Asheville Calling: Why I Claim the City as My Own.
By Vera Holland Guise
I grew up on the mountain overlooking Cullowhee Valley in the 1940's-50's at a time when "progress" had not reached the westernmost counties of North Carolina. We had no running water, no inside plumbling and the Eisenhower rural electrification program had not reached us, so we had no phone, no refrigeration and none of the conveniences most urban citizens enjoyed. Nevertheless, we lived well: we raised what we ate, owed no one anything, and lived in the Appalachian rain forest beneath a clean open sky. We had an excellent education, with the school centered on the campus of Western Carolina Teacher's College...now Western Carolina University. Nevertheless, as I matured into a young woman, I found the rural isolation crushing, and I would look at the Balsam mountain ridgeline and yearn to escape.
In 1971 I did just that, moving my family to Asheville, where we rented a house near UNCA for a year, then bought a small starter home in West Asheville and later to South Asheville, which my co-workers considered "the boonies". That was before the shopping malls left downtown deserted, and before the novel invention of "heritage tourism" brought an onslought of visitors and new residents. Asheville was a small unhurried mountain town. I worked at Blue Ridge Center with the most chronically disturbed people and went on to found the Alzheimer's Association of WNC and Mountain Care Center, loving every minute of the difficult task of finding the resources and building services for people in need where no services existed. While pursuing an advanced education through UNCA, graduating in 1983, my husband died a tragic death and my children grew up and moved out into adult life.
By the early 1990's, Asheville had become a boom town. I had hit mid-life and come to grips with the finiteness of my own existence. I had cared for and buried my mother, assumed a supportive role for my aging and frail father, and bashed my head against the glass ceiling sufficiently to find myself yearning for a more simple, less hurried, less competitive way of life. My roots began to call me home. In 2002, exactly thirty-one years after I moved to Asheville, I returned to Cullowhee to live on the land that has been in my mother's family since 1835. Leaving Asheville was painful for me; my ambitions laid to rest, my contributions to the community largely accomplished, and my children and grandchildren taking up the torch, I came back across the mountain range to live on the land, pick lush blackberries from the vines and stick my feet in the cold, clear waters of Tilley Creek. I do a few other things in addition: I teach in the Department of Political Science at Western Carolina University--a giant leap for a first generation college graduate and a girl at that, and my addiction to community service keeps me involved. But today, I look out across that Balsam Mountain Range and ponder the plight of mountain people over the past century and the role that Asheville has played in so many of our lives. I marvel at the progress in the region, delight in the renewed focus on and appreciation of mountain culture, and worry that another generation of mountain youth is focused on escaping to parts beyond, leaving homesteads and history behind. Will they be able to return when their homing urge strikes when they reach 50? Or will the family farm have been split up and littered with trailer parks or retirement homes?
Paul Gruchow said it best in his classic, Grassroots: The Universe of Home: “We raise our most capable rural children from the beginning to expect that as soon as possible they will leave and that if they are at all successful, they will never return. We impose upon them, in effect, a kind of homelessness. The work of reviving rural communities will begin when we can imagine a rural future that makes a place for at least some of our best and brightest children, when they are welcome to be at home among us.”
Copyright: 2004
veraguise@aol.com