An Asheville (Mis)Adventure

I dreaded the three-week trip even as I planned. I worried too much. Lists filled a notebook: To Do, To Pack, The Morning of Departure, To Buy. I checked off items one by one until it was the morning of departure, and that list began to dwindle.

Something happened the closer I came to deleting all the to-dos. I felt the old magic return. The excitement of getting on the road and heading out of town, just me and my guy and twenty days of visiting so many folks filled my head with Christmas morning anticipation.

As departure day neared, a tropical storm hovered in the Gulf waters threatening to unleash its wrath on the Big Bend of Florida and inland areas, such as Tallahassee where we live. I fought my storm trauma nerves. Four months prior to departure, we received a torrential overnight rain which caused our house to flood. Then a month later, a tornado roared its tail through our neighborhood taking down the top of our very old sycamore and bringing it down over the garage. Both times, we escaped with very little damage, just a lot of hard work and expenditure of money. We had a French drain installed in the side yard, but it has yet to be tested—it would take another foot of rainfall in six hours to really see if it diverts the rain and runoff away from the house as planned. The roof repairs and tree removal and new tree plantings barely hid the tornado damage, but we were whole, if not emotionally recovered.

Despite the threat, we left Friday morning, August 2, and Tropical Storm Debby would take another two days to turn into a hurricane headed toward Tallahassee.

But I still managed to leave filled with happy anticipation as Asheville loomed some eight hours down the road. After checking into the Downtown Inn one block from Biltmore Square and many breweries, we headed out into the stifling heat that had followed us from Florida. Only a few blocks from our hotel, and we already imagined how good the pool would feel when we returned after a few drinks and dinner. Jack of the Wood across the street—the original Green Man Brewery now a restaurant/bar—was our first stop, but they were charging a $5 cover because of some musical festival, so we decided to stop there for dinner on our way back to the hotel and a much-needed cooling off time in the pool. We walked around admiring the architecture of old buildings and churches.

I was very pleased to see this sign outside the downtown Methodist Church

We wound our way back to Jack of the Wood and paid the cover charge. A table toward the back, but with a clear view of the stage, awaited us. A middle-aged man sat on stage with his guitar, which he knew how to play. Unfortunately, his singing ability did not match the virtuosity of his fingers, so he shouted lyrics into the mic while he sought the right key for his voice. Often, he never found it, and other times, he did only to lose it if he held it for any length of time. Never before had we heard anything so awfully jarring to the ears. Maybe a karaoke singer once or twice. We certainly had never paid for such a performance.

It was so bad, we ordered one drink, and our dinner to-go. We would flee as soon as we could and cool off in the pool. Then we would eat our tempeh Rueben with roasted brussel sprouts. As a literary person, the awful singing could be seen as foreshadowing or as a metaphor for the rest of the evening.

We left the food on the table in our room and went to the pool. It felt just as good as we had imagined with its sprays of water shooting out over the center of the pool. After fifteen minutes, we were refreshed and hungry.

Robert went ahead of me to exit the pool up the three wide steps in the shallow end. He grabbed ahold of the railing in the center of the steps, but it swayed when he grabbed it, which threw off his balance. His left leg came down on the brick edging the pool, and his shin hit a protruding brick and slashed open his skin. Confusion reigned in the next few minutes. I soon discovered how an establishment reacts when they suspect a lawsuit might be involved.

“We can’t talk to you until we speak to our manager,” I was told when I asked for assistance at the front desk. They tossed me some towels to stench to blood. I went up to our room to get a shirt for my now freezing husband. Sirens echoed in the background, and by the time I returned to the pool area, five to six emergency personnel surrounded my husband.

“It’s going to need stiches,” one of them said. “We can take you to the ER in the ambulance, but we can’t take her.” His thumb pointed back toward me.

“I’m not going anywhere without her,” my husband said.

After going back and forth with the so-called medical personnel who could administer no first aid except to wrap his leg in gauze, they finally told me the ER was only a mile down the same road from where we were. I had been nervous about driving in a strange city after a glass of wine on an empty stomach as darkness approached. If you’ve ever driven in downtown Asheville with several Interstate highways zipping through it, you might understand my reluctance to drive my bleeding husband to the hospital. But I could manage a mile on the same road. If they’d only explained that in the beginning, all the chattering in between could have been avoided and saved my husband some anxiety.

Six stiches later, we returned to our room and our cold sandwiches and awful smelling brussel sprouts. In the morning, I went to take more pictures of the pool area just in case and the bloody towels from the night before were still in the chairs around the pool. I could go on about the lack of concern and caring from hotel staff, but I’d rather concentrate on the positive.

My husband healed although he couldn’t golf or swim for the rest of our trip. And I left Asheville determined to get back the good feelings from twenty-four hours earlier. I would not let a bad singer and six stitches detour me from all that lay ahead of us. And it worked.

Within two days, Hurricane Debby skirted around Tallahassee and gave us a reprieve. Then we proceeded to enjoy the best of visits with family and friends in all the places we visited in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

The first night did not foreshadow the rest of our journey at all. It only gave us the opportunity to get the bad stuff out of the way for the good to follow, allowing us to appreciate the embrace and welcoming arms of family and friends.

And as my journeys often do, it gave me a great story to share.