opinion

Ending a Love Affair with Asheville

Ten years before I moved to Asheville in 1997, the mountains began to woo me. Each time I visited, my heart felt expanded, lighter. The area beckoned my spirit and I decided to move there after graduate school.

My mother helped me move into my West Asheville house shortly before Thanksgiving. Fall was turning into winter and I had no job. I did not care. I was in the land of my heart’s delight. I took in every detail of my new surroundings. It seemed that every street had a tattoo parlor, a tanning booth, and a church. I thought, this must signify some of what is most important to people who live here.

I had vowed to visit the Baptist church downtown, the one with the dome, on the first Sunday after I moved. I kept my promise. That day, I also kissed the ground.

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I let out my breath after my first week in Asheville. Things were slower, easier, and gentler in the mountains than the city I had left behind. I did not need to be on alert. I could drive almost anywhere within ten minutes. I began to develop professional ties as I looked for a job. I met people who were kind to me, even if they believed I would perish in hell unless I accepted Jesus as my savior.

Asheville was filled with an eclectic mixture of benevolent sorts, including artists, hippies, intellectuals, locals, college students, government and healthcare workers, waiters, musicians, rich people, transients, and rebels. I got a job and began knowing people. Eventually, I could not go anywhere without seeing someone I knew. This familiarity comforted me.

My hometown city had become increasingly difficult for me, as it burgeoned into a monolithic civilization of people from the northeast who were happy to shed their heavily populated areas for a small southern city with lots of trees, good sports teams, and easy traffic patterns. Their numbers swelled Raleigh to many times its original size. My history remained codified in the streets and buildings of my youth, now increasingly populated by people I did not know. The road rage was outrageous.

I blended into my new Buncombe county surroundings. Not because my grandfather was born in Pumpkintown, outside of Sylva. Not because my father was born and raised in Candler. Not because as a child I played with lightning bugs on my grandparents’ front lawn, with Mount Pisgah looming in the distance. I was home because the glorious mountains belonged as much to me as anyone.

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It was a shock when, eight years later, I found myself returning to Raleigh. My mother was sick and I needed to be near her. In brutal July heat, I left Asheville, to make a new home and start a new job. My mother would live three more years.

Unexpectedly, I found myself working in a nearby academic dream job, one I had never imagined. Still, I had moved to Raleigh for my mother, not for me, and after she died, I yearned for the mountains.

Eventually, I found acceptable employment and moved back to Asheville, into the kind of old house I had always dreamed about, one facing west so I could see mountains from my windows. I vowed to never leave again.

Yet, slowly but surely, I began to experience challenges I had not anticipated. Asheville was growing; I lived in and near perpetual construction. New hotels were added to nearby downtown, one after another after another. For a while, that was fine with me. Asheville was always on some kind of ten best list. I understood why so many people loved to visit.

I had other challenges. Neighbors on my street moved elsewhere so they could (illegally) rent their expensive homes to visitors who preferred privacy to nearby hotels. One such visitor from next door, a drunken man, tried to get into my house one summer evening, thinking it was his vacation house.

For the first time in my life, I began to encounter people who were rude, unfriendly, or aggressive. One man began to beat his dog in front of me as we passed on the street. When I asked him to please stop he became enraged; I was afraid he might assault me. I was almost run over by silent bicyclists who refused to announce their speed as they came up behind me. A drunk woman I did not know began to yell curses at me one day in the street. A drunk man drove into my garbage and recycling carts one evening, causing such a bang that, the next day, a neighbor asked if there had been a car crash at my house. I could name many more – and worse – examples.

I did not decide to leave Asheville because of bad behavior, it is ubiquitous. I left Asheville because its quality of life had permanently shifted focus, from residents to tourists. Hotels were changing the city – its streets, restaurants, parking, and more: AC (Marriott), Aloft, Arras, Cambria, Element, Foundary Inn, Garden Inn (Hilton), Grand Bohemian, Grove Park Omni expansion, Hyatt Place, Indigo, Parisian, Village (Biltmore), Windsor Boutique . . .

I will not live in Asheville again, but I might visit. There are some lovely hotels to choose from, and I know some great restaurants.

Donna Helen Crisp is a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist and author who lives in Raleigh.