Autumn, near Halloween, in a strange town, strange to me and strange somewhat in its postured image for itself, on a Friday night and saturnine day, finds kooks aplenty roaming the streets. My colleague, who was in Seattle this same weekend, remarked that he saw people with the troll under the bridge made up and in costume, but who could say whether it was for Halloween or if he had in fact seen ‘the creature’ and its horde. In Asheville, the revelers were almost certainly of the seasonal ilk, and their self-conscious theatrics made for uncomfortable strolling but for delightful observation. Things were amiss, Bean Streets was gone, and of course, years in the grave, my beloved Interstate Motel only a memory. We stood in the window of Downtown Books & News late after closing looking for the cat who lived there and wondered whether bookstore cats actually live in the bookstores or whether they go to a home at night. He wasn’t there and we hypothesized that he had died in the couple of years since we had seen him last. Across the empty street lights were on in Izzy’s Coffee Den and I questioned whether I was ready for the new.

A crowd filled Pritchard Park, awakening in the morning. The square was being dug up. Men strolled toward the park with their bed rolls, most likely emerging from behind our motel, and we made a beeline for the bookstore to see about the cat. After pretending to look at books I brought one up to the counter to look around for him. He usually laid around on the counter somewhere. There was no sign of him until my eye stopped on a picture frame on the wall. There was a picture of him and a plaster cast of his paw and some sort of eulogistic text with a date. He passed away just a few months short of our visit. Asheville was falling to pieces around me. My memories there, begun not so long ago but in the flesh of my life still buried quite deep, had become obscured by layers and layers of opaque years and by the new. I paid my respects to the man at the counter who shrugged me and my affinity for his cat off into the fall morning.

It was time to start anew. Bean Streets was really not so great after all, was it? It was just there, and it felt oddly dusty in my memory. There always felt to be lacking a coffeeshop proper in Asheville. A place with some diy art on the walls, a place with concrete floors (were they?) and just enough seats and tables in just enough space to feel like you are floating in the mug or enveloped in a wing chair, a small personal place, a ‘den’ as they call it. Although the west morning light floated in coldly and the chairs were made of wire, it was a bit more on the mark and may have comforted folks from Satellite to Stumptown and in between. A small child sitting at the counter was put to work placing ‘Izzys’ stickers onto the paper cups and I wondered why the bookstore guy shrugged me off. He reminded me of me, but I would have graciously accepted the condolences of someone whose coat was clearly covered in cat fur. Maybe I didn’t belong there and the emotions didn’t belong to me, but over coffee as Izzy’s filled up, I felt a little bit like they did. I felt like the new wasn’t really the new, like I had seen it all before, and out it played.

Autumn, near Halloween, in a strange town, in a strange coffeeshop on a saturnine day, finds kooks aplenty detailing their festive plans. Here is the new memory growing from the chatterix of the little shop, strange somewhat in her postured image for herself, a memory not really new because the people weren’t new, they were the same as those cats in Austin and by god they started talking about Austin, and about their costumes, and about their exploits and about the three parties they ‘had’ to go to and did they see what Josiah dressed up as, and did they know that Janine had packed up and moved to Austin and the place was getting smaller and smaller. I focused on the coffee and the tall woman left sowing silence behind her and I quickly forgot everything but what she had been yammering about.

I thought about Retail the cat, asleep on the counter of my memory and wondered if he would have remembered me.

In the Boy Scouts I was a member of the Order of the Arrow. When someone asks me what it was I tell them it was an ‘elite camping squadron.’ I don’t quite recall what it was, but membership required participation in an ‘ordeal,’ which, among a vow of silence and manual labor, consisted of sleeping out under the stars with no food, water, or tent by yourself where ever you were instructed to sleep. In retrospect… not much of an ordeal at all. When I went camping just west of Cherokee in the Smokies I believe I finally earned my status in the squadron. My bright idea to backpack in away from the RVs and rabble for a quiet night in the woods backfired when the fabled black bears of the area took an interest in our site. Miles away from anyone, we spent the night dead still and silent, mentally rehearsing our primal screams inside our tent and listening to the creatures shuffle and gallop around, intermittently grunting and groaning and sniffing. My hand never left my camp shovel. At one point one of the beasts trotted around and fell silent in a thicket near the tent where I was sure it lay in wait. The first bird song of the morning was beautiful and unzipping the tent fly to see a blank forest gave me pause to revalue my life. We got the fuck out of there shortly after sunrise and decided to check out the coffeehouse we had seen driving through Cherokee the previous morning.

Cherokee is the quintessential national park buffer with its gift shops and shows, such as ‘Unto these Hills,’ devoted to the indigenous people that called the area home. There was also a casino and a ‘zoo’ with 6 bear cubs. The strong native American theme here replaces what is typically Flintstones or Santa related tourist traps. It is hard for me to say ‘theme’ though, as the inhabitants are in fact Cherokees. I know it is not in my purview to judge, but I was disappointed in the silliness of the representations in the area which seemed to lower expectations to the level of team mascots selling peace pipes. However, the significant presence of what I assume is the Cherokee written language made me think there was a deeper striving to perhaps show visitors the strength of the culture and the people. Some reading on the town will quickly reveal that it is in fact the intention of the tribe to revamp the image portrayed by the place and they are going so far as to remove distasteful and tacky outlets capitalizing on popular conceptions of ‘Indians.’

When I am on the outskirts of a national park there is little I expect more as a vegan gourmand than to be eating an iceberg lettuce salad and drinking black diner coffee. Never would I have imagined, that in this little enclave I would find an inspiring and satisfying place. Tribal Grounds on the one hand could be seen as your typical coffee shop. There was some sort of proto-industrial music playing, there were thrift store couches, young baristas. What was odd was that it was here, on the outskirts of a national park and amidst the usual pap. But as much as it was a typical shop, because it was where it was, not amidst the tourist crap, but amidst the history and culture of ancient people, it seemed distinctive. There was something more that just cups made of recycled material and recycling bins and soy milk, although all that was there; there was a sense of pride, of ownership of the place, investment, and what I took away most of all was a stewardship, not only over the earth, but over the place, Cherokee. Perhaps having survived my pathetic mountain ordeal put me in a reverent mood, or the shock of being able to pour soy milk in my beverage in a Western Carolina 1-stoplight-town quelled my jaded perceptions. However, I think it is merely the fact that Tribal Grounds was a satisfying place to be, with helpful people, and positive aspirations illustrating culture by modern lived example rather than charades.

They also roast their own fair-trade beans. Hail!

i have never been here of an evening. evening coffee is a different affair, one that warrants claustrophobic ceilings, clutter, dim lights, and no food service. clattering plates and kitchensounds fail to promote the proper atmosphere.

on sunday morning, early enough, one can claim a spot in the upper seating area where the large window upon the street admits a low southern winter sun that reaches almost to the back of the space. in its passage, the dust of the old space, propelled up, by sitting on torn vinyl upholstery, in intrusive swirls, radiates back out into the dim lower seating area. a man with long hair, pulled back, or possibly falling periodically to catch on his eyebrow or goatee, plays an acoustic guitar in the classical manner, a continuous tinkling smoothness that forms no apparent phrases or bodies. he was there before, and before. i saw him on the street saturday, carrying his case, his silk shirt billowing in the cold, stark sunlight, avoiding the shadow cast onto the south side of broadway by the bank, the whitewashed brick wall of the cafe in sunlight.

the dust forms a space for me in the sunlight and patrons pass back and forth to the lower seating area. two women, in jeans, have come to complain about their husbands and friends. they sit at a table at the foot of the stairs and prattle loudly over the guitar. a woman, surrounded by grocery bags, and stacks of palimpsestic scrap paper, talks loudly into a broken cellphone, and speaks as she writes nonsense over nonsense. i wish that my dusty room had some acoustic properties, or that all of the patrons were part of the deaf chat coffee group, signing, casting animate shadows on the north wall, and allowing me to follow the notes. the man playing the guitar stares into space, or closes his eyes, listens to his guitar. his fluid playing unhampered by structure or pace, could have been the same as it was the previous sunday, months earlier. it would be impossible to tell. only the patrons wander in and out. the dust, after four pm, after the barristas go home, every sunday, settles back into the torn vinyl and the curtains, pulled shut over the large window, or settles into my lungs, or the hairs in my nostrils, transported by car, to some other cafe, where i give it back to the space who awaits tidings from asheville.

ideally, i would mysteriously awaken in places whose primary delight to me is the unexpected character of their spaces in relation to the parlance of their type, and especially in relation to what i saw from the outside, awaken there, transported in my sleep, to a contained world that i would seek to formulate a shell for, a history for, like guessing the identity of an object from a magnified fraction of its whole. two places i would like to have been spirited to, on separate occasions, are the inside and outside of the double decker coffee company.

i am in a narrow space between a cabinet and a bench, on the floor, there is just enough room for me to roll over, put my hands in front of my chest and press myself erect. a warm light washes all around from eye level as i crouch upwards into a slightly wider space than where i had first lain. as my eyes raise with me i see a counter, as if infinitely far away, the narrow perspective with diminishing windows running into the distance, wrapping behind the barrista standing there, preparing me a beverage. i stand tall, proudly, slightly reaching out my hand to receive my cup, and hit my head on the slick ceiling. i awaken in another similarly proportioned chamber. again the space is low, its volume unconventional and seemingly unrelated to its function, although having the capacity to slow a visitor such as myself to paces more intimate and quiet. tables in sequence run along the narrow aisle separated by benches. upon each table is a tiny lamp with a delicate beaded lampshade which casts warm yellow light across the laminate tabletops and lavender reflections on the aluminum windows wrapping the space. some of the windows are slid down from the top, the red enameled edges of the frame outside are visible and then only blackness. i turn to see an opening in the floor at the end of the narrow aisle through which a slender spiral stair descends. more warm light is flowing out from the staircase as well as some distant music, portishead or bjork or the like. i descend the stair to find myself in the previous space, stacked beneath me, an almost identical chamber just as warm, just as black beyond the windows. there is a bifold door at the base of the stairs. i exit to get a look at the container that might hold this odd setting.

i am in a dark garden. a decorative black fence appears and disappears behind trees and plants in pots. beyond the fence is primeval darkness. umbrellas shield the starlight and create a low ceiling beneath the sky under which i feel secure. in a clearing stands a red double decker bus. warm light pours out from its two bands of windows, the soft articulation of people standing hunched over and faces low in the windows of the upper level begins to give life to the stationary vehicle. it is inhabited as though we stood in an abandoned movie lot in a forgotten filming location. we have taken over the plot of ground and its props like street trash in a junkyard and made it our little folly. the light washes over concrete patio furniture and brick paving. i walk through the cold night toward a short bifold door, up two steps, and pull it open.