BELLINGHAM/ASHEVILLE
I spent a week of nights and days on the train seeing the hills of West Virginia and the corn fields of Indiana and the lakes and forests of Wisconsin and the immense fields stretching to the horizon of North Dakota and the rolling hills and emptiness of Montana and then the snow covered peaks of the Rockies and the rushing rivers of Washington, where the people lived with a completely different mind set from me, only to get to Bellingham, Washington on the Pacific to be back in Asheville again. Asheville doesn’t have the craggy black snow capped peaks of the Cascades on one side and the blue of Puget Sound on the other as Bellingham does. Instead it has the Blue Ridge Parkway up to Mt. Mitchell and river rafters on the French Broad. Both towns celebrate hiking and the outdoors. Both have outdoor outfitters, both new and second hand. Both are beer towns with many local breweries. Both have restaurants of all sorts and funky food trucks of every kind. Both are wildly liberal. Both have restored downtowns that bring tourists from all over. Feeling at home in Bellingham is feeling at home in Asheville. If you could be whisked in a second from one to the other you wouldn’t know that you had left town except that Bellingham is a little flatter. How could that happen? How could the unUnited States be so different in between and so much alike at each end?
Yesterday we went to the Bellingham Farmer’s market and could have been at the Asheville Farmer’s Market or the Uncommon Market in the River Arts District. It was crowded and so much fun with such a variety of crafts and health products and food and even $8 rocks with Effing exhortations on every one being sold by a sweet looking hypnotherapist (the polite positive rocks she had tried hadn’t sold, these did). And then on a sunny afternoon we drank local beer at Goods, a brightly painted converted gas station with rows of picnic tables in front with A Que Tacos food truck on one side and Dumplings food truck on the other. I was home again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 