Asheville, Carters versus Vanderbilts

Yesterday was mountain peoples and today was Vanderbilts. It's an alarming gilded contrast that now, in my own town so visibly, with our Bezoses and Gateses, we're trying to live up to once again.

We drove through Tennessee, where we had a ridiculous huge meal in a restaurant called the Farmer's Daughter. Each table (about 20 people) chose two meats and then we were additionally served a dozen sides like sweet (marshmallow-sweet) potatoes, corn bread salad, creamed corn, mac and cheese, squash fritter, sauerkraut, broccoli and cheese--and the two meats at our table were fried chicken and breaded catfish. I'd already had a hot doughnut from the Pennsylvania Dutch trailer in the parking lot but we'd been waiting for a table an hour, cooled off every once in a while by iced tea in Styrofoam, so I was ready.

Before we arrived in Virginia, our van had also broke and strung a poke of greasy beans (we de-stringed a bag of green beans), which today will be blanched then slow boiled several hours, and the van had me reading out loud--Robert Gipe's powerful illustrated novel, Trampoline.

But where we were heading was the Carter Family Fold at the Western tip of Virginia, the place that houses the homestead of A.P. Carter and the traditions of the rest of the family, Sara, Mabel and later June and her husband, Johnny Cash. Historians claim they are the birth of country music--and you can see the place we visited on the trailer of this Rolling Stone review of a documentary, The Winding Stream (see 1:31-1:36--that's where I was!). There was some grumbling on the way because there'd be no alcohol; and when we got there, the concrete dancing floor was empty and a large crowd was already sitting on steeply pitched seats, stoically listening to bluegrass. An old man danced with the ticket taker, then with a little girl; we all watched them from our seats. But my friend, Corrie (pronounced Car-E, because she's Southern) brought her tap shoes and tried to teach us to clog, which she's been doing for 11 years (she's featured in the video below). I went to the floor to watch, and was soon trying to dance too, in my wide, clingy running shoes, and eventually a few more joined us. I was told repeatedly it looked like I was having a lot of fun. Then that I brought a west coast style to it, with my shoulders. One old man asked me if I was Tommy Wyeth's son--I looked and moved just like him. The last song was gospel, and I was glad to be warned ahead of time that if they start singing Jesus, to sit.

These descriptions reminded my father of his own experiences. In 1969, dad joined nine student docs and their spouses in the SAMA Appalachia to Lebanon, VA, through which he saw clogging for the first time at the Galax Fiddler's festival. Mom tried clogging and dad stayed back, watching with admiration. It was through this project that we ended up in West Virginia a few years later: Dad wrote to the Secretary of HEW (Health, Education and Welfare, a department that may return to replace Health and Human Services and Dept. of Education, among other departments), asking to be placed in a physician-poor area with the National Health Service Corps.

Outside, fireflies flitted in and out of the dark and we were told about a secret place in Cataloochee Valley, North Carolina, where for a very short time the fireflies are synchronized, lighting up the entire valley and then going black.

What a difference that morning, when I ran to the Omni Grove Park Inn, a luxury hotel at the end of a golf course, its tables and music and chairs decadent and comfortable but also resort familiar.

And then a stunning difference visiting Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate--according to Wikipedia, the largest privately owned house in the country--a French castle built for himself by the grandson of the Vanderbilt railroad and shipping magnate where every affectation was one of money and of Europe. At the time this palace was being built on over 10,000 acres, the forests in much of Appalachia were being denuded and its people tricked and cheated of their land. But the Estate is beautiful. Frederick Law Olmsted did fine work with the lands. And the house is okay. It's big. 43 bathrooms, 33 guest bedrooms, electric, sweeping views of all that land that still no one else occupies.

 

     

It's got some Renoirs and a mess of John Singer Sargent portraits of the family and of Olmsted and people important to the house. And some weird stuff, too.

         

        

It doesn't look, from the tour of the servants quarters, like the help was mistreated. And maybe the ridiculous palatial house has brought Asheville needed tourism over this century. I didn't walk through the house mad or anything, but this much wealth is unethical, even before considering devious ways it's achieved and the distortions of fellow-feeling it brings against the lives of neighbors and other such afterthoughts.

Dale Chihuly has a touring exhibit throughout the grounds, installations it took two years to plan and place.

      

      

   

I thought they added something, a vibrancy, a  magic. My friend, Sondra, said they were distractions to the natural beauty. This place is beautiful. It's not really natural.