April 29, 2024

We walked up Broadway Street in downtown Asheville looking for a restaurant. At the top of the hill, near J Rush Oates Plaza, a dozen young people demonstrated in support of Palestine, waving banners and Palestinian flags. They chanted the Palestinian anthem, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”

An hour later they were gone, replaced by others waving “Jesus” banners and singing hymns. A woman fervently read Scripture verses that carried in a chilly evening breeze.

A block away, along North Lexington Street, locals and tourists browsed bookstores and storefront art galleries, and sipped exotic coffees and teas. South of Patton Avenue, the main east-west artery, folks sprawled at Wicked Weed, White Labs, Burial, Highland, dozens of other breweries. Just south of downtown are the humongous Sierra Nevada and New Belgium brewery outposts, which qualify as state tourist attractions. Asheville is a beer town.

A week ago I walked downtown with friends. On a bright Sunday morning we wandered through a giant marijuana market on South Lexington. We stopped at Park Square and inspected the statues of wild pigs and turkey, native to the state, and walked through Court Plaza and looked at the unique octagon design of City Hall. Later we walked through the River Arts District and visited Odyssey Clayworks and Gallery of Ceramic Arts. We admired the abstract sculptures, exquisitely crafted tableware, and wildlife figures. 

The town’s big tourist draw is the Biltmore Estate, built by George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad giant Cornelius Vanderbilt. Less than a mile west of downtown is the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr, another Eastern design built with a domed ceiling. At the end of Mass the pastor invited visitors to tour the place.

The historic Grove Park Inn, on a steep hillside north of downtown, is the centerpiece of the Grove Park district. The Inn advertises that every celebrity you can count has stayed there, from FDR to Obama to Michael Jordan. The cavernous main hall is framed by massive stone fireplaces. The Sunset Porch looks west at a spectacular panorama of the horizon and North Carolina’s share of the Great Smokies. 

We visited Asheville a couple of times five years ago when our daughter Laura lived there for a while, making her way in the public policy world of urban sustainability. The city then, as now, was a national center of climate-change activism and environmental awareness.

Asheville is on the outer western fringe of the state, ranking eleventh in population among North Carolina cities with about 93,000 souls, a tenth of Charlotte’s 920,000. It’s smaller than Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro, but also High Point, Fayetteville, and Concord.

Sometimes called “the Land of the Sky,” Asheville is only an hour and change from buttoned-down Greenville, S.C., and its dozens of fundamentalist churches, but really in another dimension.

Western North Carolina seems to lunge into wildness. The state’s east coast is sunny beaches and the stately old homes of Wilmington’s designated historic district. Across the Cape Fear River the country lapses into swampland and brand-new retirement and golf communities. Then there’s 150 miles of suburbia before the bracket of big midstate towns, Raleigh, Durham with its famous university, Greensboro, then farther to Winston-Salem.

Charlotte anchors the state, full of skyscraper banking headquarters, a giant international airport, not-so-good NFL and NBA teams, and the mark of a big city, massive rush-hour traffic snarls.

The midstate piedmont slopes quickly upward along the Blue Ridge, which soars around Black Mountain before plunging south in its escarpment towards the gentler peaks and valleys of Upstate South Carolina. Asheville, though, is the jumping off point to 70 miles of rugged wilderness, the Nantahala National Forest, rising into the Smokies.

Interstate 40 is the path through a few settlements, Canton, Clyde, Lake Junalaska. U.S. 74 breaks off and passes through Waynesville and Sylva, entrenched in tall peaks. Just south are a half-dozen tiny places, including Cullowee, home of Western Carolina University. Beyond is Maggie Valley, then Bryson City, which opens to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.       

So Asheville is the breakaway point. The climate is brisker, chillier, windier. You see and feel the end of the flatland suburbs. In every direction jagged mountains rise and kluge together. East and north of town is Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet the highest point east of the Mississippi.

It may the nearness to nature that brought the smart, innovative people who crusade for nature’s purity and against climate change. They may see their impact in the closure last year of the smoke-belching Pactiv Evergreen paper mill in Canton, a move the company said was a “strategic restructuring and reorganization.” But the closure cost 1,100 local jobs. Governor Roy Cooper called it a “shocking, cruel blow” to the town.

“Restructuring and reorganization” is one thing, but the hard story for Canton is that paper mills always will be a target. Three years ago, driving I-40 nearby, we could detect the mill’s fumes and dropped Canton from our list of places to see. Years earlier I visited the paper mill town of Claremont, New Hampshire, and gagged at the pervasive smell.

That’s a digression—but it underlines an Asheville theme, the public policy activism centered on climate change, and along with it, a kind of small-dimension local savvy, driven by independent thinking and intellectual creative energy. You find the evidence: the entrepreneurship in art, cuisine, small business, local government.

All this builds to a taste for life set in the bracing mountain air: the brewery scene, the bookshops and galleries. The left-liberal politics of newcomers coexists, as far as I can tell, in peaceful harmony with the rock-ribbed Protestant spirituality of the Appalachian South.

In this town you recognize and maybe learn from an eclectic culture foreign to that of the urbane sleekness of the big center-state towns and the tourist coast. It may be many things, perhaps a sense of life, of appreciating the beauty of the human spirit, in harmony with the natural world.

April 22, 2024

The THuGs running group showed up in Asheville last week. Paul had summoned us. He lives in the area when he isn’t in Wilmington near Kirk, they run together occasionally in the flat country near the North Carolina coast.  

Paul, Kirk, Chris, Archie, and I last ran together in the Meneka 25-kilometer run in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains in October 2022. We met just below Signal Knob mountain near Strasburg. This was just after the fringe of Hurricane Ian passed through the area. The rain soaked the Massanutten forest, the creeks were knee-deep.  In March of that year, for the second time, we ran and hiked the Assault on Black Rock race near Sylva, N.C.  

Paul organized an eight-mile run on the Craven Gap trail just north of that eccentric North Carolina city. He gave it a name: “Ruck ‘N Run.” It’s an out-and-back course, four miles to a turnaround at a place called Rattlesnake Lodge, which actually is a point on the trail once occupied by a lodge.

 We came from Texas, Florida, Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina for the THuG rituals: running, coffee, beer, stories. Archie couldn’t make it but the other Meneka runners were there, along with Scott, Kevin, Nick, and a new man, Khalid, a friend of Paul. There’s the run, but the run really is only a sidelight to the renewal of the fellowship, the friendship, formed through years in Lake Ridge, Virginia.

Paul gave specific instructions, rendezvous with him at an Ingles supermarket at 8:00 AM. He led us on a three-car convoy along the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through gorgeous high country here. He handed out GPS maps. We split into groups, runners Chris, Nick, Scott, Kirk, and hikers Kevin, Khalid, and me. Kevin and Scott wore weighted vests. I planned to hike the climbs but run the level stretches and descents.

Paul planned a staggered start to give the hikers some space before the runners passed them. Kevin, Khalid, and I started, Kevin in the lead, Khalid, and me. I slogged up the first short climb, getting my breathing right, which takes longer than it used to. We made the first turn to friendly level trail for maybe a quarter-mile. I focused on Khalid, we rounded another turn, the mountains rising across the Parkway.

Things suddenly came apart. The trail was obscured by a rock ledge. Khalid turned onto a steep patch of trampled turf that vaguely resembled a trail. I followed. We staggered upward. Reaching a level point he paused and said, “Looks like we missed the trail,” or something like that. We thrashed around, then back to our last known trail point. We saw the ledge, the trail opened up before us. In those 20 or 30 minutes of bushwacking, Chris, Nick, Scott, and Kirk streaked by.

Khalid picked up his pace, I was the back of the pack. The trail leveled off for another quarter-mile. I found my legs and stashed my jacket in my hydration pack. The mountains were to the east, the trail soft, well-manicured by hikers. Then a short climb, into another. I hiked, finding my breathing rhythm. I tiptoed down a muddy rock staircase and found some running space. A paved road appeared. I checked my map and crossed. A trail marker reported Rattlesnake Lodge in 2.3 miles.

The trail turned into a rocky climb, then a steep drop, I flew down, that is, flew at my pace. A bit further on another marker appeared: 1.4 to the lodge. I hit a long climb, suddenly a chilly wind howled in the treetops. The trail rose again in three grinding switchbacks. After a turn the ascent continued, winding, paved with rocks. Two hikers approached. “Where’s Rattlesnake Lodge,” I asked. They pointed, saying, “About a mile. Two other guys asked about it.”

I thought I was closer, but trekked forward, feeling the angle of the trail.  A runner appeared, it was our greyhound, Chris, who makes trail running look effortless. He stopped. “How’re you doing,” he asked. I nodded, I’m okay.

“In another half-mile you’ll see a marker for the lodge,” he said. “Ignore it. Stay right to where Paul has set up red flags at a turn to a long drop to the road. You have to come back up.”  Just then Nick showed up. We talked, they took off, heading to the finish. I moved on. Within minutes Scott steamed along. “How are you for water,” he asked. “Okay,” I answered. He tapped my shoulder, and raced off. Five minutes later Kirk appeared. “Ed, Kevin and Khalid have made the turn,” he said. “It’s the worst part of the course. If I were you I’d skip it.”

I found the flags and turned into the steep, rocky, muddy descent. Halfway down I met Kevin and Khalid on their return. “Paul’s at the road. You can ride back with him,” Kevin said. That wasn’t my plan. I pushed on. At the road Paul waved. “Your decision,” he said, handing me some cookies. I ate one and guzzled water.  I turned back to the climb, then thought of the wrong turn that cost time and energy. I would be at least an hour behind the pack. “I’ll drop here,” I said.

Just then Paul got a text from Khalid. “I have to get the flags,” he said. I slogged up just behind him, feeling energy return. But then. “Let’s get on with the day,” I said, thinking of the planned afternoon Sierra Nevada brewery visit. I got in the car.  We all reconvened at the Folk Art Center for refreshments. Paul handed out spiffy Ruck ‘N Run coffee mugs.

On Saturday Sandy and I drove back up to Craven Gap. I finished the Rock ‘N Run course. We had a nice evening in Asheville, got home yesterday.   

Fifteen years ago some of us started running a six-mile course around Lake Ridge at 5:00 AM on Thursdays. We started at the Gold’s Gym. One of the originals, Tom, called us “THuGs,” a corruption of “Thursday-Gold’s.” It stuck.

We did the neighborhood Thursday run for years. We ran 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, Tuff Mudder and Spartan. We ran the 2011 Marine Corps Marathon.

We shifted from roads to trails, at nearby Prince William Forest Park, Manassas National Battlefield Park, and a Fairfax County park. We rented a house at the Wintergreen resort for a couples’ weekend and ran ten miles of the Appalachian Trail.

The drill was run, then coffee. The talk was running, politics, family—and the future. Paul pulled up stakes first, for Asheville. Amir took a job in Saudi Arabia. Scott and Barb moved to Texas, Kevin and Jean to Florida. Then it was Sandy’s and my turn. Kirk and Debbie chose the North Carolina coast. Tom (younger than me) and Kirsten moved to Arizona. Chris, Archie, and Alex still run the Virginia trails.

In Asheville last weekend we noticed each other’s gray hair. THuG talk now is more on retirement planning, hobbies, kids’ careers and achievements. Then the plan for the next run. Austin looks good, so does South Carolina. Maybe Black Rock again, maybe something gentler, like kayaking in Florida. Paul will let us know.  

April 15, 2024

In Taylors, S.C., not far from our place outside Greenville, is an old neighborhood called Southern Bleachery Mill Village. We learned it was built to accommodate employees of the Southern Bleachery, a textile processing mill built in 1924, 100 years ago.

The mill was the largest employer in Taylors until it closed in 1965. A historic marker on Mill Street notes that the mill’s “overseers” lived in eight large houses on a hill called “Boss Hill.” The neighborhood, near the center of town, is still there, but the plant now is an industrial relic, an old brick hulk in a collection of old brick hulks.

The sounds of textile processing no longer echo through the village. An airy, plant-filled coffee bar, where customers sit unbothered and tap on laptops, occupies a couple of hundred square feet of the ground-level space. A fundamentalist church called the Studio is at the far end.

The Bleachery building is just off Mill Street, which is lined by other old factory buildings, some in use, some sitting empty. Farther down the block are three more aged industrial sites, branded Print Works No. 1, Print Works No. 2, and Print Works No.3, facing each other across a parking lot. The Print Works buildings now are occupied by an events space called The Venue, a brewery, a restaurant, an electronic-games arcade, an ax-throwing business, a couple of others.

These enterprises are a local slice of the new business culture that grasps at the strangely romantic appeal of America’s long-ago roaring industrial economy and grafts it onto other ways of making money. Those ponderous brick structures that once housed massive weaving and stamping machinery and emitted deafening noise and choking fumes now are space for software developers, market researchers, and meeting planners. The hawking of professional services has replaced the manufacture of goods.

This isn’t new and it’s going on all over. More than a century ago the mile-long mills of Manchester and Nashua, N.H., Lowell and Lawrence, Mass., and other New England textile towns were abandoned when the owners moved South looking for cheap non-union labor. Eventually the industry, including the dozens of mills in nearby Greenville moved to still-cheaper Southeast Asia. The mill structures are now expensive offices, condos, and apartments.

The massive steel and coke mills of Pittsburgh and its environs, which emitted cancer-causing smog that coated buildings and turned the sky red, have been replaced by health-care institutions, universities, and high-tech businesses.

Relentless technology breakthroughs and economic reality pushed all this change. When I got out of the service I took a job in a small typesetting plant in Hartford. The person who hired me warned that I wouldn’t like it. The place, which still used obsolescent monotype machinery, was on its last legs. A couple dozen employees remained, subdued and sullen and waiting to be laid off. I left just before the place shut down, doomed by modern high-speed typography.

In 1977 I drove from Nashville to Sweetwater, Tenn., site of the Lost Sea, America’s largest underground lake and a big tourist attraction. I was on a work trip to visit Sweetwater Hosiery Mills, a still-surviving textile operation that made mainly socks. The plant used an assembly line on which about a dozen women fitted newly knit socks on wooden forms to stretch the wool. The socks then were picked off the forms and packaged by other people. That was their job, at the minimum wage, all day long.

Years later we drove through Sweetwater. I detoured from the tourist-centered downtown to pass the site of the mill, then abandoned and boarded up. The socks business, like all such businesses, went overseas.

Back in Taylors at Southern Bleachery, the parking lots are generally filled on weekends by patrons of the brewery, restaurant, and other businesses. The Venue often hosts weddings. A Crossfit gym and a baseball practice space share a building on the opposite side of Mill Street. I guessed the rent for that off-the-beaten-track spot is cheaper than for space in a shiny new building on a major city street.

One side of the Bleachery building is decorated with a graphic quoting novelist, poet, and Black activist Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple in 1982 and the National Book Award in 1983. She has been widely acclaimed for her civil rights advocacy, but also criticized as anti-Semitic for her praise for anti-Semitic figures and writings and her attacks on Judaism.

The graphic was painted by a group called AlliedInArt, which describes itself as “a series of actions designed to harness the arts as a force for unity and positivity. From posters to films to murals, this project is a reminder that thought, creativity, love, and beauty will always prevail.”  A marketing company, EP + Company, supported the project. The graphic further credits Adrian Meadow, who’s with EP, and Frankie Zombie, a local artist.

The graphic adds color to the dull brick, but the sentiment puzzles me. I didn’t, and still don’t grasp the connection to thought, creativity, love, and beauty. Walker being the source, it promotes Black political and social activism. But it seems out of context for the site, the wall of a building which some folks are working hard to bring back to life. But to AlliedInArt the site probably didn’t matter.

We see political sloganeering everywhere; in the South it’s generally Republican-oriented, here and there a Confederate flag. The Walker quote is a departure. The Color Purple was well-received by some literary critics, but not all. (Walker refused to allow the book to be published in Hebrew or the film to be released in Israel.)

That oddity aside, the whole site doesn’t require much more exploration. Beyond the Bleachery businesses in the Print buildings, Mill Street dead-ends in a parking lot bordered by woodland and a swamp on one side, more abandoned mill buildings on the other. They wait, no doubt, for more enterprising folks to think up bright new ideas to turn them into something else. 

Moving on from the Bleachery complex and a couple of miles up Main Street you encounter Wade Hampton Boulevard, a more typical suburban thoroughfare. It’s lined with fast food outlets, gas stations, quick-oil-change places, Wal-Marts, cellphone-repair stores, the usual array of boxy, neon-lit businesses that benefit from no zoning.

Wade Hampton runs north to Spartanburg and south into downtown Greenville, the retail gauntlet becoming more intense, more demanding of your dollars with every mile. Either way, you want to turn back to the Bleachery, poke about the old places, read the historical markers, maybe sit for a while in the coffee bar. With your laptop.

April 8, 2024

Passing North Lake now brings joy. It’s almost always a deserted, not to say lonely place at the upper end of Paris Mountain State Park. A few days ago a stiff breeze churned the surface into rollicking, surging waves. Dark overcast hung above. On the west side Paris Mountain rose, thick with new green.

A path circles the lake through thick woods on the west side, thinner growth on the east side. It’s not a large body of water, maybe 25 to 30 acres, so just barely a lake. At the south end the water extends between two narrow spits of shoreline, the mountain looms above it. The surrounding forest rises and falls with the terrain. On sunny days the lake flashes through the trees, deep blue in the shade close to shore, shimmering, gorgeous azure farther out. The water at the shoreline is crystal clear, the bottom visible ten or more feet from shore.

The path, like most Southern woodland paths, is soft and easy on the feet, unlike those of the mountain terrain of the Northeast. The place is always quiet. Few hikers persevere down the switchbacks from the upper trails, which would mean a stiff climb to return to parking. The lake path is set off by five primitive campgrounds just off the water, almost never used.

The park is really not much as state parks go, just over 1,500 acres and within the city limits. In summer kids swim in Placid Lake, the smaller lake near the visitor’s center. North Lake is deep within the park. The sensation of remoteness resonates. The forest is a boundary between the lake and nearby suburbs, city streets, factories, and a busy commercial strip. That is what forest does, isolate nature, the real world, from the dreck of civilization, the unreal world.

We may think that. North Lake speaks to us as other isolated places speak to us. The isolation may prompt disquiet thoughts and ancient memories, as if we look at a pretty place then make it something else.

It may be North Lake’s humble size that summons wonder, but the bigger, bolder ones also are on the edge of wildness. Northwest of here is Lake Jocassee, an enormous clear-water man-made lake, largely surrounded by private property. I approached a couple of times from a corner on the north end on a forest path near a pretty waterfall called Laurel Falls. The wilderness end is lonely and silent. I stood on the shore, a single small boat powered by an outboard motor bobbed a hundred yards offshore, the owner sat waving a fishing rod.

You still want to see the tourist lakes, along with everyone else. A dozen years ago we drove along Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park and then Flathead Lake just south of Glacier, near Kalispell, Montana. At Glacier we got out of the car and gawked at that classic postcard view. Flathead is the largest lake in the state, bracketed by chic vacation homes.

Decades ago we’d sometimes visit Tim’s Ford Lake in Franklin County, Tennessee, another engineered lake; creating it required flooding a cemetery and a church, which now rest at the bottom.  In summer 1983 my parents visited from Jersey, we stayed in a cabin near the lake. Dad and I rented a boat and puttered out in the lake to fish. We caught nothing.

A few years earlier I went fishing with Sandy’s father and uncle in her uncle’s big outboard on Tim’s Ford, we caught nothing then, either. The lake and its world conveyed peace, but mystery.

Way earlier, eons ago—as a Boy Scout I canoe-hiked New York State’s Fulton Lakes Chain, Tupper Lake, Long Lake, and Raquette Lake. They are inland seas, yet still modest even for New York’s vast Adirondacks region. The shoreline of all three from the canoe in the center was a thin pencil line. The isolation pressed in on our three-canoe expedition. But teenagers must look at wilderness differently. When we pitched camp in the evenings, we’d skinny-dip in the chilly lakes. It was all about fun.

Compared to Great Slave Lake (who’s even heard of it?) in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Adirondacks lakes seem like puddles. In 2010 Michael and I flew to Yellowknife, the provincial capital for a fishing trip (Jan. 29 post). Great Slave is North America’s deepest lake, something like 2,000 feet of depth, and nearly 300 miles long. Looking out from our island campsite 60 miles from Yellowknife, Great Slave seemed never to end. The wilderness we saw, like most of the world near the Arctic Circle, had not changed in thousands of years. That’s isolation.

Ten or twelve years ago we flew into Burlington, Vermont, rented a car, and drove along Lake Champlain to the Canadian border. We passed through Winooski and across to Grand Isle, getting our tourist’s fill of that massive lake, massive, that is, for New England.

While at college I knew people from Laconia, in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. It was around 2012 or 2013, I think, that Sandy and I drove through mid-north New Hampshire forest and through the depressed downtown of Laconia, perched between Lake Winnisquam and huge Lake Winnepesaukee, which brings New England’s upscale folks for the summer. We stopped along Winnepesaukee and watched them rev up their big speedboats.

Two years ago we rented a tiny place on Lake Hartwell, part of the South Carolina-Georgia border, for our anniversary. The water shimmered in sweltering August heat. It was a weekday at the peak of summer, but the place was deserted. Serene, but deserted. 

All that is most likely over, in these lingering, fading anecdotes of memories. Now there’s North Lake, surrounded by its park forest, a tiny metaphor for all that wide, shining water, all that wilderness silence of so many places that convey pure, wild beauty. So this is what we have in this gorgeous place: silence, loneliness, but then too, a sense of rest, and peace.