Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Writer's Notebook: Road Trip

Road trip.  The very words still set me a-tingle.  This summer has been a time of several trips and I've seen a lot, ranging from mountain vistas to vineyards to tossing seas.  As a writer, I've always mined my trips for material and one of my favorite things to do in a novel or short story is to take the reader to a place that I've been and try to bring it to life.  Set the scene, paint the details, sketch the moment.  Ah, that's part of the joy of writing.  

Tomorrow I go on my most common type of roadtrip, an airplane trip where I do a flyover of the countryside.  You see a lot less during the trip itself, but I find the many hours aloft are a fine time to dive into the details of writing extended scenes with few distractions.  I do most of this kind of writing longhand, which is highly portable and can be done at any time during the flight.   No need to boot the looseleaf notebook or close the pages just because the pilot wants to land.  

My last few trips were on the road.  I took my oldest son to college in western North Carolina recently and he and I drove through ten states over two and one-half days.  For me, the new places were in the middle:  Route 81 crosses from Pennsylvania into Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia in short succession.  

We started the second day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the very name a harbinger of what was to come.  For on that day, we started in a rainstorm, then cleared a mountain passage on Route 78 and watched at the clouds broke, revealing the road which lay in front of us.   Within an two hours, the clouds had vanished and sun accompanied us for the rest of the trip.  

Around lunch time, we passed into West Virginia and decided to look for lunch in Martinsburg.  My wife family had settled in that area about 300 years ago, so we were curious about the town.   We drove through a residential area for about 10 minutes and began to wonder where the town center was, but finally discovered it.  The local architecture is beautiful, a mix of art deco and victorian styles, without a lot of more modern changes.  Here are a couple of samples of what we saw: 

After lunch at a Mexican restaurant downtown, we explored further -- the railroad station was just a few blocks away.   Martinsburg has a heritage of railroads and we saw an example in the roundhouse that was just across the tracks from the more recently modernized station.  

 

As all railroad buffs know, the roundhouse is where you would turn around the train in order to be able to change directions and go onto another track.  A much smaller example is found in San Francisco with their cable cars, but I'd never seen a fully enclosed building for this purpose.  Martinsburg clearly does not have a booming economy, but the people were very friendly and opened up when we mentioned the existance of family in the area.  

The road trip continued.  Our most spectacular day was on Friday morning, as we rode from Roanoke, Virginia to Tennesee and then into western North Carolina.  Here are a couple of glimpses of our vantage points:  

 

The mountains awed us as new scenes leaped up after each turn.   The two samples here are just examples of the many beauties to be seen on a drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.  

I recently mentioned to my writing friends how remarkable I found these mountain vistas to be.  I have a feeling I'll be seeing mountains jumping into my fiction very soon.   And now, time for that next road trip.  

Return to Asheville

My son and I have returned to Asheville, North Carolina as he prepares for enrollment at a local school in the fall.  We walked the city center in the late afternoon and delighted in its many contrasts.  Asheville is packed with galleries and work of local artists, so the local art association was our first stop.  The woman supervising the gallery gave us a quick rundown of the local art scene, which is not only downtown but in an arts district by the river.   The artist whose work was on display, Gerald Jonas, had a panopoly of canvas on display which explore the world in brilliant colors and with elements of texture.   And a great sign: "It's okay to touch."  

Down the road, we walked past an open air farmer's market, featuring station wagon's and truckloads of local produce, and then onto a food coop, which featured a cornupcopia of fresh foods and much more.  

The streets here remind me of San Francisco; lots of undulating blocks where you turn a corner and the next amazing art deco building shows it face.  The town's building look mostly unchanged from years

past, as evidenced by ads painted on brick on many sidewalls, advertising products from -- I'd guess -- the post-WWII era.   There are newer buildings, but the percentage of older ones is much higher than in a city like Boston.  

We worked up an appetite, then returned to a French restaurant called Bouchon, which promised French comfort food.  Exactement.  I recommended my son try the Steak au Poivre and I had a scintillating boulliabaise, with a glass of Alsatian Hugel on the side.  It reminded me of restaurants I'd been to in Paris and my son drew the comparison with our trip to Quebec City last year. 

Our outdoor dinner was mildly interrupted by a flash.  People at the table next to us quickly asked if anyone had been using a flash camera.  Nope.  Bowling ball thunder rattled the tables a moment later.  We reconnoitered indoors and continued our dinner there. 

Afterwards, we walked a few blocks back to our hotel.  The black night and wet streets offered striking views en route, made more so when lightning flashed overhead.  My son and I both agreed that the word for this city, especially at night, is dramatic.  

This evening, I took another walk in the city and the weather was more cooperative.  Smoke rose up from the base of the mountains overlooking downtown.  To our west, the sky tinted red at sunset, signaling what I hope will be a sunny day tomorrow.  

I'll close with a few photos from the walk about town. 

 

Inside Grove Arcade

 

Flowers by the public theater entrance

 

Call letters for the local public radio station

 

James pets a local cat

Walking in Asheville

We arrived at Asheville, North Carolina about mid-day yesterday.   Our Hertz GPS was totally baffled by the instruction to go to Woodfin Road and dropped us on a country mountain road.  Nope, no sign of our hotel there.  We re-synched and headed back to on HWY 541 until we got to Rt 25 (aka Biltmore).  We went about a mile to find the Athena cafe.  They had a variety of Greek items on the menu, plus things like pizza for the less adventurous.  Three of us ordered variations on the Gyro platter.  My version came with thin slices of cooked lamb on strips of gyro bread, bracketed by a healthy-sized Greek salad.  Yum.  My youngest ordered pizza, which he demolished with a little bit of help.  Hungers sated, we were ready to explore the town. 

It turned out our hotel was on the other Woodfin Road, not far from Biltmore, so we decided to park at the hotel and avoid any extra parking charges.  We settled in at the hotel and immediately felt comfortable.  The view from the 10th floor looked like this: 

The weather had turned cool and windy, so we dressed warmly for our walk around the downtown.  Our guidebook talked about the Urban Trail, so we decided to follow that. The man at the front desk at our hotel was very helpful, suggesting we go to the Art Museum to get a map of the trail.   Nice idea, but when we got to the monument in front of the museum, we discovered it was closed on Mondays.   We were told that the trail was marked on the sidewalks, but must have looked confused, since a group of college age kids came up and asked if they could help us.  One girl in particular was very helpful, giving us tips on which streets to follow and suggesting we find our way to Grove Plaza.  

We began walking from our start at Pack Square and soon found pink stones embedded in the sidewalk marking the walking trail.  We also discovered that the city's reputation for having very well preserved Art Deco architecture was quite accurate.  We also saw other unfamiliar sites, such as a Five and Dime store.  One building after another had stunning architecture, so we didn't mind the cold weather so much.   We turned a corner and then found a red and gold sign for F. W. Woolworth.  We stepped into the erstwhile department store and found an old style soda fountain, meticulously restored, adjacent to a series of booths housing work of local artists.  The art was phenomenal and much of it had clear connections to the remarkable cityscape and the surruounding mountains of Asheville.  My oldest son loves art, so he just reveled in the many different types of art available for viewing.   We also discovered that there had been a water main break downtown, so the soda fountain was closed, along with my of the nearby restaurants.   

We resumed our walk and found more of the pink stone markers, which led us to a pedestrian walkway known as Wall Street.  It looks like this:  

We were impressed by a very new building we saw at the end of that block, but our street markers had vanished, so we decided to start looping back.  Turning the corner, we encountered the recently refurbished Grove Plaza:  

   

This spectacular example of Art Deco at it best was built in 1927, but had languished for many years when the building had been taken over by the Federal government for its National Weather Center.   The current version of the building re-opened in 2002 and now houses a variety of intriguing shops.  We strolled into a combination high end grocery and wine store and couldn't resist buying some fruit snacks and other items for the rest of our trip.   Beyond that store, we walked through an inner atrium which simply amazed us with its intricacy of design, clean lines and remarkable use of light. 

We took advantage of the respite from the chills of the outdoors and a woman proprietor told us about the history of the building and how it nearly had been torn down, before being rescue re-furbished in its current form.  She was very friendly and gave tips on places we should consider visiting in light of our son's interest in art.  

We continued the tour outside and soon encountered an amazing Basilica, featuring what is reputed to be the largest domed roof of its kind in North America.   Nearby, we walked into the civic center, which has bronze statues of musicians in full stride in front.  We walked and walked, finding more trendy restaurants of many different cuisines (while making mental notes for later) and finally got to the part of the tour where the symbol was a red angel.   Yes, we were about to encounter the footsteps of a famous native son, Thomas Wolfe, whose novel Look Homeward, Angel, borrowed much about Asheville for that novel.  There were imprints of his footprints, proving that Wolfe was a large man, and not only for the amount of words that he could spew on a page.  We'd reached the end of the walking tour -- a yellow boarding house that had served as the backdrop for Wolfe's novel.  Since it was Monday, it too was closed.     

That night, we circled back to Walnut Street, walked up a steep hill and stepped into Zambra, a restaurant featuring Spanish cuisine, in the style of a Tapas bar.  With the help of our waitress, we ordered small plates:  a delightful salad of pears and local greens, a second grassier set of greens, curry flavored albondigas -- a kind of meatball -- and two larger dishes of Paella and trout.   The food challenged our palettes, but was well worth the effort.  So ended our night in Asheville.