On the edge of the Great Divide
If you're gonna dance, that's the place to do it
I live in Asheville, NC, famous for its restaurants, breweries, and natural environs—including the French Broad River, The Smoky Mountains, and the Blue Ridge Parkway, which every year attracts millions of tourists who come from around the world to drive its smooth, winding road and behold nature’s slo-mo fireworks display of brilliant autumn leaves, a sight so arrestingly beautiful it’s often the last thing people ever see as they go flying off the side of a mountain because they forgot to watch where they were going.
Fun fact: They’re called Smoky Mountains because of all the cars burning in its ravines and valleys. But the leaves are so pretty! So it’s worth it.
I’m kidding, of course. People don’t die on the Blue Ridge Parkway from driving off the mountains. I mean they do, for sure. But mostly they die from trying to get pictures of themselves feeding a bear.
Okay, maybe not die. But human-bear interactions along the parkway go tragically south all the time. People see a bear, and they go, “Pull over! Pull over! Awww, look how cute! Let’s get a picture of it holding our baby.”
And then the bears are like, “Mmmmm. Baby food.”
No, bears don’t eat babies. They eat berries and honey and . . . berries covered with honey. But they’ll also definitely take pretty much any food you care to hand them. And is it their fault that your hand is connected to your arm, which, when you think about it, is barely connected to your shoulder? No. All a bear does is go, “For real? You’re just offering me food, right from your hand? This is really a beautiful inter-species moment we’re having right here. I—oh, shit! My bad. Do you want your arm back? Because—Look! Another flying car!”
Besides being good at ducking automobiles and selling $12 hamburgers to one-armed tourists, Ashevillians are famously and radically liberal. In the halcyon Before Times, when Hillary and Bernie were vying for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, 98% of Asheville’s Democratic voters cast their ballot for Bernie.
Ninety-eight percent! You couldn’t get ninety-eight percent of nudists to agree that splinters are bad. And on Nov. 8, 2015, a lot of those Bernie-lovers stayed home, too. If they couldn’t go for the Bern, they weren’t going at all.
Ha! Take that . . . reality.
While Asheville itself is chock-a-block with passionate DEI activists, social justice warriors and more liberal hipsters than you can shake a rainstick at, the mountain towns surrounding it are largely populated with decidedly old-school country and mountain folk who tend to feel like this picture captures a truth that is sublime, inspirational and eternal:
My wife and I moved to Asheville from San Diego in 2015 because we felt confident of two things: Southern California was going to run out of water (and we knew how much of San Diego kept burning every gottdang year), and Americans were going to continue to fall prey to the omnipresent media that knew the money to be made from continuously creating and fueling grievances that, as surely as cash can buy a spaceship, would drive people into furiously warring camps of Left vs. Right.
Anyone who was aware, on May 18, 2012, that Rush Limbaugh was popular and Facebook had that day gone public, was in possession of all the information they needed to be sure that America was headed straight toward the exact condition it’s in today.
Well, while my wife and I are certainly exasperated by some of the fundamental assumptions that inform much of leftist politics, we’d still prefer to have as many of our neighbors as possible be liberal hippie types rather than . . . I don’t know . . . Bible-thumping gunny types.
So when we learned about a famously liberal and dedicatedly artsy town snuggled into a pocket of the gorgeous Appalachian mountains, where the climate was mild, and an abundance of fresh water fell like rain from the sky?
Asheville, here we come! Came! No—come. Asheville, here we cummed!
Ew. No. Sorry. Gross.
The point is that in August of 2015 we moved from San Diego to Asheville.
Not too long thereafter I got a gig writing a weekly advice column for Asheville’s major daily newspaper. The header of my column looked like this:
I was glad to accept the offer to write Ask John, because at that time I was trying to build a local readership robust enough to support the successful launching of Everywhere She’s Not, the novel that in 2014 I’d shut down my blog in order to write, and had finished just before we left San Diego. Besides for its appealing lack of draught and devastating random wildfires, we’d chosen to live in Asheville because its literary scene is so vibrant and supportive of local authors that we thought my novel might stand a real chance in the world if it started its public life from here. But first the public here needed to know me. Having a half-page advice column in The Scene, the city newspaper’s pull-out Friday entertainment section, seemed like a solid step in that direction.
Plus, paid to opine! Perfect!
What I learned right away, though, was that Ask John had two big problems, each of which was working against the other.
The first problem stemmed from Asheville being, as noted above, a small blue island in a big red sea. What I hadn’t known going in is that the Citizen-Times is distributed throughout all the red mountain towns surrounding Asheville as thoroughly as it is within the blue city itself. This meant that roughly half the readers of my advice column did not, at all, share my views on . . . well, pretty much anything beyond that quilts are great and hot dogs are tasty.
The second problem was that in addition to running in the Citizen-Times’ print edition, Ask John was published on the newspaper’s website, where anyone with a cellphone or computer could easily read it. This straight away led to people from all over the country sending me the same kinds of questions they were used to seeing me regularly respond to on the blog I wrote on my website from 2007 to 2014 (most posts of which were, for some four years, also published on The Huffington Post and . . . all over the webernets, basically).
So then, rather suddenly, there I was, knowing that my personal opinions, beliefs and convictions would once a week be prominently featured in all the properties of the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper, a beloved local institution that had been publishing for 150 years, whose motto and guiding ethos is Voice of the Mountains—as in the Appalachian mountains, as in not exactly known as a bastion of liberal values. Meanwhile, I was getting into my column such questions as:
Why don’t more Christians act like Christ?
Does being a Bible-believing Christian make me a bigot?
Are effeminate men OK with God?
Doesn’t the fear of hell keep us acting right?
Not every question was of that ilk, of course. Some of them were more normal (i.e., Dad’s bringing his porn-star girlfriend to my wedding—which I guess isn’t normal, but you can bet I was glad to answer it—and the heart-breaking My husband’s suicide is my fault), but a lot of the questions I got in throughout the run of Ask John did have to do with some of the, shall we say, pricklier aspects of faith and religion.
And I answered most all of them. Because it’s not like you can just ignore those kinds of questions. And I also couldn’t respond to them with, like:
Hello! Thank you for sending me your mind-breakingly intense question! Quite the choice query! Unfortunately, I’m not in the position to write my honest answer to it, because I’d prefer not to be the cause of the Citizen-Times’ offices being firebombed. Good luck getting good advice elsewhere, though! And please do feel entirely free to send me the kind of anodyne question that one typically sees in a newspaper advice column. If you ever need help getting along with your persnickity mother-in-law, or in persuading your husband to stop picking his nose at the dinner table, you know who to write! Love you! John.
I mean, c’mon. I’d rather give my arm to a bear.
So once a week, for three years, I took a deep breath, held on to my pen for balance, and started dancing my way along the edge of the Great Divide.
Next week: Why and where I have spent the last two years, in the least likely of all places for me, continuing to do an even more intimate, intense, and constant version of that dance.