JUNE 1, WEDNESDAY

MARSHALL

On Wednesday afternoon I drove to Marshall, half an hour from Asheville for an exhibit by a woodworker, Drew Langsamer, at the refurbished Madison County Arts Council display area on Main Street. The woodworking show which featured wooden chairs taken apart and reworked into art objects was interesting and the variety of people who were there at the opening also interesting. This seemed to be the creative community of artists who have moved recently to Marshall celebrating their own.

But soon it became clear to me that I was seeing the two sides of Marshall, the new, liberal escaping from the urban to the countryside Marshall and the older traditional country Marshall of people whose grandparents had farmed here for whom Marshall was the downtown shopping area and the county seat with a courthouse and jail.

On Main Street lined with American flags honoring Memorial Day was a fake red, white and blue flower display honoring traditional values and Penland’s, an old fashioned hardware store frozen in time, that fifty years ago was an ordinary country hardware store. There were posters for the Mermaid celebration and parade coming on Saturday when people from all around would dress in ridiculous and scanty mermaids and pirates outfits with blowing bubbles replacing the water guns of previous parades. It signals the exuberant, joyfulness of the newcomers to town with men dressed as mermaids and women as pirates. The old jail, just down the street from the court house is now a combination hotel in the old jail cells with an upscale Jail cafe downstairs where I sat with Susie and had a smash burger and salad. The railroad still runs through town, but it is all freight now, with the old Depot now an upscale restaurant. Madison County used to be dry, but now has several small breweries and restaurants. The owner of a tattoo parlor painting his parking lot in bright colors. We met and talked with an old friend, Snakehawk, a refugee from a former respectable life with a respectable name, about to move to near Cancun, Mexico to stretch his Social Security payments.

All these signs of change were opposed by a gathering on the lawn in front of the old Madison County Court House a sparse crowd of mostly older folks who sat in folding chairs as they sang hymns and and listened to a preacher on the courthouse steps thunder against sin. We only heard a little of his speech, a few sentences about the threat of people choosing to be homosexuals and the blasphemy of people thinking they could change their sex, all proscribed by the Bible, with nothing about love your neighbor as yourself. It reminded me that Sodom was close by, a mountain community just outside Marshall, named, I presume for the original Sodom, home of sinners, of Sodom and Gomorrah infamy.

For me the evening represented the two sides of the unUnited States: those with traditional fundamental values resisting those who embrace a radically shifting world, with the signs of the old and the new all around them, with neither side really listening to the other.