Asheville Je T'aime

We were sitting in the Asheville Brewing Company when the doubts began to set in. A man with ear plugs and an easy friendliness had just served us a cast iron skillet balanced with samples of foamy beer and Mr. V was talking about possibilities but I couldn't hear a word he had to say. I was trying not to cry.

I had the Rockies on my mind. My people were prairie and mountain raised, pioneers moving ever westward and it's not a thing you soon forget. Your ancestral landscape gets into your blood and like it or not, in some ways you will always be the place you came from. Brevard was beautiful but it was a shock to my sensibilities and sitting in a bright, artsy city, I remembered where I was made. Craving one place and longing for the other, I never know where I might land.

We'd crossed the French Broad river, which I will never say without seeing a smoky-eyed woman pulling up her stockings, and made a right on a corner where The Thirsty Monk faced Jack In The Woods Public House. I might as well have been in Avalon or Paris. The Monk was a bright purple building, packed wall to wall on a string of similar tall facades, the streets loose brick that shifted beneath our feet and meandered around courtyards and bright alleyways, each one brimming with drinking, dining folk facing streetward, a la Parisienne. Plenty of bookstores, plenty of earthy chicks with scarves in their hair like me and legs that go a long time between shavings, also like me. (Sorry, my Californian sisters, but it's true). There were specialty stores for everything from pastries to wine to cured meats to dog biscuits, and this is exactly what I love about Edinburgh and Manhattan and all the great old cities. Asheville is known as the Paris of the south, and now I know why.

In Asheville it seems that the culture is the counter-culture, but no one's feeling smug about it like they are in Boulder. Perhaps because you get the sense that Asheville isn't a place where rich pseudo-hippies have settled because it's beautiful and has a Whole Foods, but a place where eclectic people, people normally on the fringe, have congregated and they ain't smug but so damn happy to have found each other in all this mess, and who woulda thunk but they've made a home.

Driving in to Asheville we'd spotted an old man waving a confederate flag from a bridge, but inside the city there was no such nonsense. The brewery was running over with young families. Mr. V was talking mortgages and I was craving babies, the surest sign of trouble I know. I shook myself back into the present and shifted towards sunny as we walked up Patton, past traveling musicians to Hayward and Battery Park Avenue, where I was reminded that there is history in the south, history involving names like Grant and Lee and Stonewall Jackson. After standing quietly taking in the view of the hills from the portico of St. Lawrence Basilica, my husband decided to take me out for a French dinner and we found Bouchon almost by accident. "This city should be a good place to get French," I said to Mr. V. "Asheville has a lot of French influence." Since this is my blog and we're into being honest here, I'll admit that this is one of those things I say more by instinct than by actual knowledge. But steering by instinct is what landed us here in the first place, so I went with it.

Bouchon was at the end of hill where we'd spotted a Japanese chef plucking herbs from his garden to use in whatever culinary mischief he was up to. We sat in the cobblestoned alley, filled with greenery and umbrellas and summer soiree lights. I ordered my first pate and my first Kir Royal and thought, if I can't have Paris yet, at least I have this. Mr. V ordered the canard a l'orange rubbed with cocoa nibs and I stuck to moules-frites. They tasted of the ocean and I sucked them down, happy as any sea star nestled in its proper bed.

We left Bouchon and were headed up the hill when the skies just broke right open, faster than a prairie thunderstorm. Look at that cute little cloud, I thought, and then suddenly the rain was too torrential to see in. We were standing just in front of a brewery, so having one more drink was the only thing to do. There was a deep covered patio, perfect for sipping and breathing in the scent of rain, the bright light on the art deco buildings just across the street, and smiling like we'd won the lottery. This is my favorite thing about traveling. You're just going along in your life and suddenly serendipity blesses you so certain you know there is good in all this limping, stuttering earth. I grinned wildy at Mr. V over a salty margarita and told him how I loved it when this happens. That's when it struck me that I've always said I want to live in a lively city and in the middle of nowhere, and that maybe in this part of North Carolina I could have both.

There are things I haven't told you: there is a Starbucks in Brevard, but it's inside a grocery store and while the local coffee spot makes a creamy, nutty latte, it has the ambiance of a Furr's in foreclosure. Mr. V says that when I saw his first paycheck from the brewery, I cried. I have no memory of this but I don't doubt it. What I know is that in the end, anywhere I go is going to become one more place I want to leave.

The next day it was time to head home. We traveled over four hours in the rain from Brevard back to Atlanta and when we got to the gate at 2:35, after running faster and farther than I have since college, our 2:40 departure had already left. We sat half the day in the Atlanta airport, so overstimulating I curled up on the floor with headphones in my ears and closed my eyes. I stayed that way until Mr. V brought me a frozen yogurt and it was time to board the plane and fly west, west over prarie, west toward home. We passed over a spectacular lightnight storm and watched great thunderheads light up rhythmically from the top side, clearer now than ever the way those clouds answer each other, a nebular call and response. Departure was at the tail-end of evening and a strip of electric blue sunset hung stubborn in the sky. We chased that last light of sun all the way home. We never did catch it.

To Your Left Are the Baptists. To Your Right Are the Baptists

This is part one of the trip Mr. V and I just took to see if we want to relocate to the other side of the country. Photo taken en route to Brevard, just inside North Carolina.


Taos, Santa Fe, Tucson, Sedona, Los Angeles, Huntington Beach, Billings, Bozeman, Big Sky, Missoula, Eugene, Jackson Hole, Durango, Manhattan, Paris, Barcelona, Brittany, and Fraserburgh, Scotland. These are all places I thought I might one day wake up and find myself living in.

North Carolina was never on that list, well and so.

You fly into Atlanta where the females are ornamental, every girl a cheerleader and every woman blonde with her hair teased like a farm boy in a Nevada bordello. Get out of the city and for three and half hours, you can just hear the banjos playing all the way through South Carolina to Brevard, NC, so rolling and remote is the countryside. Every exit promises food-gas-lodging but there are so many trees, you can't see them. I don't believe it, if we're being honest. I couldn't see a damn thing but forest and more forest, and I half think all those signs promising Wendy's and Exxon mobile were put there to reassure the tourists. Where I'm from, if someone does a jig three miles away you can see what shoes they're wearing and smell what's on for dinner. Growing up in Denver leaves you a strange hybrid daughter of the Rockies and the plains. One majestic and demanding father who hurts you just enough to keep you running toward him, and your flaxen-haired mother just spread wide open, head down in the grass and arms begging you to enjoy all that sky.

The road side attraction in Georgia are boiled peanuts, which the locals insist on calling "balled", but I know the truth. All the grocery stores are called things like "Save Mor Foods" and "Lots 4 Less", which to Mr. V and I might as well be "Crap For Dimes" and "Edible Chemicals for Sale". "Why can't we just have a Piggly Wiggly?" I asked Mr. V. We did see a Publix, but I can't help hearing it "Pube-lix", so as you can see, it's not much better.

After all the peanut and strawberry stands, you hit the Carolinas and you might as well have canoed down the Amazon. The forest is thick as jungle to my prairie-trained eyes, the trees so canopied they turn the light old fairy-green until it goes so dark you begin to wonder if the sun shines here at all, or if you have landed on some strange sunless planet where the light shines pine from the leaves themselves.

We pulled into town just in time for the White Squirrel festival, where they have vendors and live bluegrass and some poor body dressed up in a white squirrel outfit, wandering around and waving paws. There are six to eight thousand people living in Brevard, depending who you ask. They are friendly and welcoming, even if the Starbucks Barista was a pink fellow named RayRay and I almost called the whole thing off. There are Baptist churches left and right, Main Street runs about four blocks and two lights, but there's music and art galleries, wine stores and French cheeses, so what's a girl to do? Women who might as well be from Colorado, wearing dresses and sandals, peasant blouses and no makeup, have come for college and never left. The people have accents and I can't help it, I adapt them immediately, saying "thank yew" and drawing all my vowels out long from the throat. No one looks at me funny, I think they are fooled. I do have an ear for accents. People love it at parties, no seriously. THEY DO.

 Noah (who still prefers to be called Mr. V on the blog) and I arrived at the stage just in time to hear the mayor giving out awards to the winners of the White Squirrel boxcar derby, where boys and girls from six to sixteen, all functional in athletic shorts and t-shirts with hair and ponied and un-teased, were blushing and receiving their trophies. They mayor ribbed a mom for holding up the ceremony to take pictures, then said, "That's all right, she was my high school girlfriend. She knows it. Ask her where she was the night of her sixteenth birthday," and Mr.V and I laughed like we'd gone back in time to find Laura Ingalls and her farm boy husband, who were all modernized and twinkling-eyed about it.

We introduced ourselves to the mayor, who also runs the Ace hardware on Main by the cinema. This little town is very excited to have Oskar Blues coming in, and Dale's big focus is to help out the community and grow more jobs. So the mayor greeted us warmly, gave us his number and recommended good neighborhoods for house hunting. "There's no better place to raise your kids," he said, and even though we know it's his job, Mr.V and I were starry-eyed. After shaking hands and kissing babies, we were thirsty for some beer which is, let's face it, what we're here for. We drank a few absolutely first-rate beers at the Brevard Brewing Company, including an American lager that I want to take down some slow river and sip the whole way, then headed over to the Square Root for dinner. It was hopping. Chewy homemade blue corn tortillas and folks hanging out on the light-strung porch, where Mr. V and I observed a unique, bearded fellow in a fancy brown suit. He looked like Joaquin Phoneix in his crazy stage, only without the mad pretension and self-importance. After a wonderful meal of fish tacos and good old cheeseburgers, local grown Brussels sprouts on the sides and Dale's on tap, we wondered back out to the stage to find the man in the brown suit up on the stage, playing with his band, Chatham County line.

Well no wonder.

The next day we drank cups of hot coffee and cruised for houses. Everyone had babies and was strolling toward the swimming pool in this quiet green neighborhood set right into rolling hills with the woods creeping up into the yards, nature just waiting to take it all back. The word idyllic came to mind, but I am city-bred and was feeling a thump of something that might be called panic.

So we rolled out north to Asheville.

Tomorrow, Part Two: Asheville--It's Just Like Boulder, Only Awesome.

What I Do

Late last week I'd sat down to work, ready to input edits I'd made to my Very Pretentious Work of Fiction, when I plum started crying. I know it seems like I cry a lot, usually into food, and this is why I identify so strongly with Tina Fey and all the other crazy, hairy-legged artists. Thinking about  their glamorous mood disorders and anxiety medication, however, makes me sad, because I suspect deep down I'm not crazy enough to be brilliant. I'd love to be as hilarious as The Bloggess, but it turns out she struggles mightily with mood disorders and here I sit, not on a single anti-depressant whatsoever. That's only because I don't have the health insurance to procure them, but never mind that, never mind. For a creative person I am disturbingly sane. But that's not why I was crying, I cried because Tina Fey has been lurking around my yard again, hiding in the irises and putting her hand through the mail slot. I'm sorry, I just--it's very hard, and I get emotional. I wrote to my friend Nathan Fillion about it, asking if he'd show up in his Captain Tightpants outfit to scare her off, as he does every week for our house mother Rachel Maddow, but he wrote back saying please cease and desist, he didn't want to have to contact the police but he would. Which is how Nathan jokes, but I'm thinking of telling him it's sometimes hurtful.

He should know.

Anyway, there I was, crying this time over white sheets of writing and not over my tuna melt, which wasn't ready yet, and watching Tina Fey pull crab grass from my yard. I am getting the hang of talking myself off ledges. I am learning that I can't save lives other than my own. I have heard the answer to a question which troubled me for years, concerning purposes and plans and does the Divine choose to play my life like a chess board? I heard that it does not, that my essence loathes the idea of purpose and so the Divine is pleased not to bridle me with one. Armed with this knowledge, I have naturally begun to consider writing smutty novels. I have read this Shades of Grey nonsense and while I am glad that the world has offered something to please the female libido, for once, I couldn't believe how poorly it was written, how alienated our erotic heroine was from her own eroticism, and I think our Lady Gardens deserve better. Someone must tend them, and it must not be Brian McKnight. It can't be worse, after all, than writing pretentious fiction, and I rather like this idea of myself: a bottle-dyed redhead sitting in her garden with bees in her hair and amorous stories flowing veins to page (and back again, as you know if you've ever written Lady Porn).

I'm starting to hope you have.

I took two days' leave of absence from all writerly aspirations, and what I learned then was that 1) Malcolm Reynolds is one thing, but Fillion is unreliable at best, and 2) my dreams have begun to feel less like hope and more like a thing that weighs me down, and I'm tired of that. For so long I have focused all my energies into earning money, aplomb, a thing that could accurately be called a career to lack of eye-rolls at parties, and for what purpose? My identity  has become wrapped up in 'should' to a degree that drags my heart. It unmoors me deeply down, because so much trying to be removes me farther and farther from the truest bud of my real self, and my grittiest, most truthful self is the only power I'll ever really have.

I am so weary of having something to prove.

Writing is what I do, and I will always do it. So while I tell you artists to keep making your art, I do mean it so, but here is other half of that story, here is how the flower comes to full bloom: I will love you if you never make art again at all, if you earn not a dime, publish not a page. Go and make your art the way you have sex, because it pleases you, and for nothing more.


And so we must learn to love ourselves. I don't know it yet, but I hear this insistent voice whispering that to turn away from all measures of success and back to the joy of creating for it's own sake is the best thing I can do for myself, and thus the best I can offer the world.

So that's what I'm going to do. Now if you'll excuse me, it's just occurred to me that Tina Fey might be after my honey and I'm going to go take her back to look at the bees and see if that doesn't calm her down. Wish me luck because I think she is escalating.

xoxo
-La V

Sunday. Snow.

Sometimes I forget myself.

Like last night, I was reading one of those damned Somerset Studio magazines where all the art looks the same. It was called 'artful blogging' and featured a slew of artful bloggers who all took beautiful pictures of their beautiful damned woodland estates and groomed children and oh yeah they were all so precious about everything.

So I thought, I should write like this too!

Precious precious. Precious day. Precious children. Precious tea cup, precious bookshelf, precious me, precious life.

Then I remembered that I'm not. You know.

Precious.

Thank god I remembered before it was too late. Otherwise you might be reading some ode to the snowy fields right now. While staring at heavily photoshopped children. Or something.

***

I spent more time than is healthy in Boulder this weekend and I can confidently tell you that I am the only woman in the world who doesn't own a pair of knee high boots.

But ohhhhhh lordy, do I want some bad. I want them buttery and tromping.

***

I was reading Whole Living. I always think I should read all these magazines I see every day at Black Ops Job and then I read them and they are faith-in-humanity-losing boring. Whole Living was about losing weight and, best I can tell, learning to match your oxwool slippers to your throw blankets?

Shit, man. Just. . . . shit.

****

I'm not good at reaching out to people but sometimes they reach out to me. So what happened was this: Me sitting in the wrong city reading the wrong magazines getting the wrong ideas about my life. Be more precious be more holy be more ambitious be more better. Then Kimmy calls me and I start to remember.

Thanks Kim. Carry on, my wayward authoress.


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I am Vesuvius and I think a blog is like a polaroid in print.