Discovering North Carolina
A week in Ontario reliving some of my past and also doing the tourist thing in Toronto proved to be enough to convince me that great as it is see old friends and revisit old stomping grounds, such journeys back into one’s previous life serve only to accentuate what has been lost and do nothing to satisfy the inner need to make the best of one’s future. So having satisfied that nagging curiosity that comes from always looking back over my shoulder, flying away with Celine to once again discover new lands was an exciting prospect.
Our destination from Toronto Pearson International Airport was Asheville, North Carolina via RDU, the airport shared by the Research Triangle cities of Raleigh and Durham in the Piedmont Region. Bad weather along the east of the country having delayed our flight for thirty-six hours and thick clouds still hiding much of the country beneath us, only clearing as we crossed over to the sunny side of the Allegheny Mountains, then getting our first glimpse of the wonderful green countryside of the Eastern States that is such a welcome contrast to the vast stretches of arid yellow and brown scenery to be seen when approaching the Southern Californian megalopolis we call home, combined to breath new life into both of us and somehow we knew this was going to be a destination with a difference.
The idea of a 240 mile drive after getting up at five in the morning wasn’t a great prospect, my mind still thinking in terms of overcrowded multi-lane freeways, both California and Ontario style, so finding us cruising smoothly along the enjoyably ‘not-too-busy’, two-lane highway that was Interstate 40 proved to be just the relaxing panacea I hadn’t dared to hope for. The temperature was agreeably up in the low eighties, Toronto having been a little on the cool side for us both, and we soon left the busyness of North Carolina’s technical hub to find ourselves out on the open road, driving westwards through a seemingly endless corridor of healthy green trees in their early blush of spring freshness. After an hour or so we turned off the highway to take a look at Winston-Salem, a city that CBS MoneyWatch had listed among the ten best places to retire in the United States[1]. It wasn’t a bad looking place, but being the first town we had visited in that part of the country we had nothing to compare it with. We were getting hungry and eventually finding a large shade-tree to park beneath next to a small park in a fairly gracious part of town, we satisfied the inner man with the sandwiches we had bought in the airport, while we contemplated our first morning in the not-quite-deep south.
From thereon the scenery got better and better as the highway climbed steadily, slowly worming its way into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains until we passed a sign announcing we had reached the Eastern Continental Divide at something over 2,600 feet above sea level. It was all downhill as we coasted the last few miles past the small towns of Ridgeville and Swannanoa into Asheville where we had to climb once more to our accommodation, a cute little old chalet snuggled away among the treetops near the crest of “Town Mountain”. It was an auspicious start to our introduction to the Carolinas.
We spent the next three days exploring with our eyes open for a possible nest relocation. Our immediate neighborhood comprised a variety of homes perched on both sides of the steep hill, as well as along the ridge where the locals had great views of the town to the west and the rolling tree-clad hills in every other direction. Our chalet was one of those that were clinging to the hillside which rose up directly behind us and dropped precipitously into the woods below us, such that the front half of the building was supported by steel pillars which disappeared into the undergrowth several feet below our little balcony. We quickly came to the conclusion that if we were going to find a property to purchase, the building would need to have all four corners planted firmly on terra firma – and the ‘garden’ would need to be level enough to comfortably push a wheelbarrow up and down. However, one positive benefit of such a location soon became self-evident as we got our day’s exercise carrying a small load of basic groceries back up from the local store only half a mile away but also a long, long way below us. After spending half a day sitting in the car on our drive from Raleigh-Durham, we had an urgent need to stretch our legs and headed downhill soon after our arrival, luckily meeting some friendly locals who pointed us in the right direction for the shops – our inclination would have been to turn left at the next junction which would have doubled the length of our trek, let alone the degree of hill climbing!
An amusing little incident occurred as we were nearing the bottom of the hill. A rather flashy looking gentleman of colour with a full set of bright gold teeth in his mouth, pulled up next to us in his large BMW, rolled down his window and promptly proceeded to chastise me for not walking on the outside of my wife when there was no sidewalk.
“My mother always said that the lady walked on the side of the bush? Weren’t you brought up properly?”
he blustered. Well he was maybe only about forty years younger than me, and I had of course been brought up to do exactly as he was instructing, so naturally I felt somewhat ashamed to have had my temporary aberration so vociferously pointed out to me. But we had to laugh as he drove off and wondered whether all the locals were so obsessed with correct etiquette!
Downtown Asheville was on the other side of the “mountain”. So next morning, after revelling in our surroundings as we ate breakfast serenaded by a chorus of wild birds and bathed in the leaf-filtered sunlight, we abandoned shanks’ pony for the less healthy motorised option. As is our wont, our first visit to any new town is to cruise the streets, getting our bearings and a feel for what the place has to offer. Asheville’s historic centre initially presents itself as being unpretentious, compact, very green, and well endowed with older buildings, many from the Art Deco period. Our car-borne meanderings initially failed to reveal an obvious town centre, or even a main street when, feeling somewhat disappointed after having heard so many good things about the town, we lucked upon the local Whole Foods store where we consoled ourselves European style with coffees and patisseries. Trader Joe’s was also just around the corner which really made it feel familiar territory. It may sound silly to born and bred Americans, but for us relatively new immigrants, after so much recent travel to distant lands where nothing was the same as over’ome, it seemed strange to realise that even though we were once again a couple of thousand miles away from home, this time we wouldn’t have to change our shopping habits.
What we really wanted to see was where freewheeling retirees such as ourselves might live in this interesting town, so armed with some local knowledge of the neighbourhoods from the pastry lady in Whole Foods we decided to explore the up-market Montford area, another historic district. Only five minutes drive from the city centre with a handsome small park (Montford Park) at its heart, this lush green paradise built on gently rolling hills was replete with many beautiful, and rather expensive-looking homes, each one set in an ample garden. We didn’t see any For Sale signs which in itself is a good indication that the residents aren’t looking to decamp, but not very promising to potential house-hunters; still if we ever decide to move to Asheville this would be one of the first areas we would start looking however financially optimistic we might appear. We did our usual thing of driving along every little street and were somewhat surprised to find a contrasting small estate of far less prosperous homes, identical wooden prefabs all standing on steel piles, backing onto the northern end of the area, somewhat resembling the small villages one would find outside the grounds of stately homes in times gone by, built for the staff, gardeners and chauffeurs. And this was also very positive in a way as even if we could just about afford to purchase one of those other fine houses, we have no wish to end up in an elitist, snobbish community with no sense of social equality. Indeed we believe one of the more attractive aspects of Asheville life to be its broad appeal to a wide spectrum of society. In the afternoon we decided to explore downtown Asheville on foot and to discover for ourselves the eclectic mix of artsy stores and boutiques, cafes and restaurants for all tastes, with hardly a single nation-wide store to be seen, that gave the town its reputation for being such a pleasant place to live. As the sun went down we drove down the valley, through the more commercial end of town and past an impressive looking medical complex which could bode well for our approaching old age, to Biltmore Village, originally constructed to accommodate the workers building Mr Vanderbilt’s “Biltmore Estate” in the 1890s. We thought it rather “twee” and bore a strong resemblance to a retirement community, something we aren’t quite ready for just yet!
We had to return along the same route the next day as we wanted to sample another of the sumptuous residences of the fabulously rich American business barons of late Victorian times – Casa Loma in Toronto having merely whetted our appetite for such architecture. The Vanderbilt who owned Biltmore Estate had done his research well and the end product of his dreams was a fine mish-mash of French Chateaux and English stately homes[2]. The building’s exterior is certainly handsome and it has lots of fine interior woodwork, the octagonal sunken Winter Garden being especially splendid, but some of the rather heavy Portuguese and American furniture detracts from the delicacy of the architecture and gives the house a less refined appearance compared with the European homes that inspired the design. Nevertheless it was a well spent three hours that we took to walk through, and that was without exploring the extensive grounds, omitted on account of heat and general old age fatigue! The icing on the cake however was the five mile drive through the estate to reach the exit, a melange of mixed woodlands, a stream and a river, a couple of small boating lakes, various farm buildings and finally, a field full of Canadian geese.
Still trying to see as much of Asheville and its environs as we could in our lamentably short stay, on our way back from Bilton we took a “short” detour to the little village of Black Mountain, recommended to us by a charming lady in the bookstore where we had stopped to pick up a few cards and gifts, as being a much nicer place to live than Asheville itself. About fifteen miles north east of Asheville, it turned out to be a bit further than we expected and when we got there we were disappointed to find that it wasn’t as attractive as we had been led to believe and, indeed, appeared to be rather high on the “Hicksville” scale. Perhaps it was just the lower cost of housing there that generated the suggestion which was obviously given with good intent. Anyway the next morning being our last, after enjoying another breakfast with the North Carolina sunshine seeping through the curtain of green leaves surrounding us, and being serenaded by the songs of the throng of small birds easily defeating the distant hum of traffic on the freeway in the valley below, we explored a couple more of the local neighbourhoods before heading off towards Charlotte. Lakeview Park and North Asheville in the general area of Beaver Lake are about a ten minute drive from downtown. The houses in the immediate vicinity of the Asheville Country Club were every bit as posh as their address implied but for those of us for whom the close proximity of a golf course is not a pre-requisite for residential desirability, there seemed to be a good choice of potentially liveable properties and in a very pleasant environment. Grace, where we stopped on the road back into town is another quite acceptable small neighborhood that seemed to have a sense of community, and is where we discovered “The Fresh Market”, a store that seemed to live up to its name and where we met with Linda and Josh, two of the staff who couldn’t have been more friendly. If there was only one very positive feeling we took away with us about Asheville, it would have to be the helpful, friendly vibes we sensed from everybody we met during our stay, something that is lacking in so many larger towns and cities.
One last drive through downtown, passing a protest by teachers, parents and pupils against education cuts, a perennial problem in our capitalistic society, and we were on the road again. Having left ourselves just six days to get a feel for North Carolina, we had decided that twenty four hours in Charlotte, the most populous city in the state, should be included in our itinerary. We opted for a more southerly route on highways 26 and 85, taking a slow detour through Hendersonville – nice main street but otherwise uninspiring – and eventually arrived at our luxury boutique hotel, “The Ivey’s Hotel”, on North Tryon Street in the heart of Uptown Charlotte, our little birthday splurge. The city is certainly quite impressive with plenty of very smart new high-rise architecture, clean streets with avenues of mature trees and a nice little park. The city has witnessed a lot of America’s coming-of-age history, and it is now the home to several large multi-national businesses and banks reflecting its status as one of the country’s major financial centres, the logos of Wells Fargo and Bank of America in particular to be seen everywhere. We only had time for a short walkabout in the evening, but the next day we toured around a couple of the city’s more liveable neighbourhoods, starting with up-market Plaza Midwood in the vicinity of the Charlotte Country Club and ending with more economical looking North Davidson (better known locally as “NoDa”). Our conclusion was that if one had to live and work in a large city, you could certainly do a whole lot worse than Charlotte, where it was possible to find very nice properties within a short drive of downtown – or Uptown as it is called in Charlotte. However, all said and done it is still a very large conurbation and certainly not the type of place your scribe would want to live out his retirement.
Thus, with our short vacation nearly coming to an end, we spent our last afternoon driving the more southerly route back to Raleigh-Durham airport avoiding the major freeways and taking NC24 and NC27 through towns with interesting names like Locust and Carthage and cutting across the edge of Uwharrie National Forest. The scenery was a patchwork of rolling hills, small farmsteads among the fields between the many townships, and at the roadside hundreds of churches of all denominations. Everywhere was very green and healthy-looking, the weather was sunny and hot, up to 90degF in some places, and our freeway-free meander gave us a brief but interesting insight into life in the rural Carolinas. We arrived in Raleigh in time to grab a coffee and take a brief walk in what appears to be a fairly modest city compared to Charlotte, before we had to return our rental car and check-in at our overnight airport hotel, in readiness for a crack-of-dawn flight the next day. As we waited for our shuttle bus driver to wake up, our final early morning chat with yet another friendly local, the overnight hotel concierge, provided us with a slightly less rose-tinted view of life in the Carolinas.
“Yeah, I have a gun at home, all my neighbours have guns and some of them even wear them openly when they go shopping for groceries. I hope I never have to use mine.”
and when Celina asked him why he had a gun himself, he simply answered,
“It’s our right!”.
He was in his sixties, an Afro-American who had started out life the hard way on the streets of Brooklyn and seemed completely oblivious to all the bigotry that we hear about in the media. I like to think his optimistic outlook on life was justified but there is always that undercurrent that seems to permeate through society in this country that makes one cautious about making a move such as we would be making if we ever decide that Asheville is the ideal nesting place for us. Not perhaps the best thought to go away with after having found such a delightful corner of the world.
[1]Nancy F Smith (2012-03-08). “The Ten Best Places to retire”. Finance.yahoo.com
[2]George Washington Vanderbilt ll was the youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt who amassed a huge fortune from steamboats, railroads and other such lucrative enterprises. He commissioned a prominent New York architect, Richard Morris Hunt, who visited, amongst others, the French chateaux Chenonceau and Chambord, and Waddesdon Manor in England. Celine and I visited all three in the last few years which added an extra dimension to our impression of Biltmore. Of particular interest to me was the use of a load bearing steel framework beneath the stone exterior, a design feature which was a very new innovation when Waddesdon Manor was constructed some ten years earlier.