Beaucatcher Road, Asheville
“I guess my feet know where they want me to go…Walking on a country road.” - James Taylor, Country Road
I lamented to a friend recently that, while I loved living in Asheville proper, I missed being able to step outside my cousins’ house in Montreat and essentially hop right onto a hiking trail. He then reminded me that I live across the road from Kenilworth, a historic neighborhood in Asheville full of twisty, quirky roads, wooded hillsides, and a motley assortment of both ramshackle and grand old homes.
“Why don’t you just go for a walk in there?” he suggested.
So I did. As I turned onto Beaucatcher Road, which winds around a mountain by the same name, I was soon entranced by the play of early evening sunlight through the lush green leaves, the clutch of vines shimmying up trees, the heady aroma of summer grass, made more pungent by the moisture hanging in the humid July air.
I had driven through this neighborhood only a couple times, but I’d never traveled by foot and I have a lousy sense of direction. I had just finished a long day of massaging other people’s psyches, so I succumbed to the experience of the road massaging mine. I just kept walking wherever my feet took me.
I passed young men pedaling bicycles, middle-aged women walking their dogs, a take-no-prisoner’s gray-haired lady sitting on her porch rocker smoking a cigarette, her free hand wrapped across her ample stomach. I passed overgrown, weedy yards next to lovingly cultivated gardens, lawn sculptures, and the occasional bear totem pole.
As I ambled along one magical road to another, I wondered how it was that I had lived so close the past several weeks and never thought to mosey into this neighborhood, one of the most desirable in Asheville. Instead, I’d been driving 15 minutes to do the Beaver Lake loop, a gorgeous stroll, but one that I took because I hadn’t investigated other possibilities.
And it occurred to me, so much of how I’d lived my life had been constricted by what I knew, or what I clung to — out of habit, out of a need to control things, out of fear. I reflected on the psilocybin-infused epiphany I’d had at a soccer game last year, the realization that it wasn’t that avenues had been closed off to me throughout life. It was that I wasn’t present enough to notice them.
I meandered out of the enchantingly dilapidated historic section up into the bougie Beaucatcher Heights enclave, where pricey modern homes perch along the mountain ridge.
I traveled so far that I had to rely on my iPhone’s Google Map app to take me home. But there were many more roads to wander and I returned after work yesterday to take the ones not traveled.
I stayed in the historic section this time, because I’m a sucker for a grand old home, the kind of home you gaze at and imagine a marble rolling down a warped floor, children’s footsteps clamoring up back staircases, tired but amorous young parents locking eyes over their pre-dinner cocktails.
In her memoir Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, writer Meghan Daum shares her journey into fantasy house obsession, one that she inherited from her peripatetic mother, and her eventual realization that you can lose your shirt tricking out the coolest bungalow but never heal the wounds that gnaw at you.
In my earlier years, I would have stood in front of these homes, convinced that my life would be better if I owned them. As much as I felt charmed by the genteel grandeur before me, I also knew that nothing that mattered would be any different if I lived inside.
You can admire a thing of beauty that you will never have and also love the thing that you do have, that maybe isn’t quite as beautiful, but is in some way better because it’s where your path took you. The only way to flourish is to stand in the gap between desire and reality, the what-would-have-been and the what-is, and not feel the sting of loss, but see the gap not as a gap, but as a sweet spot of acceptance.
Only then can you settle into your body and the earth and notice that, right in front of you, a butterfly is draining every drop of nectar from purple blossoms — and you are reminded, so should you.
"The only way to flourish is to stand in the gap between desire and reality, the what-would-have-been and the what-is, and not feel the sting of loss, but see the gap not as a gap, but as a sweet spot of acceptance.
Only then can you settle into your body and the earth and notice that, right in front of you, a butterfly is draining every drop of nectar from purple blossoms — and you are reminded, so should you." (Virginia Gilbert-American Author and Essayist)
“it wasn’t that avenues had been closed off to me throughout life. It was that I wasn’t present enough to notice them.” So true.