Asheville Walks: West Asheville Walk

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The bus station
The first thing I notice is demographics. There are as many black or brown folks as white, and in my world, the world of the university, which is mostly white, this is remarkable and refreshing. The place feels like other places I’ve lived, and I have the weird sensation of being somewhere at once familiar and unfamiliar, old and new.

The bus arrives on time at the top of the hour. More people than I’d have thought need to get on and we queue delta style, converging currents on the door. I’m surprised how well it works, but then I’m not in a hurry. I’ve put on my fieldworker’s suit. I’m content to watch and wait. I take a seat in the back across from a young white woman, a blonde, with three dark, bi-racial daughters, triplets.

A man on my side remarks that he couldn’t handle three daughters. He says he could handle three sons, but not three daughters. I have no sense that the two know each other. The woman says she has a son, too. She smiles. She seems to take pleasure in someone recognizing the hard work she puts in. Then, as if to demonstrate this, she spends the rest of the journey keeping the three in tight form.

The man who remarked on the daughters spends the rest of his journey ignoring them. He talks instead with a bearded, long-haired, overweight youth across from him about hallucinogenic drugs: mescaline, peyote, Hawaiian wood rose, mushrooms, jimson weed, and so on. They recount a surprisingly long list with recipes for preparation. This is curious because early in their conversation I heard the first man say he was a recovering alcoholic. And this caught my attention because it prompted the other into a long discussion of his own round-the-clock drinking habits.

At one point a middle-aged couple – late 30s I’d guess – mixed race, she black and he white – gets on the bus and sits beside me, between me and the alcoholic who knew so much about herbal pharmaceuticals. I assume they were houseless though I can’t say why – perhaps it is their pairing, and the roughness of their faces, the unwashed over-worn smoothness of their clothing. They didn’t carry any gear, though, so my assumption is probably wrong.

The woman sits near me and the bus seats are narrow so our arms touch, and I let that happen and so does she. I think about the various ways people make contact with each other and suppose that, for some, the bus is the one place they mingle with others, engage in civil discourse. It is anonymous contact between me and the woman, but our arms are bare and her skin feels smooth and warm, and for a moment I feel close to her.

As soon as the woman with the triplets across the way gets off, however, the woman beside me moves across the aisle, and the ‘closeness’ disappears, if it was ever there.

The bus crosses the river on Clingman, which becomes Haywood on the other side, and growls along Haywood, through West Asheville’s business district, toward Patton Avenue. I want to get off before the bus turns on Patton, but I’m uncertain exactly how far Patton is, so I press the plastic strip that signals the driver to stop five or so blocks early and get off at Cloyes Street. This is where my ramble begins.

I go out walking
My aim is to walk along Haywood, wander through neighborhoods, cross the river at Craven (a smaller bridge than Clingman), then climb the hill through other neighborhoods back into town, back to where I’d parked my truck near the bus station.

My intention is to do this through a number of parts of town to get a firsthand feel for the varieties of places in Asheville. My method: take photos at least every five minutes as I walk, keep my eyes and ears open, and make notes, but not obsessively: at this point I want something less systematic and more organic to occur, for the landscape to lift itself into my consciousness.

I turn back the way the bus came along Haywood’s sidewalk through the business district. It is unlike downtown Asheville, none of the buildings is taller than two or three stories. An occasional church steeple is taller. It feels like a small North Carolina town. (Asheville itself is a small North Carolina city but it feels bigger down town as it has some ten and twelve-story buildings and an architecture found in larger cities than Asheville is.)

The business district

I’m struck by two things: Haywood snakes more than I expected of a street through a city business district. And the type of business veers from a North Carolina norm more than I expected: here are banks and diners and churches and insurance agencies; here too, however, are holistic and herbal medicine schools, coffee roasters, Latino markets, and beauty salons catering to beautiful people with died hair and nose rings that I’d have expected in Greenwich Village, or even Chapel Hill, but not West Asheville.

There is an American Legion Hall, several Baptist and Methodist churches, but also a West Asheville Yoga Center. There are a couple of pubs. Pubs, not bars. One calls itself an Irish pub. There’s an eclecticism here that suggests the street is different places to different people, and that people here do business in parallel universes. I wonder what the Baptists think of the transgender bookstore?

The street changes as I approach I-240, which bisects West Asheville. The businesses are a little grungier, less peopled. There is a gas station and some empty storefronts.

On the other side of the interstate I turn left on Westwood and enter an old neighborhood. Though I see few people, this area feels old, working-class. Only a few houses bear the tell-tale signs (Tibetan prayer flags, Volvos in the driveway) of gentrification. The street feels like old Asheville, like Asheville felt when it was young.

The neighborhood

Indeed, I am moved to take pictures of houses and yards that remind me of farm houses and yards I knew in my youth: white clapboards and flowers and lawns trim but not precious. No landscaping: lawns interrupted by rectangular plots of vegetables and flower beds and old roses gone to riot. I feel transported in time. This might be a small town far from Asheville, except, eventually, I round a bend in the road and see the city across the river.

Another thing I notice is Westwood curves like Haywood, even more so. It is rural lane more than city street. That is something to say about large parts of Asheville, which hold on to their rural, Appalachian character, if nothing else than in the sort of planning that went into the layout of streets and yards. The lawns here are huge, farm scale.

I turn right on Toxaway, the city before me, and the landscape drops steeply along a small lane with dogs, and I worry that they’ll run into the road and bite, but they’re on tethers and I am safe. Here is an old mobile home – a rare sight in Asheville but common in the county. This one is old and rusted and leaning, in the process of falling off its foundation. Someone has jerry built new foundations to catch the trailer before it falls. I want to take a photo but the door is open and though it is dark inside clearly someone is home, and I am afraid to turn their home into a spectacle.

Perhaps by making an exception of it (I’ve been taking pictures of homes all along the walk) I make it even more a spectacle. There is no winning with such judgments.

At the bottom of the hill Toxaway spills onto Mill Road and I turn right and then left onto Craven, across from the Asheville stockyards, and then cross the river.

Before crossing, however, I notice beside the old stockyards a semi-tractor trailer loaded with metal cattle stanchions of some sort and a driver adjusting the load. I’d read that the stockyards were no longer in business. But I can smell cattle, and I see the driver, who looks like a cowboy or a country-music singer, so I approach and ask. He tells me the stockyards have been closed for about five years.

“But a man down the road here leases the barn for his rodeo bulls.”

“Rodeo bulls?” I repeat.

“Yep. Rodeo bulls.”

“Are there many?”

“There’s a bunch of them in there.”

It’s dark and I can’t tell, but I can smell, and I see through the wooden fencing a couple of what look like Holstein calves, heads down, peering back through the slats at me.

That's why the driver looks like a cowboy. He hauls portable fences for rodeos.

The river district

Across the bridge I enter what the city calls the “River Arts District.” It used to be an area of warehouses and factories and tobacco barns (and the stockyard), but these are all either empty or much slowed or taken over by artist studios. Railroad tracks pass by behind the first row of brick and wood buildings.

I’m photographing the tracks when I see some colorful graffiti along an old embankment wall. I’ve had an interest in graffiti, if for no other reason than it represents a different sort of vision of the city than the Chamber of Commerce promotes. Then I see two young men actually making graffiti.

I’m nervous to approach – I’ve heard that graffiti artists are purists and like to be anonymous and secretive (which is curious as their tags advertise them). But it's broad daylight, the middle of afternoon, so I walk over and admire their artwork, ask if I can watch. They seem pleased. They do not stop. The conversation is punctuated by the whistle of spray paint cans.

I don’t pry. They ask what I think. I remark that I think it is art. The one declares that it is art. The other, clearly his friend, smiles and says he doesn’t like to use the word, because to him everything is art and calling it art is unnecessary. Perhaps pretentious. The latter is making a piece with only two colors, seeing what he can produce with that limitation. He also says that’s what his finances can afford. The other says he took the day off to paint. He is putting white accents on his piece, giving a realistic impression of light reflecting off something bright and new. They’re pleased to have a wall no one seems to want to defend against graffiti. I ask about graffiti on top of graffiti: there’s all sorts of tags effacing the mural-like work on the walls here. They shrug their shoulders and say it’s all part of the scene. The one who’d taken the day off work said that if graffiti artists like what you’ve done they’re slow to add their own marks, but even these marks can become part of the layering of painting on painting that seems to be the point.

I wonder whether graffiti artists ever think to paint streets, Pollack style. Let traffic add its own random layers.

It’s getting late so I pull myself away. They’re not that keen to talk with me and I don’t have any paint cans. It occurs to me it would be interesting to learn from them how to do it. I walk back to the road, take it up to West Haywood past an abandoned house, boarded up and painted over with gang tags and overgrown with sumac, and then up around newer structures, some of the gentrification happening on what still is called “Chicken Hill” (I suppose because its formerly rural residents kept chickens, or maybe they fought roosters – I don’t know). I turn right on Hilliard, which is now a straight city street, and head back to the bus station.

Into town

Looking back west across the river. Just to my left was a small group of people standing over a for sale sign. The likely new use of this lot will not be its historical use (which was not its use before that, and so on).