A couple of weeks ago, I visited Washington, DC to attend a writing conference. I arrived early for sign in, forwent the provided breakfast since I’d already had one (I knew about the complimentary breakfast, but I also happened to know where on could find a Wawa about twenty minutes outside the district), and took my seat in the auditorium where the conference’s opening marks were slated to begin.
After a few minutes, a girl about my age—definitely a fellow writer judging by her outfit, which would’ve looked exceedingly at home anywhere in West Asheville—joined me in the row. We started engaging in the type of small talk that strangers at these conferences engage in. She was delighted to learn I lived in Asheville.
“I love Asheville,” she told me.
“It’s a fun place to live,” I concurred.
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I’m obsessed. I almost moved there last year, in the fall, but then–”
“Well, the hurricane,” I admittedly interrupted her.
“There was a hurricane in Asheville?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, a little befuddled that this woman obsessed with Asheville didn’t know about Helene. “I assumed that’s why you didn’t move.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I ended up getting a better job offer for an in-person role. Was the hurricane that bad? Y’all are pretty far from the coast.”
“It was,” I said. “It was pretty unexpected.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “I’ll have to get back down soon. Like I said, I’m obsessed with Asheville. I love The Admiral and The Whale, and I’m obsessed with White Duck Taco.”
“I was just at The Admiral a few weeks ago for dinner,” I decided to share. “I had possibly one of the best bowls of rigatoni I’ve ever had.” I neglected to tell her that the original White Duck Taco is a shell of itself (literally, the entire property is washed away except for the shell of the quonset hut that once contained the restaurant and kitchen).
“I’m such a foodie,” she said. “I think that’s why I’m obsessed with Asheville.”
****
Midway through the conference, I chatted with an older gentleman as we both waited in line for a foodie-approved lunch at Panera Bread. He was also delighted to know that I lived in Asheville.
“My wife and I consider it *our* place,” he said. “We go almost every year.”
“What are some of your go-tos?” I asked.
“We love the wine bar downtown and always get dinner at Curate.” I approved of both of these and told him so.
“We also love touring the Biltmore and browsing art,” he added. “It’s nice to see the city has bounced back. We were just there in February and couldn’t tell there was a storm.”
“Did you visit the Biltmore?” I asked. He had. This was confusing. You could go to downtown Asheville and see no remnants of Helene. You could go to many parts of Asheville and not see remnants of Helene (I have friends who will go out of their way to not drive through River Arts because they find it too depressing), but to get to the Biltmore, you need to go through Biltmore Village. I had to drive through Biltmore Village a few days before the conference. There’s caution tape all over the place and a collapsed Moe’s Southwest Grill with the remnants of its kitchen and dining area strewn about its parking lot.
****
I talked about this phenomenon with a barista at one of my favorite coffee shops the other day. She said it was wild how many tourists stopped in and would ask why say, so many roads and hikes were closed or inaccessible, and how she’d be the one to tell them that the area was devastated by an unprecedented storm only 6 months prior. “I knew,” she told me, “that after a week or so, Hurricane Helene wasn’t really covered on a national level, but I always forget because my friends who don’t live in the area keep up with the recovery, probably because of me.”
I’ve had a very similar experience. I’ve had out-of-area friends who’ve kept up with the devastation and rebuilding efforts, probably because of me, remark how little they’d heard about Helene after the weekend it hit. The barista and I agreed that we shouldn’t judge these folks who aren’t keeping our area at the forefront of their minds when they aren’t here. For example, we both concurred that we didn’t keep up with the rebuilding efforts in Los Angeles.
But, she added, we knew about the fires. We understood their scope. We wouldn’t show up in Los Angeles ignorant of that knowledge. We wouldn’t have to have Angelenos explain the devastation to us if we ran into them in the wild. She had a salient point.
Not two or three days later, I was waiting in line for a breakfast sandwich at Ultra Coffee Bar and idly listening to two couples in front of me chat.
“We come up here from Charlotte a couple of times a year,” the male half of the one couple told the other. “We’re always giving our friends advice for when they visit.”
“We’d probably move here if it weren’t for his job,” the female half of that same couple said. The other couple then asked for some brewery recommendations.
“She doesn’t really like beer, so we like going to the breweries that have good wine or seltzer selections,” said the male part of the Charlotte-based couple. “We love Burial. We really love Archetype. And you’ve got to go to Zillicoah for the best river views.”
Zillicoach was located just 3.6 miles up the Riverside Drive from where we were all waiting for breakfast. It’s not there anymore. It’s allegedly coming back, but as of this writing, it, like White Duck Taco and most waterfront businesses along the French Broad, is just a shell of itself, the building standing, but most of the brewery equipment washed downriver. Ultra is located in the River Arts, but a large new apartment complex means you don’t have river views. However, a 30-foot walk would’ve underscored that there was no way you should’ve recommended Zillicoah as a destination for the best views in our current iteration of Asheville.
AshevilleExplorer 