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.
This is beautifully expressed, thank you for sharing it. ❤️
I've never been to Asheville, but there were a lot of people who moved there from my hometown in the early 00s – "it's a bigger [Ourtown], with better weather!" was something we heard a lot, but didn't really understand until seeing the destruction of the storm and looking at old pictures of the area.
The geography, the buildings, the economic situation, the infrastructure – it is (was?) so, so much like here. The people even look the same – I watched a report from a county manager last night who looks like he could be my uncle or cousin, but every person I've seen could be one of my neighbors.
This place has long been neglected and forgotten by everyone with power to help it, in the same way that I'm sure the mountain communities affected by Helene have been. Watching them continue to be neglected in their time of greatest need while the government prefers to spend trillions of dollars on murder and oppression isn't surprising; it's galvanizing. We have always known we only had each other, so we better be ready to take care of our communities ourselves.
I really hope so, I have daydreamed before about apocalyptic weather rattling Americans out of their delusional individualism. Seeing the destruction kinda embitters that fantasy though, since I think in my imagination it was just property that gets destroyed, not people.