Making Like Terry Gross

This past weekend, Andrew and I made like Terry Gross* and got some Fresh Air by visiting Asheville, North Carolina. * If you don't get this reference, click HERE.



I'd heard a lot of good things about Asheville, which piqued my curiosity. I read a lot of praises about the place, like, a LOT of praises, like the best praises that a small city could ever hope for. Things like how it was one of the top 7 places to live in the USA (according to Forbes), or how it's one of America's Top Art Destinations (American Style Mag). AARP called Asheville one of the "Best Places to Reinvent Your Life"and Rolling Stone proclaimed it was the "New Freak Capitol of the U.S." Asheville pops up as "The Happiest City for Women" on Self Magazine's radar, PETA named it the most vegetarian-friendly small city in the US, Outside Magazine named it one of the "Best Outside Towns", and the author of The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner, cited it as one of the happiest places in the good ol' U S of A.

All this goodness made me suspicious.

I'm a skeptic and a cynic, as well as a recovering misanthrope. Have you seen the movie Coraline? It's story about how things that seem to good to be true usually just aren't true. I don't want to sew any buttons on my eyes, I just want to be happy, and be in a place where I can walk barefoot to get my mail. A place where trees are more prevalent than garbage dumpsters and bodegas. A place where, in the summertime, the sidewalks don't smell like urine.

We flew into Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday around 7 p.m, rented a car and drove on a highway that had been adopted and sponsored by--get this--the Church of Wicca. When we pulled in to the downtown area of Asheville sometime around 9:30 p.m., we decided to go on a mission to find some ice cream. Instead, we were immediately greeted by a drum circle. That's when I immediately broke up out hives. Don't get me wrong--I like drum circles. I like drums. I don't consider myself a conservative person, either. I'm not afraid of music--I am a musician. And I like communication through music, and I like rhythm. But there are drum circles, and there are drum circles. And the only hypnotic trance that this drum circle offered was the dizziness caused by the overwhelming cloud of patchouli and American Spirit cigarette smoke.

Woy Yoy? Oh boy.

This is around the time that I announced that Asheville just wasn't for me, and quickly took to the role of the cynical commentator as Andrew and I looked for an ice cream shop. There were street musicians on every corner with no shoes on who took breaks from their didgeridoos to send text messages from their cellphones. There were a lot of white people. There was a restaurant called the Mellow Mushroom. This was what Rolling Stone considered creds for a Freak Capitol?

"I'm not trying to form any opinions just yet," Andrew said after several minutes of sitting in silence, eating ice cream on a bench. I didn't want to either, but I just couldn't help it. I had read Ryszard Kapuściński's The Emperor. Twice. I was curious if these young Caucasian rastas were aware of Haile Selassie's corruption, or cruelty. Did they know about the Wollo Famine?
I was starting to miss my pee-pee smelling street in Brooklyn.

We went back to our room at the Red Roof in, which didn't have a red roof, by the way, and went to bed.

To my chagrin, the next morning, they were gone. It was as if the sun, as it rose from behind the Blueridge Mountains, had melted the hippies. Instead, the sidewalks were less crowded but dotted with a random mix of fresh-faced people--very friendly people. In daylight, I could see what the town really looked like--bookstores upon bookstores, interesting art deco architecture, flowers and trees and clean sidewalks, yes, some tourist shops with dreamcatchers and tie-dyed t-shirts, but also lots of restaurants and nearly all locally-owned stores. All set against the background of the Blueridge Mountains. I liked it. I liked how everyone was relaxed and friendly. I liked the crispy mountain air, and the freshness of it. We went to have some breakfast at the Early Girl Eatery. We met up with husband and wife Kevin McIlvoy and Christine Hale, both authors from Warren Wilson's MFA program (which was voted the #1 low-residency MFA program in the USA by Poets & Writer's Magazine). They described their life in Asheville--how they write at home, have a flower garden, live at a slower pace, take dance lessons to perfect "The Carolina Shag"--as something like bliss. Their genuine happiness was palpable. It reminded me of what is important, and things like why I became a writer in the first place: not because I have something to prove to the world, but because I wanted to describe the world, and because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. It was just after breakfast and right as we were driving up a mountain for a morning hike in Craggy Gardens that I started to digest my pancakes, started to let my guard down, and started to fall in love with Asheville.



To make a long story short, we had a great trip. We hiked on mountains, had breakfast with some friends who now have a baby boy as well as some chickens in their backyard (the baby boy does not live with the chickens). We went trail running, which kicked my ass. We "trotted" through about 10 1/2 miles of trail just off the Blue Ridge Highway, which is quite different from running around the Prospect Park loop. You can't really zone out; you have to be alert 100 percent of the time because there are roots to jump over, rocks to balance on, branches to dodge, streams to leap over, injuries to avoid. It's hard to be alert and present and focused for such a long time. It's hard to continuously stay focused and pay attention to yourself and to the path that is RIGHT in front of you, hard not to try to look further down to see what to expect. It's challenging, and just as challenging as it is to figured out WHERE you want to SETTLE DOWN. . . what you want your life to be, which, really, only requires you to do one or two things: 1. be present. 2. be genuine.

post-run popcorn

Along this theme of choices, I started reading the novel Freedom by Jonathon Franzen--it's very good--and am going to start reading Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen simultaneously. (I haven't started just yet.) Apparently Born to Run is amazing; Andrew read it in one day and is smitten with it. The book also inspired him to purchase those aqua socks-looking shoes to run in, which look ridiculous and are terribly unsexy and draw lots of surprised looks from civilians.



But Andy swears by them. And swears that I MUST read Born to Run because it's going to change my whole perspective on running and training. So I got that going for me . . .



We in arrived in Brooklyn late last night, and despite the fact that I can't turn my neck or head in any direction (somehow I pulled a muscle on the airplane), I'm feeling extremely refreshed and optimistic. I'm exited about the fact that there is a place out there that we could live in that is close to nature AND has a vibrant downtown that is veggie friendly, is outdoorsy, is creative, is dog-friendly, vegetarian-friendly, and has an excellent literary scene. (I am, though, concerned about how I will handle not living near the ocean, or if the rest of North Carolina is segregated and too conservative for my tolerance.) One question I always ask myself when considering where I want as a home base is "will this place be safe when the zombies come?" What I mean is, will this be a good place to be when the sh*t goes down? Quite possibly.

Anyway, lots of fun was had, and I'm going to post some more pictures of our trip below.
























This weekend: 22 miles. The longest run yet. I see more toenails being lost in my future.

P.S. A story about why I run is going to be published in an anthology next year! The Moment book will be out in Fall 2011 from Harper Perennial, the publisher that made the Six-Word Memoir Project a bestselling franchise. Previous Smith books have featured contributions from Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Silverman, Malcolm Gladwell, Mario Batali, Gay Talese, Aimee Mann, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jane Goodall, Tony Kushner, Chelsea Handler, and the late Frank McCourt and Harvey Pekar, among many others. You can participate and share your story, too! Check out Smith Magazine's story projects by clicking here: http://www.smithmag.net/