The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, October 18th. It is the 14th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: To Emma, On Our Wedding Day
We spent the week up around the Smokies, sometimes in, sometimes out, but always around them, in that stretch of Tennessee and North Carolina where the roads wind and the hills roll and there’s a pervasive quiet, even in what we were told was the busiest week of the year.
I’d guess I’ve been to Great Smoky Mountains National Park before. I’d guess I was taken there as a child. But I’m not sure of this. I knew it was the busiest of the national parks, a product partly of its beauty, sure, but partly of its proximity to population. Both were on display during the days we spent there—the trees shone, the meadows glowed, and the crowd was of a more democratic sort than those at Glacier or Arches or even Yosemite or Yellowstone, which is to say it was more diverse in the categories of age and race and weight and style than those which populate those others. I’d call it the most American of the National Parks for this, but what am I to use those words? I’ve been to only fourteen or fifteen of the 62, short of a dozen in recent memory, and what do I know of America?
I’ve seen quite a bit of these United States. I’ve been to 49 of the 50. I’ve been to each of the contiguous 48 within the last five years, and done at least something in all of them, which is to say I haven’t simply passed through. I can enumerate the many differences between Coeur d’Alene and Twin Falls, and their respective parts of Idaho. I can tell you how long it takes to fly from Charleston—the West Virginian one—to the Ohio River and back in a Cessna. I can discuss the merits of various routes through Oklahoma depending on weather, urgency, and time of day.
And yet, I don’t know it. And this is something I need to remind myself.
America reminded me for me this week, and not in some grand spiritual way. It was matter-of-fact. It was simple. It would not have been a reminder were I not so predisposed to having predispositions.
On Monday night, we went to Knoxville for dinner. The “resort” we’d booked a room at near Kingston was disappointing—beautiful land, but lacking effort and helpful staff (and I say that as a man whose preference in lodging is always, without exception, a Holiday Inn Express, because they have cinnamon rolls and Hampton Inns don’t)—and Knoxville wasn’t quite an hour away, so we went.
My wife, I later learned, had good expectations for Knoxville. I did not. Or rather, my expectations were good in a different way from the good Knoxville revealed itself to possess.
I’ve heard many people praise Nashville and Memphis, and though I’ve yet to make Memphis, I don’t dispute the kind words reserved for Austin’s pop-country counterpart. But until this week, I’d never heard someone speak well of Knoxville, or ill, and so I pictured a city something like a mountainous Birmingham: industrial, understated, with the surrounding rurality peeking through. What Knoxville turned out to be—at least from our vantage point that evening, and across two pit stops for meals on our way into the park the next two days—was a happier place. The surrounding rurality did peek through, and in a charming way. The college did not just happen to be there, but seemed to feed off the city and feed it simultaneously. The city was not overstated, but it was not a place where the gems are hidden. This is no better nor worse than Birmingham, especially not objectively speaking. But it was not what I expected. I was ready for grit and moonshine. I encountered quaintness and craft beer.
Now, do I know Knoxville? Of course I don’t. I’ve spent eight or nine hours in the town. But it wasn’t the eight or nine hours I was expecting.
Later in the week, after our reservation near Kingston mercifully expired, we stayed in Asheville for three nights. Asheville, unlike Knoxville, was a place I thought I knew, rather than a place I thought I had an idea about. I’d been to Asheville twice previously, both times in 2016.
The first was over spring break on a choir tour. Uncharacteristically, I don’t remember much of it. I remember the coffee shop in Rochester two and a half years prior. I remember the meal they served us in Great Falls the spring before that. I cannot for the life of me remember how we spent that afternoon in Downtown Asheville, beyond that at some point I was near the Grove Arcade, I took a picture of the pig statues at the Vance Monument, and I might have had a flatbread for lunch. I remember watching members of an orchestra walk in across the street from where we were to sing. I remember that the inside of the church—the Basilica of Saint Lawrence—was shaped something like an egg. I remember drinking wine in a hotel room, though I don’t remember why we didn’t go to bars, or whether some did but I abstained. (We’d gone to bars a night or two earlier, in Savannah, so maybe that was it? Or fatigue? Or solidarity with the underage? Or uncertainty about Ubers? I do not recall.) I don’t think I was disappointed in Asheville, but I felt like I’d missed it. It was a city I’d heard of often. I’m pretty sure it was on the placemat map when I was a kid. I think I expected a bit more.
The second visit came that summer, during the trip around the country. I’d stayed down in Greenville (or maybe it was Greer—I can’t remember where exactly my buddy’s family’s home was at the time) and spent part of the morning under a ledge beside a waterfall waiting out a storm, either in North or South Carolina and I didn’t know which even at the time. In the afternoon, we’d gone to the Biltmore, making our way through the rooms and buying fudge down by the stables and taking a quick stroll through the gardens before flipping off the front door of the mansion (a consciously odd joke) and passing a loose black bear on our way to supper, which we’d eaten at a little place that could’ve been anywhere besides Downtown, because I’d have known it was Downtown. I remember sensing an abundance of dinner options, and some of the mountaintown aura Asheville’s reputation promises, but again, by the time I found myself my Holiday Inn Express for the night, I felt I’d missed it. My impression that spring had been that Asheville was small and, to be frank, a little dead. My impression that summer was that Asheville was perhaps somewhat sprawling, not not a town but more a conglomeration of people who liked the Smokies than a city of and by itself. I entered this third visit with a mix of those conceptions, and some curiosity, and some caution, because for some reason—the placemat map or the hype it’s received—I wanted to love Asheville.
This week, I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express, or at any other interstate hotel. We were Downtown, near Downtown’s southern edge, at a nice hotel with a friendly staff and a cool little restaurant on site. We didn’t get tickets to the Biltmore—the place was pretty well booked up for the week, and planning the honeymoon had been a lower priority than planning the wedding. We spent the first full day exploring on foot: first Downtown, then the South Slope, then the River Arts District. And while there were signs of quaintness, and a few beautiful little views, and plenty of friendly spaces, it still felt like we were missing it. It wasn’t until we googled the population—fewer than one hundred thousand people, roughly half of even a Knoxville—that I began to suspect I hadn’t missed anything on the previous visits, and that there simply wasn’t all that much of Asheville to see. The placemat map had made a geographic choice, I thought, and the hype must be circular—people liking a thing because they’d been told they’d like it, then sharing that forecast with others.
But again, I was wrong. Or at least, at this point a day or two later, I feel I was wrong.
On our second day—the final full one before we started moving back towards Texas—the place began to make sense. It’s possible this was just more familiarity. It’s possible this was the driving we did around town, through the pretty little northern neighborhoods. It’s possible this was endorphins from the short hike we’d taken—four miles round trip, about a thousand feet up and down, just twenty minutes from where we stayed—before the drive. But I think it also may have been the realization about the smallness, or the lingering mesmerization from crossing that square over by Wall Street in the dark. The ability to cross the city center in a ten-minute amble. The vigor with which tourists evidently descend on the place. The area’s cultural battles, not different from the country’s but unique to western Carolina. All of these conspired to create something that didn’t feel so much like Boulder as it felt like Ljubljana, or like Bath, those old European towns surrounded by beauty and possessing some notoriety and certainly worthy of their status as cities, but small in population. Small in scope. Not sleepy. Just small.
Again, it’s possible I’ve gotten Asheville wrong. It’s likely there are Asheville’s I did not see, of the thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of Asheville’s I’m sure there are, just as there are so many of any place depending on who and when you ask. But I have an idea of it now, and it’s not what it was, and that I do and that it’s changed is another reminder of how little we know places in this great big country, even when we’ve visited them on the relatively high number of three occasions.
So, when you hear someone like me saying they know the country well, be wary, and if you yourself begin to think you know the country well, remind yourself you’re wrong. There’s a lot of this big place. There’s a lot of each state. Knoxville isn’t Birmingham. It’s Knoxville. And Asheville isn’t Boulder. It’s not even everybody’s Asheville.
Next week’s essay: On Stars
