Asheville is a mountain town, tainted by polluted air that is blown up from the industrial wastelands of the piedmont (
pie'monte in Italian, for some reason, which means
foot of the mountains), those are the flat lands of South Carolina that stretch off towards Greenville and the sea. However Asheville's status of air quality as bad as Los Angeles is hard to credit when you are in the city of a freezing cold afternoon under a bright mountain sun doing it's best to give you sunburn. Asheville is one of those cities that has a concentration of residents who are far more liberal than surrounding rural areas, and Appalachia is nowhere near as urban, and hippy and faux rugged as the residents of well-to-do Asheville.
Unusually High Level Of STDs the banner headline of the local newspaper was screaming last night as we strolled into the grocery store.
New Reports of Syphilis Oddly High continued the paper speaking of Buncombe county, of which Asheville is the seat. "Higher proportion of gays," my sister-in-law said laconically, as only a physician can when speaking of something as bizarre as syphilis. I guess that sums up Asheville's place in rural western North Carolina, oddly syphilictic. It is, though a divine city, one of those places whose fame precedes it and is becoming annoyingly popular, much to the chagrin of local residents:
Another, less arresting page of the newspaper proclaimed North Carolina to be one of the fastest growing states in the nation with population growth around ten percent. It's not surprising really as for most people the climate is mild (not everyone I am told is as neurotic as I am about cold weather) and Asheville was plunked down amidst incredible scenery with a University campus, relatively low cost housing, trails for biking and walking, rivers for fishing and rafting and miles of agricultural land to feed the back-to-basics movement that has thrived up here.
House prices have dropped I am told but not plummeted. Roads are being widened and buildings are being built, though they have done a nice job of preserving the past:
And the St Lawrence Cathedral glowing in a mountain sunset in the middle of the hilly city:
My sister-in-law (the physician) hankers after a low income apartment in the middle of the city though with some chagrin my brother-in-law (a retired University professor) is forced to confess his income is low enough but he has too many assets. Perhaps the melt down will take care of that. These units are centered where people can walk to almost anything they need downtown:
Pigeons like the old fashioned touches on these splendid brick buildings:
This is a modern city too, and I have to confess this was the first place anywhere I had seen an outdoor climbing wall overhanging a public street:
Asheville has embraced the new/old urbanism of total mixed use with local stores downstairs and residential units upstairs, giving the city a well used, lived in look at all hours:
It was a splendid joke for my brother-in-law when we showed up totally inadequately dressed in sweatshirts and long pants, facing the coldest nights of the year. The air was so cold and crisp my clothes felt ironed onto my body with a sheet of ice. My nose ached and my ears itched until my nephew found me a spare wool watch cap. My wife took to wearing her scarf in the Russian style, wound round her head. You know it's bad when the locals are complaining about the temperatures and everywhere I looked people were bundled up against the biting wind:
I spotted a vendor, badly under dressed selling stuff from a street cart and looking horribly cheerful as frostbite consumed his body:
Of course it's entirely possible he was out of the ghastly cutting wind and by that time the temperature may have risen to a bold 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Some few people lingered on the sidewalks as the sun went down, but my hands were trembling by now and I had forgotten my gorilla pod tripod in Florida.
Others took refuge in any of the wild variety of small intimate restaurants found all over the city. I doubt this place holds a candle to the worst such restaurant in Key West, but I'm sure they do the best they can (sniff!):
We stopped in for pizza and refreshments at a cheerful Italian place where sister-in-law and brother-in-law made a fuss of their newest one year old grandson:
The pizza was excellent but the waitress mistook us for concentration camp inmates and started abusing us so we left (they made a mistake on the check, overcharged us and took umbrage when we pointed out the mistake. Weird) and took to the streets like Bosnian refugees seeking shelter from the increasingly vicious breeze. Asheville by night is decidedly pretty with swooping streets and cheerful storefronts everywhere. This isn't a downtown in decline:
With my sister-in-law's passion for all things Indian it's hardly surprising we ended up in a place called Mule, I think which far from being an obdurate horse was actually a suave and upscale Hindu kind of place with upscale waitresses who cracked obscure Hindu jokes and served us impeccably making me feel like a lumpen prole of the first order. It was good grub though, and we survived the billing process unscathed. I think Asheville is just another of those University towns where the wait staff are all actually lightly disguised artists and waiting tables is just a phase until they are discovered.
My nephew mused after he saw it, that this picture would have come out much better if he hadn't been playing the fool and I couldn't disagree, but we were out of time and the car was out there somewhere turning into an igloo, and we had to run and get into it before the blood froze in our veins. I am nowhere near converting to the religion that requires the stated belief that different seasons are a Good Thing. I just hate being cold, and I know it. I miss Key West.
It has always struck me as very old fashioned to stop at a Florida roadside stand and buy citrus fruit. Why bother to haul Florida grapefruit 1500 miles in the trunk of the car these days? This, when fruit from all round the world is shipped to us in such a continuous stream that we don't even know anymore when the season is for the food we eat. Grapes from Chile, tomatoes from Mexico, asparagus from California...and citrus from Citra, Florida.
We left Ocala after breakfast and took off for Jacksonville seventy miles down Highway 301 across the top of the state which is all citrus groves, as it turns out, or at least a lot of it is. Interspersed with pine forests and horse ranches and...roadside stands. We were cruising the four lane when my wife said out of nowhere. "I think I'd like a fresh squeezed orange juice."
"We should stop," I said. "No," she said. "We'll stop at the next one we see." But I knew better so we pulled a (legal) U-turn and headed in. In to the stupid old fashioned citrus stand that has been superseded by international shipments of fruit.
It was a blast actually. We bought two bags of grapefruit for five bucks and for another five we got a bag of tangerines, all piled up and ready to go:
I'm pretty sure if you shop a lot you wouldn't be surprised by the interior of the store, cookies, jams, mustards honeys and all the bric-a-brac one should probably expect in a store that sells oranges and lemons...
I wasn't about to be seen walking around in one but I took a quick picture to remind myself where I was:
And the old fashioned truck might look cute but orange processing has apparently moved along a bit with the times:
When I lived in Fort Myers almost twenty years ago (oops!) I used to ride across the state to visit a friend in Palm Beach and a half hour out in the country I would ride towards LaBelle which in those days, and may in these days for all I know, had an orange processing plant by the side of the highway, west of the town. When they were working, it smelled like the sweetest orange sponge cake I had ever eaten as a child, and my nose would twitch under my helmet like a dog as a I passed by. Oranges and bananas, some of my favorite fruit and in Florida they grow together:
Take that you ski fanatics hoping for snow and ice this Christmas Day. Put me in an orange grove when the fruit are ripening and I will be happy.
We got back in the car clutching a quart (liter) of sweet fresh orange juice snagged for just three bucks and set off again down the highway.
That was definitely not my last stop at an orange shop on a Florida highway. But next time I'm going without my wife because I have a feeling an orange flavored chocolate something might taste good while on the seat of a Bonneville. It's worth remembering too, not a hundred years ago, oranges were so rare and expensive they were treasured Christmas gifts. As they should be.
Except perhaps not so much around Christmas time as the crowds are monstrous, and we got a taste of the crowding on the long drive in, past the carriage house photographed above:
Inside the massive mansion we got lost and separated all eight of us (including two infants) so we paused to regroup, and as we paused we realised the house was packed, people were streaming through in an endless crocodile of gawping visitors, bundled up against the frigid air outside:
And barely warmer inside the cool, somewhat heated interior of the Vanderbilt mansion. Which as they were celebrating Christmas like everybody else in Asheville, was decorated for the season:
And in the sun room just inside the entrance three hardy women sat at the piano and tinkled bravely away at Tchaikovsky as the Arctic blasts blew through the entranceway crowded with visitors filing slowly inside. I tell you, Charles Dickens wasn't in it, it was all pure nostalgia and quite wonderful :
The Vanderbilt mansion outside Asheville is a national landmark, like the Vizcaya Mansion I wrote up earlier on a visit to Miami. It has all the miles of corridors and rooms and crazy luxuries of the golden ages of decades past. It also has a website of it's own for those interested in hunting down facts and figures; goggle it and rejoice in what you find. Ours was a family visit, and pretty soon we found we had come at the wrong time of year, it was just too crowded:
The Biltmore House was supposed to exist as a working farm and it is still surrounded by acres of land. It is a major employer in Asheville, and it produces all manner of food products, not least wine:
The Mansion is the centerpiece of course with its heavy dark furniture, it's medieval tapestries, paintings and carvings.It brings a piece of Old Europe, to the wild rugged mountains of western North Carolina. Call it a civilizing influence, which wouldn't be exactly true, but the wealthy of years past wanted to take the fresh mountain air in the summer as much as the masses did. It is our good fortune the spires and towers are now open to all:
This immense block of granite is plunked down in the middle of the mountains with incredible views in all directions:
Inside, where photography is forbidden apparently there are miles of rooms worth viewing. We, the experienced visitors, decided to skip the formal tour and made a beeline for the basement where we figured only the hardiest visitors would penetrate after circling the drawing rooms and bedrooms in the floors above.
The basement is a world apart, long corridors lined with laundry rooms and sewing rooms, a bakery, a machine room with an electrical generator and a steam room with a heating plant. there's a two lane bowling alley and a magnificent tile lined swimming pool (empty) complete with diving platforms and submerged lights. And there are larders with meat, vegetables and fruit and cheese, bottling rooms and you name it, the farm provided it. And then there is my favorite room, the kitchen, a vast spacious room with a separate grill room and magnificent views out across the valley:
And there are the grounds which don't look at their best in my opinion on a twelve degree winter day be it ever so sunny:
What the flock of geese did on these wild cold nights I can't imagine. What we did was to leave the cafe area after a quick wine and chocolate tasting and a couple of purchases in the huge gift shop area (two bottles of Biltmore red actually). The crowds made it impossible to enjoy the Bistro which I had been looking forward to, farm produce in the Biltmore restaurant, but there we were. We went into Asheville instead to get cold and see the city, another essay entirely of course.
If you are in Asheville or riding this section of the Blue Ridge Parkway don't miss the Biltmore Mansion. I was frozen but still glad I went:
My joy is hard to discern I know. To those lighting candles, like my in-laws, Shalom...
