accounts, analyzing pre-flood Google Street View images, and visiting the site. They hoped to develop a theory about what happened and where Lenny’s body likely ended up. 

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released post-flood imagery, the team overlaid it with pre-storm satellite photos to further hone their understanding of how floodwaters moved through the area. On-the-ground reconnaissance plays a role too—the group has spent days clambering through piles of mangled trees and homes, looking for fragments that might indicate whether the drift came from the area of Lenny’s house.

During the early days of the search, the crew routinely worked 16-hour days, sometimes pushing on until 3 a.m.; now the typical day is closer to eight hours. Home is a tent camp about seven road miles away from Lenny’s homesite, embraced by the local community—the camp is located on private property its owner lent to the cause, and supporters have been keeping the men stocked with food and supplies. But even with multiple heaters firing under the tarp and insulated igloo-style tents for sleeping, toes and fingers stay chilly and backs stiff. Many of them left the security of paid work and the comforts of home behind in places ranging from Idaho to Michigan to South Carolina. 

Multiple cadaver dog teams have swept the river’s path since the floodwaters receded, marking spots where they find a scent. Pritchett’s crew uses their analysis of how the flood transpired to prioritize digs at these marks. Some days, the crew goes out with whatever combination of personal and donated chainsaws and handheld tools they have, making their best effort against the seemingly endless landscape of debris. Other days, they’re directing thousands of dollars worth of heavy equipment that a constellation of construction companies and individual equipment owners have lent to the effort, going as deep as 40 feet to excavate sediment and debris.

“We’ve been saying to the excavator guys, this isn’t just your regular job,” said Pritchett. “You’re looking for someone’s loved one, so treat it like it’s your loved one. If your daughter was in that hole, how deep would you dig? How late would you work?”

Despite these efforts, Lenny remains missing. But the search hasn’t been fruitless. The crew has become close with Williams, even raising money to buy her a car to replace the one she lost in the flood. And they’ve found pieces of Lenny’s life hidden in the piles of ground-up wood: the back of a fiddle, a package of NASCAR collector’s cards, a wooden sign bearing a cartoon of a stressed-out man at a desk and the words, “If you’re too busy to play, you’re too busy”—and a 1989 cassette tape of Lenny’s music titled Golden Fiddle. His stage name, Lenny Ski, appears in black letters at the top. Underneath, he smiles in a white Western-style shirt, his left hand clutching a rhinestone-studded violin whose unusual color makes clear the inspiration behind the album’s name.

Williams “understands that he might never be found, but to have some of the stuff means the world to her, because her whole life washed away,” said Pritchett.

Williams wasn’t able to return to Yancey County until more than 10 weeks after the flood. When Helene hit, she’d been in Williamsburg, Virginia, staying with her daughter while recovering from back surgery. She’s convinced that if she’d been home, she could have made Lenny leave sooner.

“I blame myself,” she said. “I went down banging the ground, [asking] why did God take such a wonderful person like that? He had plenty more life in him.”

A Life of Music

Lenny may be gone, but his memory remains alive and well in living rooms and music halls across Yancey and Mitchell counties. An outgoing man often seen wearing a brightly patterned shirt and jaunty hat, Lenny was hard not to notice. Following a February incident that left him facing an assault charge, Lenny was more downcast than usual in his final months. But friends and family uniformly describe him as quirky, fun, and gentle.

“He was happy with his life,” said his sister Lydia Widawski, 72, who lives 20 minutes away in Burnsville. “He wasn’t rich at all—he struggled—but he loved his music, and that’s what counted.”

Lydia is the youngest of the four Widawski children while Lenny, the second oldest and only boy, was six years her senior. But he was her best friend during their early years in Miami, Florida. Lenny let his little sister tag along to play baseball, scuba dive, and go fishing—“all the boy stuff.”

“I was the little brother he never had,” said Lydia.

After graduating from high school, Lenny went off to school at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, determined to build his life around his beloved violin. After three years of study, he left without graduating—“he didn’t like the music they were playing,” said Lydia—and “bounced around Boston” for a while, working in restaurants and eventually becoming interested in magic and ventriloquism.

“When he gets interested in something, he’s got to master it,” she said.

Lenny’s friends and family all reiterated this point. Whatever he put his mind to, he excelled at: pool, home repairs, drawing, water skiing, gardening, painting, snow skiing, construction, carpentry, and, of course, music.

Lenny eventually left Boston for a 15-year career as a cruise ship entertainer, playing big band, Sinatra, and swing music. When audience appetites shifted, he left and teamed up with pianist and vocalist Brian Gurl. The two spent years touring the country, their musical performances including “special appearances” by the pair’s alter egos—Gurl impersonating Liberace and Lenny mimicking Jack Benny. 

Lenny purchased his cabin in Yancey County 30 years ago. His parents were living in a cabin of their own nearby, and Lydia was in Spruce Pine. Between tours, the mountains were home. It was on one of these return trips that he met Peggy Williams, whose ex-husband had become a friend of his following their divorce.

“I dreamt of him before I met him,” said Williams. “I had a dream of this violinist that played ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ and all of a sudden this person walks into my life.”

The two quickly became inseparable. Though they never married, Williams describes herself as his wife. She loved to go out on the road with him, where she would “dress real showy” and sell CDs and merchandise. She coached his singing, helped him bounce around song ideas, and made sure he had healthy meals to eat at home. And he took care of her—he was “a perfect gentleman” who always held the door and, once Williams’ back began to bother her, took on all the yardwork they used to do together.

One of a Kind

Lenny liked fixing problems, and he liked taking care of people. His best friend Steve Casper, 55, who owns a computer store in Burnsville, describes him as “the most creative guy I know.” 

His inventions included a pool table on a swivel that allowed his favorite game to be played in the smallest of spaces, a hairdryer holder that pivoted the function from drying hair to drying hands, and a body roller designed to soothe sore muscles. After hearing that his friend had pinched a nerve so badly he was having trouble walking, Lenny gave this last creation to Casper about a week before the storm hit.

“He was always thinking about you like that,” said Casper.

That was the last time the two saw each other.

Lenny would “step up for anybody,” Casper said, and it’s this characteristic that he believes led to an incident last February that resulted in a felony assault with a deadly weapon charge, which Lenny was still facing at the time of his disappearance. 

According to the Yancey County Sheriff’s Office, Lenny fired a shot that struck a 15-year-old boy, who had been visiting the swinging bridge across the road from the cabin with his friends. The teenagers had had a disagreement about parking with Lenny’s neighbor, which grew into a “verbal and physical altercation.” The boy was airlifted to Mission Hospital in critical but stable condition, and Lenny was arrested and released on a $75,000 secured bond. 

His friends and family said the incident showed how selfless Lenny was. His intervention saved his neighbor’s life, Williams said, and he never meant to shoot anybody; the gun, which he’d cocked intending to fire a warning shot into the air, went off accidentally in the ensuing struggle. Now Lenny’s death means he’ll never have a chance to defend himself in court.

Lenny was loyal, said Barry Stagg, a musician and songwriter who owns The Dispensary and Upper Club, a bar and music venue in Spruce Pine. One of the club’s most treasured traditions is Singer and Songwriter Night on Tuesdays. Lenny had been a regular since The Dispensary opened in 2013.

“There’s good musicians, and then there’s people who can outshine everyone else,” Stagg said, “and Lenny was one of them.” 

Though he trained as a classical violinist, Lenny was also at home playing bluegrass, jazz, blues, or almost anything else, and he played guitar, too. 

But most recordings of his music were lost to the flood. Casper couldn’t convince his friend to buy a computer until somewhere around 2003, and after that he never upgraded. While little of his work is available online, what videos there are show Lenny’s prowess as both a musician and a showman, and the joy and comfort he felt on stage. His sister Lydia has several of his CDs, including the 2005 album “Classic Pizzazz!” with his long-time musical partner Gurl. A sense of fun pervades each track as the violin races through complex passages, dancing with the keyboard. 

“I’m not looking to fill his spot,” said Stagg. “Some people can’t be replaced, and he’s one of them.”

Williams isn’t looking to, either. She’s searching for an apartment she can afford on her Social Security income, probably near her daughter in Virginia—there’s nothing left for her but mud in Green Mountain. Last week, she came back for the first time since the flood to see the homesite and the cross. Someday, she hopes, she’ll be able to spread Lenny’s ashes there.

“We just want to carry him with us,” she said. “Just lay him to rest, properly.”