May 13, 2024

The big South Carolina schools, Clemson and University of South Carolina, were caught up in the student Palestine protest movement sweeping the country. Small groups demonstrated, mostly peacefully, coordinated by an outfit called Upstate Voices for Palestine.

A couple of people were arrested at USC. Local TV news did a short squib on it. As elsewhere, the central crisis, the right to free speech versus the right to freedom from violence and antisemitism, was submerged in atmospherics like demands for “divestment” from Israel that ignore the complexities of how endowments are managed.

The Israeli-Hamas war explodes from ancient, intractable hatreds. The campus turmoil recalls the 1960s-1970s Vietnam antiwar protests, when schools nationwide shut down, buildings were bombed, people killed. U.S. forces were nearly all withdrawn from Vietnam by late 1972.  North Vietnamese troops overran South Vietnam’s capital, then called Saigon, on April 30, 1975. The war ended, the protests ended. The country moved forward from historic tragedy.

 America has victims of the current carnage, families of casualties and hostages. But news producers and editors know the Middle East conflict barely touches the lives of their audience.

What does? Cancer, now and forever. The American Cancer Society estimates that one in three Americans are affected by cancer, either as a patient or by disease of a family member. ACS projects that in 2024, for the first time, new cancer diagnoses will exceed two million, or 5,500 cases per day. More than 611,000 deaths are projected. That is 1,600 per day.

Because of earlier detection and a nationwide decline in smoking, annual cancer deaths have decreased over 20 years. But the ACS journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians forecasts an increase in cases of six of the 10 most common cancer types: breast, prostate, endometrial or uterine, pancreatic, kidney, and melanoma. (The other four are lung, colon and rectum, bladder and non-Hodgkins lymphoma.)

One in eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Also increasing are liver cancer in women, oral cancers associated with human papillomavirus (HPV), cervical cancer in women ages 30-44, colorectal cancer in people younger than 55. Four of the cancers found to be increasing are “screenable”: breast, prostate, colorectal, and cervical. Endometrial, liver, kidney, and breast cancers are linked to excess weight.

The ACS provides grants to researchers, maintains a National Cancer Information Center, and conducts public health education campaigns like Relays for Life and Great American Smokeout.

While millions are spent on cancer therapy research, cancer remains what it is: malignant cells that multiply and overwhelm healthy cells. The vicious reality is that treatments: surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy, frequently are as traumatic as the disease.

Chemo is what it sounds like: drugs that cause toxic side effects at recommended dosages. The Washington Post report last week that a Food and Drug Administration initiative called Project Optimus, started in 2021, aims at lowering dosages to reduce side effects while maintaining drug effectiveness.

The FDA effort acknowledges that many cancer drugs cause side effects so debilitating that patients skip doses or stop taking the drugs, allowing their cancers to resurge. For example, a lung cancer drug, sotorasib, manufactured by Amgen, is prescribed at doses that cause severe side effects. The FDA required Amgen to conduct a study that showed that lower doses were effective against tumors, with fewer side effects.

Cancer drugs are based on chemotherapy, which destroys healthy cells along with cancer cells. Surgery, radiation, and immunotherapy offer hope of longer life for some patients, but fail for others. My year of immunotherapy cost my insurance hundreds of thousands of dollars for no benefit.

Cancer patients have powerful allies. The American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) carries out groundbreaking studies and research. The ASCO Foundation has provided more than 8,700 research grants in 88 countries. The American Association for Cancer Research (ASCR) supports and funds critical research, and publishes the journal Cancer Research.

Community action matters. Outside the medical research world, order-of-magnitude smaller local organizations across America work to raise hope. In our town, the Neighborhood Cancer Connection, formerly the Cancer Society of Greenville, provides holistic physical and emotional support, medical and non-medical financial assistance, at no charge, for cancer patients and their families.

Founded in 1965, the non-profit NCC offers counseling for patients and family members and nutritional products and medical equipment like wheelchairs, walkers, prosthetics. The group spends more than $200,000 annually for nutrition support to patients It supplies toilet and bath-assist items, gloves and masks, wigs, hats, turbans, and others.

Fighting cancer is big business. At the end of 2022 ACS, which operates nationwide, raised and spent nearly $2 billion. The NCC’s ongoing capital campaign aims at raising $4.5 million.

NCC walks a different path, devoted to core values at a local level. The organization’s mission statement declares that “We focus on creating, expanding, and connecting a robust community of patients, survivors, volunteers, family and friends, and donors to create the strongest, most consistent support system we can.”

The statement continues: “For us as companions and citizens, to love is to serve. We actively seek for ways to assist, support, and provide hope to our own neighbors facing the emotional and financial toll of cancer. Because we are able, we are responsible.”

May 6, 2024

The weather grew warm, I had an idea for a trip somewhere, something different. The big six-person tent was stashed in the garage, where it had been packed for three years.  I hauled it to the back yard and lay out the heavy canvas base next to the poles, cord, and pegs. After a struggle I was able to put it up. I hauled one of the camper cots inside.

I last put up the tent in the yard during our first South Carolina summer, 2021. It stood for a couple of days, high winds and heavy rains brought it down. It took days to dry. In fall 2020 I put it up in our Virginia yard for the heck of it, on the top of the backyard hill. We actually spent the night.

Before that? We used it in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains in mid-May of 2017, 2016, and 2013. It was always cold. Then once at Bull Run Park near our place, and once in the Catoctin hills near Frederick, Maryland. Once or twice in mid-state Pennsylvania.

One fall day we drove with the tent to a park near Richmond to camp along the James River. It rained with monsoon ferocity, we slept in the van. In the morning we saw the river had crept within feet of our parking spot.

Sometime in those years we bought a two-man pup tent, easier to erect. I used it a couple of times in the Shenandoahs on solo hikes.  A while back, on an impulse, Sandy bought two small tents from an online company that advertised they could be assembled in three seconds. Not really.

We used one of the small tents on the Wyoming road trip two years ago. We camped five nights of the two-week trip, on the others we stayed in hotels or at daughter Kathleen’s place in Colorado Springs. Early on the second morning, in Blue Hills, Missouri, we were chased by a thunderstorm. Two nights later, in the Black Hills, wind blew the tent over, we shivered through a freezing night in the van.

When Michael was about ten I took him camping at Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park. A few years later we went on a week-long Boy Scout junket in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We slept in a tent on our Canadian fishing trip in 2010. He and two of our daughters live in cities and like it that way. Kathleen is an outdoors girl who will pitch a tent in a Rocky Mountain forest.

The big tent and the pup tent stayed packed. As years pass, camping is less of a thing. Instead you want a warm hotel room.

But still. You walk through REI or Outdoor World and admire the high-tech, although expensive camping gear. Two years ago we took the grandsons to a family reunion near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We stayed in a heated cabin with running water. But the park visitor center maps showed dozens of adventurous trails. How about it?

Right now Upstate South Carolina is a hot spot. Yankees as well as folks from Georgia, Alabama, and Texas are stampeding here, sold by the booming economy, reasonable cost of living, and nice weather. In Greenville and its suburbs builders are bulldozing wide tracts of red Carolina soil for new subdivisions, apartments, and industrial sites.

But away from all that, this corner of the Southeast still is mostly empty. A few farms and remote retirement communities are enveloped by mountains, hills, wild rivers, waterfalls. The North and South Carolina boundary region is the vast Sumter, Pisgah, and Nantahala National Forests, the Chattooga Wild and Scenic River Area, the Jocassee Gorges Management Area.

Along the northern South Carolina border are Oconee, Keowee, and Table Rock state parks, in North Carolina, there’s giant Gorges State Park. A half-dozen trails converge at the northern tip of the lakes along the state boundaries. Upper Whitewater Falls, the highest cascading waterfall east of the Mississippi, is on the state line, a long, winding drive on U.S. 130 from anywhere.

No one transits these gorgeous, rugged places except the hardcore wilderness people, the ones who trek with 70-pound packs, study the wildlife and forest richness, and sleep in the woods. And you find very few of them. Hours of hiking the remote, rocky trails and along the clear rushing streams that penetrate this world are mostly silent and alone.

The local roads spider through the rough country, north to tiny Rosman and Brevard, N.C., and west to Wahalla and Seneca, beyond Lake Keowee. The forests close in along the wild, beautiful Chattooga, the Georgia-S.C., boundary. Farther west along U.S. 76 in Georgia is more near-empty country, Warwoman Wildlife Management Area and Black Rock Mountain State Park, then Clayton and Lake Burton, a pretty vacation spot.

Highway 76 crosses Georgia’s segment of the Appalachian Trail. Beyond Blairsville, 76 passes through the 867,000 acres of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, which encompasses Springer Mountain, southern terminus of the AT, and merges across the North Carolina line with the Nantahala.

After Blairsville state road 19 leads into North Carolina, then U.S. 74 passes into Tennessee and through the Ocoee River Basin, the scary whitewater river where the Olympic kayakers train. The highway teeters on a precipice above the plunging rapids, occasionally you see some daredevils racing downstream. The river eventually calms down as it enters the hidden gem of Lake Ocoee.

Old folks have their memories. With a little imagination we could rouse ourselves, pack the big tent, the sleeping bags and air mattress, ground cover, camper stove and cookware, lanterns, batteries, ponchos. Then the tools—first-aid kit, hammer, hatchet, flashlights, matches. We could drive west or east or north or south.

The idea simmers. We talk about it once, twice, then change the subject. No plan emerges from the talk. Outside in the yard, the tent is standing, the guide ropes tight and taut. We could do a dry run, it’s been so long we need one. Then the sun sets, evening falls. Although it’s early May, a chilly breeze rises here in our suburban subdivision, 30 miles from the nearest forest. I glance out at the tent, and close the back door.   

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.