I lived near Asheville for a year, and visited a bunch of times. On Fridays there was usually a big drum circle in the center of town near the bus stop. I thought they were embarrassing–I was cringe back then. I remember the sound of it coming up out of this big concrete basin that looked depressing except on Fridays when it was stuffed with the drummers who ran a spectrum of rich city kids enjoying college away from their stifling parents to barefoot, legitimate artists who smelled like shitty weed. The whole town would basically close down at like 8 PM.
Once I had an assignment from uni to interview someone doing public art, so I tried to get one with some folk musicians who played on the street in the evenings. They ignored me for hours and I remember being royally pissed at them before leaving as the shop lights started going off at 7:30. The street I sat on for all that time had surprisingly nice-looking cobblestones for some reason.
It hit me today that it’s gone. Maybe the streets will be fixed, maybe some of the cooler barefoot drummers will still meet there on Fridays, maybe those fucking washboard playing douchebags are still in a band, I don’t know, I haven’t been there in a decade. But at least a couple weeks ago I could almost pretend that Asheville is exactly the way I remember it being.
Now I understand that those memories are of something dead, to get mulched into the same layer of mental soil as everything else I know is gone. It’ll get flattened with the rest as I put new memories on top, pulped into the same stuff as the trees my neighbor cut down so he could have a big green lawn, the technicolor coral I saw when I went snorkeling at the great barrier reef as a kid, the cigarette-smoke-wreathed couple with missing teeth that I saw in Rome whose now-empty home is part of a tourist “experience,” the tiny school that I went to where you got in trouble for saying “the R word” which has been closed down by a dipshit senator looking to make the world worse for a few bucks more, and the blinking cloud of fireflies over the empty fields that I used to see driving home from nighttime events hosted there. They are beautiful memories, and I feel like I need to keep them beautiful in a way that is very much unlike what has become of them.
The drum circle is still alive. Even during this tragedy. In fact it’s probably more active now than it’s ever been as that’s where people are gathering for comraderie and supplies.
The river arts district and the Wedge are gone. But the Wedge will recover. The arts district will recover. It’s Swananowa and the working class neighborhoods of the city that have been killed.
Probably hundreds dead. The trailer parks by the river washed away along with their children. The linemen fixing the power there have pulled dozens of dead children and elderly people from the trees.
But the drum circle lives.
Makes me want to go back for a visit honestly. I used to see people from those trailer parks on the bus, including a guy who was an obvious pathological liar, but he was harmless and very funny to listen to. But fuck man I didn’t even think of Swananowa, I only saw that town once when I went to buy a violin there (I wanted to start playing it again, it didn’t take) and it was very charming. I overheard some people sitting outside complaining about mountaintop removal with terminology that I had only heard elsewhere in my ecology classes and it’s something I always remind myself of when scumbags like Vance try to characterize people from those rural areas as unaware hicks.