On our way out of Smoky Mountain National Park, we drove through Cherokee, North Carolina. It is a Reservation for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation—those people who remain on the traditional homeland of the tribe. The majority of the Cherokee were removed to Oklahoma and are recognized now as the Western Band. Today, there are about 14,000 members living in the 56,000 acres of reservation territory in North Carolina. The parts of town closest to the SMNP have been reduced to caricature. There, it is synonymous with Pigeon Forge. There are lots of Minnetonka moccasins for sale and turquoise available that is not indigenous to the area or remotely associated with the Cherokee. That comment made, all municipal and street signs are in English and Cherokee, using the syllabary developed by Sequoyah in the 1800s, and the governmental structure is tribal with a principal chief at its head. We spent the morning at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, a place I think my sister Kristen—whose great compassion was evident upon her reading of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee—would love and have a difficult time working her way through. Some exhibits are hokey with holographic videos and dioramas, but there is a wealth of information—most of which I had never encountered before—and I think—for anyone who is going to pick up some arrowheads and a shot glass that says you were in Cherokee—you should earn your souvenirs with a visit. The halls dedicated to the treaties and the Indian Removal Act, the role of Cherokee women and the Trail of Tears were particularly captivating to me.
We doubled back to the Blue Ridge Parkway and took that from Cherokee to Asheville. It was alternately breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly death defying. There’s a reason they’re called Smoky Mountains and the rains we experienced each day gave way to mist and fog and mountain smoke that decreased visibility to 20 or 30 feet in some places. Cherokee to Asheville is downhill most of the way and that hill is a mountain with sharp turns and without guard rails. Chris tells me it was stunning. I mostly had my eyes clamped closed. I did have my eyes open once and spotted a wild turkey at the side of the road.
Our B&B isn’t in Asheville but in the next ville over: Hendersonville, which is also a charming town with shops and restaurants and a General Store that has been in constant operation since 1838 and still has wooden floors. It’s possible it has always sold mostly crap, but now it definitely does. In any case, as I mentioned last time, the B&B is so called because there is a bed and we were served breakfast but it isn’t what you’re picturing if you fancy yourself B&B goers. In truth, it isn’t really in Hendersonville either; it’s more out in the middle of nowhere up a dirt road and behind a horse farm and then into the woods. We passed some stray dogs and two waif-like children on our way and when we arrived we weren’t sure we had because we found ourselves in front of a house with no signs of commercial endeavor. Our hostess ushered us into our two room suite. The first has a jukebox and pool table and a Lazy Boy and a rocker. Attached is a closet with a refrigerator in it, in which the family who resides here keeps some of their food but when they’re getting it they’ll respect our privacy. We can use it too, if we want… Our bedroom is off the billiards room and its decorated like a motel at the seaside: starfish are a prominent theme and each sheet of wallpaper almost meets the next. They’re clearly trying hard; they’ve painted clouds on the ceiling and there was a single pink long stem rose in a bud vase on an end table when we arrived, but they have three beast-size dogs and the whole place smells quite a bit like they got wet and ran through shaking their pheromones on every last piece of furniture and then rolling it around on the carpet. All of this would fall into the “you get what you pay for” category and not fall into the creepy one until we asked about our room key and were told that our host was never given any keys for any of the doors in the house and asked us to please not lock our room door else they would have to remove the door to get in. Again, they’d be sure to respect our privacy while we were here with them. None of it mattered because Chris and I hadn’t showered in four days and were desperate to get away from her and out of our campfire-stinking clothes. After good hot showers, we left our doors unlocked and went into Asheville to get the lay of the land.
I could live in Asheville. I know I could live in Asheville because I was raised in a town exactly like it. Substitute bluegrass music for Frank Lloyd Wright and Asheville is nearly identical to Oak Park. It is littered with boutiques and art galleries and ice cream shops and cafes and actually has some of the same shops as are in Oak Park. Chris was going to trade in the Saturn for a Subaru so we would fit in better and for my part I was going to plaster myself in FREE TIBET bumper stickers but I decided I looked enough like all of the other Southern Appalachian lesbians who had relocated here that I didn’t need to do much more. We wandered up and down hill, into and out of shops and settled on an Indian place named Mela for dinner. Given the fact that there were no Indians to be seen anywhere in the restaurant, including in the kitchen, which was open air, dinner was quite good. After, we went to Pack Place, a park in the center of the historic district, where there was a Shindig. There were a ton of bluegrass bands and cloggers on stage and pick up song circles around the park. It was a lovely way to finish the evening.
Any disparagement of the B&B stopped with the second B. There were three people catering to the two of us and we were served frittata with sundried tomatoes, spinach and feta with a potato crust, grits, muffins, strawberry/banana smoothies and coffee all of which we enjoyed on the lanai abutting the woods. We chatted a bit and it turns out that our hostess lived in Chicago—at 75th and Western—for a time. She was doing mission work. We had to appreciate the irony of Southern Appalachians coming to Chicago to do mission work at the same time that Chicagoans are going to Southern Appalachia to do mission work. They left us to our breakfast and that kind of decadence first thing in the morning led to a different kind of decadence: we napped right after, but we made it to Hendersonville by noon. It’s a smaller and calmer than Asheville and mostly closed on Sundays but it was a nice stroll and we actually returned there for dinner, eating at a place called The Black Rose and enjoying decent Irish food. Between, we spent several hours in Asheville, in and out of different shops than those we had visited the day before and taking a rather leisurely break in a coffee shop mid day, something I don’t think we’ve ever done at home but we have enjoyed more than once on vacation.
Returning home, we visited the Mill Pond Cemetery and found several graves of men who had served in the Confederate States Army. It was a tiny graveyard and we left when a woman came to tend the grave of a loved one. We’re back now and Chris is working on a new song about Jesus coming back to Kentucky. You should ask him to sing it; so far, it’s pretty good.
We doubled back to the Blue Ridge Parkway and took that from Cherokee to Asheville. It was alternately breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly death defying. There’s a reason they’re called Smoky Mountains and the rains we experienced each day gave way to mist and fog and mountain smoke that decreased visibility to 20 or 30 feet in some places. Cherokee to Asheville is downhill most of the way and that hill is a mountain with sharp turns and without guard rails. Chris tells me it was stunning. I mostly had my eyes clamped closed. I did have my eyes open once and spotted a wild turkey at the side of the road.
Our B&B isn’t in Asheville but in the next ville over: Hendersonville, which is also a charming town with shops and restaurants and a General Store that has been in constant operation since 1838 and still has wooden floors. It’s possible it has always sold mostly crap, but now it definitely does. In any case, as I mentioned last time, the B&B is so called because there is a bed and we were served breakfast but it isn’t what you’re picturing if you fancy yourself B&B goers. In truth, it isn’t really in Hendersonville either; it’s more out in the middle of nowhere up a dirt road and behind a horse farm and then into the woods. We passed some stray dogs and two waif-like children on our way and when we arrived we weren’t sure we had because we found ourselves in front of a house with no signs of commercial endeavor. Our hostess ushered us into our two room suite. The first has a jukebox and pool table and a Lazy Boy and a rocker. Attached is a closet with a refrigerator in it, in which the family who resides here keeps some of their food but when they’re getting it they’ll respect our privacy. We can use it too, if we want… Our bedroom is off the billiards room and its decorated like a motel at the seaside: starfish are a prominent theme and each sheet of wallpaper almost meets the next. They’re clearly trying hard; they’ve painted clouds on the ceiling and there was a single pink long stem rose in a bud vase on an end table when we arrived, but they have three beast-size dogs and the whole place smells quite a bit like they got wet and ran through shaking their pheromones on every last piece of furniture and then rolling it around on the carpet. All of this would fall into the “you get what you pay for” category and not fall into the creepy one until we asked about our room key and were told that our host was never given any keys for any of the doors in the house and asked us to please not lock our room door else they would have to remove the door to get in. Again, they’d be sure to respect our privacy while we were here with them. None of it mattered because Chris and I hadn’t showered in four days and were desperate to get away from her and out of our campfire-stinking clothes. After good hot showers, we left our doors unlocked and went into Asheville to get the lay of the land.
I could live in Asheville. I know I could live in Asheville because I was raised in a town exactly like it. Substitute bluegrass music for Frank Lloyd Wright and Asheville is nearly identical to Oak Park. It is littered with boutiques and art galleries and ice cream shops and cafes and actually has some of the same shops as are in Oak Park. Chris was going to trade in the Saturn for a Subaru so we would fit in better and for my part I was going to plaster myself in FREE TIBET bumper stickers but I decided I looked enough like all of the other Southern Appalachian lesbians who had relocated here that I didn’t need to do much more. We wandered up and down hill, into and out of shops and settled on an Indian place named Mela for dinner. Given the fact that there were no Indians to be seen anywhere in the restaurant, including in the kitchen, which was open air, dinner was quite good. After, we went to Pack Place, a park in the center of the historic district, where there was a Shindig. There were a ton of bluegrass bands and cloggers on stage and pick up song circles around the park. It was a lovely way to finish the evening.
Any disparagement of the B&B stopped with the second B. There were three people catering to the two of us and we were served frittata with sundried tomatoes, spinach and feta with a potato crust, grits, muffins, strawberry/banana smoothies and coffee all of which we enjoyed on the lanai abutting the woods. We chatted a bit and it turns out that our hostess lived in Chicago—at 75th and Western—for a time. She was doing mission work. We had to appreciate the irony of Southern Appalachians coming to Chicago to do mission work at the same time that Chicagoans are going to Southern Appalachia to do mission work. They left us to our breakfast and that kind of decadence first thing in the morning led to a different kind of decadence: we napped right after, but we made it to Hendersonville by noon. It’s a smaller and calmer than Asheville and mostly closed on Sundays but it was a nice stroll and we actually returned there for dinner, eating at a place called The Black Rose and enjoying decent Irish food. Between, we spent several hours in Asheville, in and out of different shops than those we had visited the day before and taking a rather leisurely break in a coffee shop mid day, something I don’t think we’ve ever done at home but we have enjoyed more than once on vacation.
Returning home, we visited the Mill Pond Cemetery and found several graves of men who had served in the Confederate States Army. It was a tiny graveyard and we left when a woman came to tend the grave of a loved one. We’re back now and Chris is working on a new song about Jesus coming back to Kentucky. You should ask him to sing it; so far, it’s pretty good.
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