Asheville: Rooted and Rising

They say every place has a pulse — a rhythm beneath the noise of traffic and talk. Asheville’s, I think, beats somewhere between fear and love. Between the walls we build and the bridges we try to cross. Between holding on and staying open.

Fear builds quickly. It’s efficient — all stone and defense. This valley has known fear before. Long before white settlers arrived, this land was Cherokee — Shaconage, the “Land of Blue Smoke.” These ridges weren’t scenery; they were kin. Belonging meant reciprocity, not possession.

Then came settlers in the late 1700s — mostly Scots-Irish, followed by English and German families moving down the Great Wagon Road into the Southern Appalachians. Many carried their own histories of displacement, but they brought a different worldview: fences, titles, ownership. Treaties were pressured and broken, and the land that held meaning was taken piece by piece. By 1838, the Trail of Tears formalized what fear had already set in motion.

Standing by the French Broad today, I still feel the tension between those two relationships to land — belonging and banishment, kinship and conquest. Fear can shape a place long after the moment that created it. And yet something of that first love — balance, reciprocity — lingers in the quiet mornings here. What’s sacred can be forgotten, but not erased.

The mountains shaped the people who settled here next. The terrain was hard to reach and harder to tame, and families learned to mend before they bought, to share labor, to deal with isolation through creativity rather than excess. That independence — born from both Scots-Irish resilience and Cherokee teachings — became the region’s defining temperament. You still see it in the small workshops, hillside homes, local markets, and art studios. Asheville stayed small by choice, expressive by nature, grounded in a long tradition of making do, making beauty, or making a new path when the old one washed out.

That same groundedness resurfaced during the Great Depression, when Asheville made a rare decision for the time: it refused bankruptcy. Citizens spent nearly fifty years repaying city debt dollar by dollar. It wasn’t easy or even logical on paper, but it reflected something steady — mountain pride, communal responsibility, the belief that you stay true to your commitments even when fear tells you otherwise. That choice became part of Asheville’s identity.

And it appeared again during the 2008 financial collapse. Across the country, entire neighborhoods unraveled under impossible mortgages. Asheville told a different story. There was strain, but not the endless streets of foreclosures seen in other cities. People here tended to live within their means. Part of that came from generations of families who built homes they could heat and repair. Part came from the artists, back-to-the-landers, and wanderers who moved here from the 1960s onward — people who valued simplicity, yard gardens, shared resources, and an unpolished kind of creativity.

Maybe that’s why this city holds together through so much. Fear can shake a place, but it can’t easily uproot a community that’s learned to live simply and creatively.

Still, Asheville has always carried another truth next to its modesty. This is a place where the handmade and the monumental sit shoulder to shoulder — where the earthiness of mountain living coexists with the grandeur of the Biltmore Estate and the clean lines of Art Deco downtown. Vanderbilt didn’t build Biltmore out of local extravagance; he brought an outside vision to a place shaped by simplicity — and it was the skill of mountain craftspeople who made it possible.

The Deco architecture that followed wasn’t born from steady prosperity but from a brief moment of ambition and decades of endurance. Many buildings survived because the city had no funds to tear them down. Even today, you can see this contrast in The Arras, rising from Asheville’s walkable, human-scale streets. It’s vertical and polished, yet surrounded by makers, musicians, small businesses, gardens, and the grit that keeps this city grounded. The Arras doesn’t erase the modesty here; it highlights the ongoing conversation between scale and intimacy, ambition and rootedness.

But that conversation has been changing. As Asheville rises — in popularity, development, demand — the people who give the city its texture are being pushed to the edges. Service workers commute farther. Artists take on multiple jobs. Buskers are fewer on the sidewalks where spontaneous music once filled the air. Asheville pulls people in with its promise — and in the same motion, it pushes someone else out. And when I think about that pressure, I can’t help but remember that change has reshaped this land again and again — most profoundly when the Cherokee were forced from the very ground that carried their stories. This land has known displacement before. Every rise has a cost, and every era has its losses.

Maybe that’s the deeper rhythm beneath all of this — the push and pull that shapes every living thing. Cultures shift, landscapes adapt, identities stretch and contract. The Cherokee felt it. Early settlers felt it. The artists and service workers feel it now. Asheville seems to understand that evolution isn’t a clean line; it’s a constant negotiation between what roots us and what pulls us forward. That tension isn’t a flaw — it’s part of being alive. It’s where growth happens, where old forms loosen and new ones take shape. A city, like a person, is never finished.

Everywhere I look, I see the presence of opposites — fear and joy, loss and renewal, life and death. The people here aren’t afraid to hold both at once. They’ll talk about grief and hope in the same breath, name what hurts and what helps without hiding from either. Opposites aren’t contradictions; they’re partners. The fear of losing what we love reveals how deeply we love it. The awareness of death sharpens the beauty of being alive.

And somewhere in all that, I realized this city had become home. I’ve lived in a lot of places, but Asheville is the first that felt like it mirrored my inner life — layered, evolving, both grounded and stretching. I don’t love it because it’s perfect; I love it because it’s real. It has its shadows and its shine, its tensions and its tenderness, and somehow it holds them all without pretending to be one thing. In that way, Asheville has given me room to be more fully myself.

The mountains hold these tensions with a kind of steady patience, reminding me that we don’t have to rush to resolve the polarities inside us. If we sit with them long enough, something new rises between them — a third thing, a deeper truth, a more open way of belonging.

The French Broad knows this rhythm well. One of the oldest rivers in the world, it carries its own memory of giving and taking. After Helene, when Marquee reopened, the air still smelled of silt and sawdust, but what I remember most is how people showed up: sweeping mud, brewing coffee on camp stoves, checking on one another. A musician played a weathered guitar, and the city exhaled a little. Fear knocks the power out; love lights the candles. Maybe that’s Asheville’s secret rhythm — turning survival into something shared.

On Friday nights in Pack Square, the drums start up, and people fall into rhythm together — tourists, teens, elders, queer kids, businesspeople. Down the hill, The Block once thrived as the center of Black business and culture, anchored by the YMI Cultural Center, built by Black craftsmen in the late 1800s. Much of it was lost to neglect and urban renewal, but the YMI remains — a reminder that some things endure despite pressure.

All of this lives in a region whose Civil War loyalties were fractured — neighbors split, families divided, people navigating fear and survival in different ways. That mixed inheritance still shapes this place: skeptical of power, protective of autonomy, slow to trust but quick to help when it matters.

Asheville draws seekers — artists, healers, wanderers, people trying to remember themselves. Here, eccentricity is simply part of the landscape. A poet reading under a magnolia tree. A veteran learning yoga beside a teenager with purple hair. A drag performer raising money for a food pantry. These crossings soften us. Love here isn’t romantic; it’s spacious. It’s letting people be who they are without shrinking the room.

Stand on Craggy Pinnacle at dusk and you’ll see the ridges stacking into the distance. The wind can rattle you at first, but the view steadies you. These mountains teach that endurance isn’t the same as being unshakeable — it’s the ability to bend without breaking. Maybe that’s why this city feels both like a refuge and a challenge. It asks us to stay open even when life tilts — to choose belonging over banishment, connection over concealment, and to live in that space between fear and love, where transformation actually happens.