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.
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“You can never go home again.”
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.
Nicely written. Expresses the same sense of loss I had as a kid when they put in a golf course over some wetlands my parents would take me to.
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Thank you
witness my power to induce pain at great distances!
I remember arts festivals, and Bele Chere.
They had to stop Belle Chere in 2015. Too many drunk drivers to deal with. It was fun though
I know. I just remembered it.
Eh if there’s one thing north americans are good at it is idiotically rebuilding things in the exact same way in floodzones and hoping it won’t happen again.
Asheville isn’t in a floodzone, is it? It’s supposed to be well situated for surviving climate change, it’s just that a major hurricane just happened to come at an unusual angle right after it had been hit by a regular storm.
It flooded a hundred years ago too so yeah it’s in a flood zone. The “climate haven” thing was probably just a real estate sales tactic.
From what I could find online, I believe it’s rated flood zone X which is moderate risk, less severe than A or V. There’s areas near the river that had elevated risk but overall the risk was considered about average for the US, most costal areas are worse.
What’s happening there could’ve happened basically anywhere outside of the desert, though admittedly it’s harder to access up in the mountains.
A huge amount of the homes that flooded were well outside the 500 year floodplain. The issue was the dams being overfull and overtopping during the storm.
Due to rain that already put the region at a 20 year high on rainwater.
That and the tornadoes that formed inside the hurricane as it hit the mountains. Something that has basically never happened before. At least not on this scale. It literally ripped while forests out by the roots and dumped them into homes, lakes, and rivers.
Yeah, that’s where it was basically a perfect storm, very unlikely and unpredictable. My point is it’s absolutely rational to rebuild in the same place.
Me and everyone I know will be doing exactly that. Asheville getting hit like this is a sign that nowhere is safe from the effects of climate change. Even the places that have been marked as more likely to survive.
Because the unprecedented will start happening and will keep happening more often.
I’m not that certain about this, but I feel like you’d have a hard time finding a place that hasnt flooded in the last 100-200 years.
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.
a post that reminds me why I am here. tytyty
we will rebuild
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I know I’ve been leeching onto every post mentioning Asheville lately but still:
That sense of community and awesomeness is still here. In fact it’s stronger than I’ve ever seen in libville. I made an effort post about this a few days ago if you want to read more. I’ve been helping with recovery all week and that just gives me more proof of this. Just know, we will be back and stronger than ever.
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