Nowhere to Go, Driving Like Hell

Notes During a Pandemic

I wouldn’t describe Asheville as a sleepy town, but I do think of it as laid back.  I’m not sure why tourists have flocked here in recent years—a part of me thinks they just want to drink a lot and goof off (Asheville is the craft brewing capital of the world)—but where we have our house, seven or eight minutes from town, it’s comparatively bucolic, with a cattle farm nearby and plenty of greenery around.  When we come up here in the summer and walk along the road, people slow down, give us a wide berth, and wave; this is one of the waving capitals of the world I’ve gotten to a point where I wave at every car that passes.  I can’t always tell if they wave first, or wave back.  I wave anyway.

But this spring, as we’ve come to take care of my wife’s autistic brother during the pandemic, things have been different.  This is not my imagination; we’ve seen it again and again.  Cars that pass us on the road are driving faster than usual, often much faster than the speed limit, and even cars on the gravel road up a mountain where we take our walk (I wouldn’t call it dangerous, but there are plenty of places where, if you go off the road, you’ll plunge to your death) sometimes rip along.  One teenage girl was skidding around a curve furiously in what may have been her parents’ SUV, and some kind of service truck came so fast we gestured at him to slow down.[1]

And on our third day here, when we were still kind of shaky and trying to adjust, a guy on the main road came whizzing around a curve on a dirt bike and almost hit my wife.  She held up her hands as if to say, what are you doing, and he yelled, “You’re on the wrong fucking side of the road, bitch!”  Actually, walking against traffic is the right—by which I mean correct—side of the road; that’s what she and I were taught.  In any case, he was over the speed limit (on a bicycle!) and seemed pissed at the world.

I’ve thought a million things, of course.  Maybe he’d just lost his job, maybe he was going crazy in self-isolation, maybe he was anxious.  (He didn’t look like a person in financial distress.  That was an expensive bike, and he wore one of those spandex biker outfits that look so ridiculous to anyone who is not a bicycle fanatic.)  Ditto for the girl in the SUV.  Her parents may have been driving her nuts.  But it’s as if everybody’s moving at the pace of the old world, but we’re now in this new world.  Why would you be in a hurry now, when there is literally (as the Zen teachers used to say) no place to go, nothing to do?

Yesterday a guy came to treat our place for wasps and hornets.  He was what I think of as an Asheville type, kind of a hippie, maybe moved here because there were lots of jobs and the place is beautiful.  He has a couple of kids, and his wife had lost her job in a restaurant.  My wife expressed sympathy, but he said no, actually it was better.  She loved being at home with the kids, and had plenty of time to tend their large garden.  They have less money, but they’re not spending much now.  And they’re starting to get stuff from the garden.

Asheville has been a tourist town for years—the minor league team is even called the Tourists—but in recent years it’s been on steroids.  If you went downtown during the summer—if you made that mistake—the sidewalks were so crowded that you literally could not walk.  Mildly inebriated people staggered around in the afternoon sunlight as if to say, Where’s all the fun?  What is there to do?  (Drink more beer, is the usual answer[2].)  There are tons of restaurants, good ones, and there are now five or six luxury hotels in a tiny downtown, but finding a parking place is almost impossible, and getting a table at a restaurant a Herculean feat.  To say the very least, this kind of growth wasn’t sustainable.  Now that tourists probably won’t be flocking here (do you want to walk those crowded sidewalks?), places are going to go out of business.  There won’t be so many jobs.  It won’t be the land of opportunity it’s been.

The land where we’re living, the cabin[3] we live in, has always been a refuge for my wife’s family.  Originally it was a vacation home for her great grandparents, who came up from Florida in the summer, but a generation later it was where my wife’s grandmother came when the Depression hit and the family business had gone under.  She learned from the mountain people how to grow her own vegetables and get along.  Even at that she had to put her youngest children—a pair of twins—into an orphanage.  A generation later my wife’s father came here after he retired from the Air Force.  He had fought in three wars, and the third one, Viet Nam, nearly broke him.  He moved to this cabin when he had nowhere else to go.

My wife remembers coming here to visit her grandparents when she was young.  They led a simple life; there was always a pot of soup on the stove, and they would sometimes just sit out on the yard listening to the birds.  That life is gone forever, I suppose, but it had its simple pleasures, and those pleasures are still here.  Maybe Asheville will regress (if what it did before was progress), but that might not be a bad thing.  People might stay home and look around.  They might learn to like that.

And maybe they’ll slow down a little.

[1] He stopped and said, “I was going seven miles an hour.”  Yeah.

[2] I like beer as much as anyone on earth, within moderation.  I don’t consider it a way to spend the afternoon.

[3] We had to tear it down and rebuild it, but it’s on the footprint, and has some of the same furnishings, of the old one.