Oh, Brevard

I took one of my older notebooks to Asheville, and I flipped back through it while sitting in the human warehouse that is the Atlanta airport. I found this paragraph, written probably six months before I moved to Tahoe:

I want to flee, I want to devour this place in massive gulps. It's on the brink of something big, a tipping point. As people and companies gravitate here, I am moving in the opposite direction, fighting the tide of naysayers. Sometimes I go for runs and it's the most beautiful heartbreaking thing, and sometimes I just sit in the house, sulking and lonely.

The restlessness and sadness that I felt in my last year in Brevard came rushing back as we drove down 280. This is the land where clothes never dry, where condensation frosts the windows all day, where cicadas sing, where my hair poofs into an unmanageable greasy halo, where the air folds you into its hot wet embrace. It is the land where effete hipsters and rabid cyclists coexist with tenth-generation southerners, high school dropouts smoking cigarettes inside their battered cars, walrus people waddling through the grocery store, tiny seniors driving erratically as they peer through the slots in their steering wheels.

My every molecule has been imbued with the smells and sounds of Brevard and Pisgah. I ran and rode some of my favorite trails and the toxic emotions ebbed when I was in the woods. It rained off and on the whole time and even when the sun was out, pushing through wet rhodo tunnels left me sodden, and the roots and rocks had a patina of grease, but I remembered the body English necessary to stay upright.

I was in town for Gaskin's wedding. I haven't attended enough weddings to be jaded, and I knew hers would be full of sincere love and good people. The-Bill-Formerly-Known-As-Baker was in New Hampshire visiting my grandparents and I missed our rambling conversations. Other than that I touched bases with just about everyone I wanted to see, and more remarkably didn't see anyone I didn't want to see, which is nearly impossible in Brevard. It seemed that all my best friends were thrashing around in their own deep ruts, similar to the one I had climbed out of. They've outgrown Brevard and Asheville, are questioning their trajectory, are losing touch with old friends. But they each inspired me with their pursuits: Morgan is leaving to get a masters at NYU; Alexis is running an amazing non-profit; Joh is being the world's best mother; Ella is travelling extensively; Cortney is taking ownership of her own happiness.

A wonderful wedding

This place, these mountains, were crack to me for so long. It pulsed through my veins and dragged me back from college, from trips, from ambition. I finally drove west four years ago and it was a clean break. I still love Brevard but I'm no longer addicted. I stepped off the plane in Idaho and it was dry and windy and beginning to smell like fall. Here is home.