A Cold War Diary.

From the introduction:

1971.  We were stuck.  Stuck in Europe, stuck in Germany, stuck in missiles, stuck for two years with curling rivers, half-ruined castles, beers in mugs, gas stamps and cars with dents and clicking motors.  We were stuck driving narrow roads that trundled on to the Alps, Paris and Amsterdam.  We were stuck in civil rights battles over music and holidays and issues of equality, a microcosm of street wars in the states.  We were stuck in uniform.  God, we were so stuck.  For two years, stuck.  We were so stuck, we talked about how much time we had left ~ how “short” we were ~ on a constant basis.  But, in the meantime, in the grooves of all our stuckness, we felt a lot of things.  We saw a lot of things.  We loved each other.   We became different people.

            Having no television and no doorway to news, we went to bed early and read books to each other.  Over the weeks, we'd slip into Hemingway's Moveable Feast, Willy Morris' North Toward Home, LeCarré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.  Words, and how they were used, crawled into our time together, filling down moments with longings and dreams, and hopes for a better world.  We co-imagined a geography of hurtness saved by words.

            Hemingway wrote: All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

            We would read that to each other and I would wonder about "high white houses" and "the wet blackness of streets" and why those words carried the weight they did and whether Hemingway meant to have two "wheres.”  Words meant something then, whispered to each other in bed under a fingernail moon, in the midst of a larger thing called "the Cold War.”

A handful of the shots that have gone into illustrating four downtown trails.

At French Broad Chocolate late in the day.

For a creative collaboration between the city, the Asheville Downtown Association and the Convention/Visitors Bureau, we've taken off on the development of three distinct walking trails -- namely twenties architecture, public art and murals -- combining them with the well-established Urban Trail on a new website soon to be accessible through the city's main site and/or ExploreAsheville.com.  It's been both an honor and a lot of fun hinging all this together with the partnership of Elizabeth White, digital art director for the tourism development office.  Along the way, I've been able to shoot some of the city's great treasures, some of which are included here.

My daughter Sara steps into a scene with W.O. Wolfe's angel and the original Pack Library.

At the St. Lawrence station, saluting Raphael Guastavino, on the Urban Trail.

Sara and Nathan in front of the Public Service Building on the Twenties Architecture Trail in a carpet of ginko leaves.

Part of the Lexington Avenue Bridge mural, shot in the process of putting together a murals trail.

Mural at PennyCup Coffee in the block of the YMI.

Urban Trail station honoring Richard Sharp Smith, early 20th century architect who influenced many Asheville neighborhoods.

First Baptist, a Douglas Ellington commission, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Public art trail photos, Asheville

Part of a project to wrangle together four distinct walking trails for the web involving: the Urban Trail, mural art, deco buildings and stand-alone public art.

Words for my friend Brad Campbell yesterday as he received AAF's Silver Medal.

First of all, Brad and Judy have been very, very special friends to me, too special to even categorize unless you wanted to say once in a lifetime.  We have hiked all sorts of mountain trails, traveled to Italy together and to London and we once got to New York in time to see Christo's wrap of Central Park.  Once when I was out of work, I flew to Chicago and Brad hosted me in the city then took me for a flight in a Stearman Bi-Wing he co-owned.  It completely transferred my mind to a state of being just plain thankful -- which is generally the effect Brad has on anyone who really gets to know him.

He originally moved to Asheville from Louisiana to be a writer, to maybe follow in Wolfe's footprints.  What he became, instead, is a person who is (yes) a writer, but also a leader, a conjurer of ideas, an inspiration to creative types of all varieties, and mostly, once again, a true friend to many, many, many people.  It was sort of a miracle we met up-- and I'll always be grateful for it.

There are so many memories along the way but one of my favorites is sitting in Peter and Jazz Gentling's garden on Town Mountain and conjuring up Thomas Wolfe -- actually scripting what Wolfe would say about Asheville if he were to show up today.  We then hired an actor who played the part of Wolfe -- this was in the eighties -- and working off script, that actor castigated the audience at ACT that day for not caring enough for downtown and for implanting a building that looked like a sternwheeler in the middle of everything.  I'm pretty sure it was Wolfe, wringing his hands, who started the whole downtown Renaissance.  Well, that was Brad's work.

I think Brad has accomplished a lot more than being a writer -- whether for the cinema or for advertising or for the Chicago Tribune's Sunday edition.  I think he has managed to be one of the best friends a person could have -- and that certainly includes me, my daughters Sara and Alison, their mom, and a host of characters too many to render -- and many yet to be named.

From last year's scrapbook.

The sky over Dublin during a cross-town amble with Alie.

A dive into memoir.

Inspired by conversations with two ancient friends at a reunion last year, I took off on a short but lush piece about my last two years in high school called "Class of '65," then workshopped it in a Great Smokies program led by fiction writer Vicki Lane.

Here's the way it begins:

The lane reels off the highway and spills over small hills, moving quietly through trees yellowing with fall, ending at a lit pavilion.

I pull the station wagon next to a fence and walk down a pitched slope, trying to stay on my feet.  I'm nervous and a bit self-conscious.  Orange and black balloons dangle from fence posts, the colors of Virginia High School.  The shadows in front of me jump with energy.  Under the half-light of the pavilion, hardly anyone looks old enough to be 68 ~ or whatever 68 is supposed to look like. 

As I walk up, a bearded Jim Crumley bounds out to say hello and I'm glad to see him.  Fifty years ago, we squeezed into his mom's kitchen and held court on the merits of Motown.  We listened to Bobby "Blue" Bland and talked about the advantages of folding seats in a Rambler.  We talked about shooting doves in Southwest Virginia and escape-hatching girls at Virginia Intermont, the small women's college just up the hill.

Crumley married Sherry Smith, who I kissed in the autumn of '64 at the Moonlight Drive-in on Lee Highway.  We kissed after I'd hung a 5-pound metal speaker on our car window. Down front, the giant screen flickered and pulsed.  Engines cranked and shut off.  Someone drifted by, at the edge of a kiss, on the way to the popcorn hut.

I'm thinking about Sherry and, from nowhere, she's next to me, talking about my parents, and our friends' parents, about her mom who's still alive.  She uses nicknames I hadn't thought of in years.

Big Jay for my dad.  Rooni for Frank Goodpasture's mom.  Big Frank for Frank's dad.  Animated and smiling, she talks about Big Jay building a fire and telling labyrinthine tales to kids in the neighborhood.

"Yeah," I say, "I can see that.  He was a kick-ass great storyteller."

I feel like I'm standing in a doorway.  On the other side it's 1965 and we're all half a century younger. Kennedy is dead, Johnson is waging war on poverty, a deadly conflict unspools somewhere green and thick and wet, the Beatles have landed, and that fall we could actually win the game against Tennessee High, the equivalent to Haley's Comet crashing into South Holston Lake.

Watercolor: "Into the Woods"

Saving history as oral remembrance: A documentary about Asheville's public art.

This week, working with filmmaker Erin Derham, we'll record the voices of a dozen pioneers, activists and artists involved in the original development of Asheville's Urban Trail.  Once recorded, Erin will carve out a 15 minute documentary which we're hoping to debut in the early spring.  What excites me about the project is the whole idea of combining the efforts of a number of interested parties--the city, the public arts commission (I'm a member), the Asheville Downtown Association, and others--in realizing this endeavor and staying steadily behind it.  I think it opens the door to all sorts of other cross-agency collaborations in the future--hopefully more films incorporating oral histories and story-telling which, in turn, celebrates who we are.

The finished film, debuted earlier this year.