Dispatch from the Mountains

Less cooking, more eating

Hello from a cabin in the woods. I’m currently at the tail end of a two-week writing residency in North Carolina’s mountains, one of my favorite parts of the country. Fall hit last week: on Friday it went from t-shirt weather to cold. As the cabin I’m in stays dark and keeps a chill even when the temperature outside peeks above 60, I’ve been staying cozy with a space heater next to my desk and endless packets of hot cocoa ferreted from the dining hall where I hike or drive up to take my meals. I’ve done no cooking, unless you count toasting things in the broiler, reheating leftovers. I always think I’ll miss it more than I do. When I’m trying to focus my brain on the big hulking mass that is this book, one less thing to provide for myself is a creative boon. The dining hall is heavy on comfort food: last night we had chicken and dumplings, stuffing, roasted vegetables, and pecan pie.

This residency has been a necessary break from “work“, though I’ve been working steadily, often waking up an hour or two before the sky begins to peek light through the trees. From my bed or desk I see patches of pale aqua, then blue, then a flash of orange through the kitchen window, and I know the sun is with us again. The cabin has no wifi and only a rare glimmer of cell signal, a generous constraint. I force myself to write every day even when I have nothing to say and I have done a lot of organizational and busy work that I’ve been putting off for nearly half a year. Also just sitting outside and staring at the leaves as they threaten to turn, listening to the wind make them loud. The month and a half leading up to this trip was too much work, too busy, and it took me a few days for my mind to adjust out of survival mode. The first night I got here I had to lay in bed and let my brain run, like a motor winding down, for over an hour. Now I just feel crazy in the normal ways. I have mostly stopped worrying that a bad guy will come out of the woods at night and murder me, or that the mice in the cabin will unionize and revolt.  

On Sunday I drove the Blue Ridge Parkway (abominably beautiful) to Asheville, my favorite escape when I lived in Charlotte just over a decade ago. (Then I was crazy in the normal 22 year old ways, confused and in the wrong place.) My then-boyfriend and I would go for the weekend, bop around the microbreweries that obsessed him, shop for books and spices and chocolates, eat at restaurants far more interesting to me than what we got in Charlotte. There were people here who made ceramics for a living! It was my small version of cultural tourism at the time. Plus you escaped Charlotte’s droll landscape for the mountains, which announce themselves gradually, grandly, like the Star Wars theme, as you approached on I-40. Once you’re in them they consume you, let you breathe.

The parkway is the long way down from here, inefficient twists and turns that spit you out at a vista every few minutes, the sort of view you usually only get after climbing a mountain. And they never stop. I kept laughing as they appeared; so much beauty becomes absurd. I listened to Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s live album twice through, because I couldn’t imagine anything better. Finally I was down in Asheville, where buskers unironically wear fedoras and play the harmonica while they stomp in tune. Got a seat at a brunch spot we used to haunt, hulked out my book, settled in. 

Revisiting your own personal history always underscores more than anything the distortion of memory, the discomfort of the evolution of self. Are my old favorites any good, and who was I when I loved them? The chicken biscuit made me sad, I regret to report, the chicken (breast!) pale and wholly lacking crunch. They were out of grits. I consoled myself with a Bloody Mary (delicious, unfinishable), and set off on the rest of my tour. I realized I had built up this visit as if I was going to be walking around the West Village in the ‘70s—that’s how the place felt to me in 2010! But commerce-based tourism directed by a past self will only ever result in you spending too much money on craft beer and chocolate, say, because there’s not much else around that excites you anymore, and not spending money risks implying a lack of enjoyment. I read a zine about bibliomancy at the used book store and tried my hand at it in the fiction racks, but found no guidance for my life, just people making boring decisions. 

On the mountain I’ve been working on a book about the stage magic troupe I grew up in, a history that spans over 40 years and nearly twice as many personal histories, including my own. Recently my uncle gave me an enormous gift: 38 DVDs of the magic show, starting in 1979 and plodding all the way to the last show in 2012. I have been ripping them onto a hard drive while here, an easy feeling of progress, but find myself unable to sit down and watch one. I say it’s because I’m lazy, or because they’re too long (the main show lasted a painstaking two and a half hours, with intermission). More likely it’s because recalling a memory is far simpler than being confronted with its documentation. The latter forces a realization that you may have been wrong, or worse, points out the strange and embarrassing things you forgot. What you once found majestic may just be mundane, or amateurish, or more complicated than you have time to consider. Food, likewise: far more satisfying to recall the thrill of discovering locally sourced Southern cuisine when you were young than to chomp down an underseasoned hunk of meat. 

After wandering around the city, buying a few old shirts and a few delicious things, I gunned it to a nearby movie theater to see The Woman King. A joy! Go see it. (I loved Fran’s review, and also Julian Lucas’ piece on the movie’s inaccuracy.) Walking out, I felt exactly the way the movie had been calibrated to make me feel: Powerful! Excited to be alive! Grateful for cinema! Grateful for this day, when the sun still shown strong after a 3:30 movie! Eager for Lashana Lynch to hip check me to the ground and then give me a little grin! I sped back to town for the real reason I was here: dinner at Rosetta’s kitchen, my true favorite restaurant in Asheville, a place I blindly refused to be disappointed by

“The Mountain”: Smiling Hara tempeh, kale, brown rice, and tahini BBQ sauce.

Rosetta’s falls into one of my favorite genres, a dying breed: the crunchy-homey vegan restaurant. (I already mentioned it a few weeks ago, foaming at the mouth for my visit.) Here you eat piles of brown rice and braised kale and some sort of soy protein topped with nutritional yeast gravy or tahini sauce. Satisfaction, not goopy wellness, is their goal. I got double the amount of food I needed—I wouldn’t be getting breakfast or lunch at the residency the next day, and was grateful that over-ordering was the responsible choice. A Highland Gaelic from the fridge, and a big honking slice of peanut butter chocolate cake that I am still working my way through on Wednesday. 

Returning to Rosetta’s was like rewatching Almost Famous, my favorite movie in high school. Have my tastes shifted to a place where this may no longer be my favorite thing? Sure, I’m old now, and I live in New York. But the thing still comforts me in a way I do not have to question, drawing a bridge between current and past selves, a space that often feels like a chasm. 

Driving back to the cabin, away from the sunset, I was happy to have made the pilgrimage, and relieved to be leaving it. I had work to do, and new thoughts to develop, and leftovers to eat tomorrow. A relief to no longer be bound up in those expectations, just the sound of the wind and the cicadas and the fear of ax murderers rustling the woods.