TUESDAY (THROUGH THURSDAY)
I am looking back from Monday, September 18 at my second week back and responding to that week in posts. Two weeks ago I was in Buenos Aires, two weeks from tomorrow I will be in Milan. So I am back but not back because already whatever part of my mind insists on anticipating the future is already taking off while another part of me is going in the opposite direction, trying to fit back in.
And what I have discovered this week is that where I am now is as interesting as any place on earth, but even more interesting because I have stepped out for a while and am looking at my everyday world as an outsider.
It begins with the view out my back window from my deck above. The view is beautiful. I live in a special place in the mountains. On Thursday Todd and Susie and I drove to Lake Fontana at the invitation of Joanna Gallberg who went to India with me 30 years ago and who now, with her husband Jamie, owns a houseboat on Lake Fontana.
This trip was in three parts and I will write about the first part today and leave the lake until Thursday. Lake Fontana is about 70 miles from Asheville. The drive through the mountains is beautiful. Much of the way we drove along the Pigeon River.
Our first stop was for breakfast in Canton. Canton is only about twenty miles from Asheville, but while I have passed by it many times on Interstate 40 in the almost 60 years I’ve lived in Asheville I have never been to downtown Canton. In the 60’s and the 70’s, before the environmental movement caught hold, when the wind blew our way we could smell the stench of the Champion paper plant all the way to Swannanoa. Maybe that smell is why I never felt the desire to visit Canton. The paper plant was also fouling the Pigeon River which flowed into Tennessee and for years was being sued by the state of Tennessee. In those days there was often a yellow haze caused by the paper plant and the view of Mt. Pisgah was rarely clear. But Champion cleaned itself up somehow and the Pigeon River became swimmable and the mountain view’s became clearer and the the smell disappeared. And Canton receded from the news and my consciousness.
But on Thursday we drove into downtown Canton to eat breakfast on the way to Lake Fontana. The huge paper plant has just this summer finally closed down. But it certainly hasn’t disappeared. As we drove into Canton the hulk of the abandoned paper mill a huge collection of red large red brick buildings with huge metal pipes connecting the buildings rose above us. It dominates the town. How can a little town now have this huge collection of fenced in rusting pipes and chimneys and factory buildings at its center? Already the North Carolina environmental department is overseeing what will be a huge cleanup of hazardous leftovers, but what will happen to all the metal? No one can use this huge plant for anything else. And what kinds of work will now support the people who used to work there? We read in the Smoky Mountain News that a group of 8 former workers were training to be truck drivers. But what will happen to the other workers and the businesses that supported them?
But the surprising thing for us was the Main Street of Canton. Canton may be a blue collar town, but the shops we saw on a short strip of Main Street were hip and upscale and the kind of shop that you would find in upscale Biltmore Village. We ate breakfast at The Grateful Table where I had a huge bowl of sausage gravy on a homemade biscuit. It was delicious and I had to take half of it with me. We looked around the store section of the Grateful Table at Spicewalla Indian spices, Poppy brand popcorn of all flavors, wine of all kinds and the store T-shirts. On the walls were nostalgic black and white photographs of Canton in the 1950’s and earlier.
In the Grateful Table there was no hint of contemporary Canton and the hulking, abandoned factory just down the street. This was tourist town Canton headed in a new direction and apparently pleased to leave the mill with its pollution behind.
After breakfast we headed toward Lake Fontana, but first we had to find a grocery store to take picnic items with us, guessing that along the highway we wouldn’t find much till we got to Sylva where we would lose time by having to to leave the highway to find it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 