East End-Kennilworth Walk

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Today's walk took me up over Beaucatcher ridge from East End (the parking lot of the city school board on Mountain Road), down into Kennilworth, around the ridge's southern nose, and finally back up the western side of the ridge into East End. Find walk photos at Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27612120@N03/sets/72157605593018461/show/with/2574711395/

I tell my students that ethnography is an intimate look at a small slice of human experience. What I am doing with these walks -- because of their quick, in-out, superficiality -- feels like the antithesis of ethnographic work. But these surveys are, I think, a necessary preparation. I am walking "transects" of Asheville, getting a broad feel through my eyes and feet for the city's landscapes and variations. Later on I'll settle in.

Today's walk took me up over Beaucatcher ridge from East End (the parking lot of the city school board on Mountain Road), down into Kennilworth, around the ridge's southern nose, and finally back up the western side of the ridge into East End. For anyone unfamiliar with Asheville, East End is historically one of Asheville's African-American neighborhoods, largely demolished by so-called urban renewal, reduced to a fraction of its former self. Kennilworth is one of the city's older, more affluent, and largely white neighborhoods.

I was never more aware than during today's walk of Asheville's geographic and demographic variations: a working class neighborhood made of tiny box houses and trim, crew-cut lawns would suddenly give way to Tudor houses and dense gardens and old, storied trees, and around the corner, small bungalows and even a couple log cabins. Likewise, crowded development on one street would end, and then I might have been walking along a forest lane. It gave me goosebumps to see this variety so close to city center.

The variation won't last. Not all of it, anyway: I came upon builders in the forests developing dense gated communities on once green slopes above town. Like Tolkien's Ents, the woods seemed threatened as I walked through them. Of course, that perspective expresses a bias for a particular scenario, one that preserves trees. There are other biases. Put another way, development on the slopes seemed assured.