The search for missing people continues after Hurricane Helene

CNN
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Matthew Cloyd, safe at home in Illinois Friday afternoon, knew the hurricane that struck Florida's Big Bend overnight would continue its brutal waves through the Southeast.

However, he never imagined that this might have included his parents' home near the Nolichucky River – about 500 miles north of where Helene made landfall – in far northeastern Tennessee.

Tropical systems can of course plunder coastlines. And if the gusts are strong enough, trees might break 50 miles inland. Or, if they falter, they might dump rain in the same place for days, filling basements and streets like soup bowls.

But even if such a storm reaches Matthew's parents' neighborhood, their house is on a hill. In the Appalachians. About 1,700 feet above sea level.

And that certainly couldn't happen with Helene, Matthew suspected, even if the former Category 4 monster showed little sign of cooling down his anger.

Then his phone rang.

It was his mother.

“Your father is in trouble.”

Hours earlier, Helene's nightmare had unfolded in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas: debris lay everywhere, houses toppled from their foundations, cars festering in the muddy water of swollen streams.

Some people were already dead. Many, many others had disappeared.

And the storm was still moving north toward East Tennessee, saturated by at least 4 inches of rain from a separate system in recent days.

Drizzle from Helene's outer bands had settled over the community of Keli and Steven Cloyds before dawn on Friday before increasing to a steady, then heavy rain at 8am

Still, Keli headed to her job managing a cosmetics store about 20 miles east in Johnson City. Her husband of 36 years – and exactly one week – stayed home with their 2-year-old goldendoodle Orion, named after the hunter placed among the stars by a god, and their black Jeep in the driveway .

Anyone who met Steven would agree that he was a tough guy, her son would later say. And as Helene's bands pumped out more and more rain, he kept his wife updated via calls and text messages, including a video of a growing puddle in a meadow near their home.

“Um, isn’t there another front coming through???” Keli asked. “Safer for me to come home??”

But soon the water began to soak the asphalt.

“I think the house on the hill it's built on is fine,” Steven wrote, “but the drain outside…”

Soon the creeping water line had almost reached the garage. And now the tough guy seemed to understand more clearly what might be coming:

“Uh oh,” he texted Keli with another video showing water near his Jeep. “You’re not coming home right now.”

“OMG,” came her reply. “I should have left.”

“You wouldn’t have made it,” he said. “Shit is getting real.”

The next few videos Steven sent showed murky beige water getting closer and closer.

“This is not good,” he wrote to his wife. “If it keeps up, it will go up. The basement is empty.”

“We are…trapped in the house,” he soon wrote. “The basement is filling up quickly…”

In between their text messages, Keli and Steven also spoke on the phone.

Keli later said she had never heard so much fear in her husband's voice as during those calls.

Keli called Matthew in Rockford, Illinois, where he and his brother grew up before their parents moved to the mountains of Tennessee just three years earlier.

“Your father is in trouble,” she said to her 35-year-old son.

“What do you mean dad is in trouble?” Matthew asked her.

“Your dad just called me and said the flooding is really bad,” Keli said.

“The house is flooded.”

Matthew got his younger brother and a vehicle. And they set off – some 700 miles – to find their father.

Hunt online, in fields and on river banks

According to GPS, the drive from Rockford to Jonesborough should take 11 hours and 8 minutes. But according to Helene it wasn't a direct shot.

When Matthew and his brother arrived Saturday evening, the nightmarish storm scenes that had seemed impossible in East Tennessee had occurred.

There was rubble everywhere. Houses were torn from their foundations. Bridges lay separate from the land they were supposed to connect.

The brothers hunted and hunted and finally found a bridge to cross. They joined their mother.

In the meantime, the police and fire brigade, friends, spouses and children had also started searching on the other side of Helene's area of ​​destruction. In canoes, in flood vehicles, on foot and online, they searched for people whose cell phones rang and whose answering machines answered.

Who never showed up.

Who weren't where they were supposed to be.

Together, Keli and her sons found Steven's Jeep in a field about a quarter-mile southwest of the couple's home.

Its removable roof panel was not present.

Neither does Steven. Or his Goldendoodle.

The family took to social media to appeal for information about their missing husband and father – and his dog. Soon a lady came forward and said she had found Orion alive.

She lives 3 miles down the road.

Now, almost a week after Keli confessed her deepest love to her 36-year-old spouse in that 27-character, frantic text message, the Cloyds feel “helpless,” Matthew told CNN.

Like countless other families, they contacted authorities to report their loved one missing. The Cloyds continue to post pleas for Steven on social media, hoping someone will respond and say he's safe.

Matthew wants everyone who lives along the Nolichucky River to check their backyard and surrounding areas to see if anyone has washed up on the banks. It could be his father, he said. Or maybe someone else.

Everyone, he said, deserves to be found.

Once this is all over, Matthew wants to meet up with other people Helene has sent on an unimaginable hunt, relentless even though the stars have appeared night after night since the storm passed.

“I think right now we are the only people who know what each of us is going through,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel real.”

CNN meteorologist Mary Gilbert contributed to this story.