Finding Each Other in Asheville

Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit.

Issue No. 211

Root Ball Thanksgiving
Carrie Frye

Root Ball Thanksgiving

by Carrie Frye

A big deal about the root ball tournament this past Sunday was that Max Chain, the game’s originator, was there. Before he moved back to the area, Max had been living out of state for several years and many players had never met him. All afternoon they kept coming up and shaking his hand, telling him how much the game he invented has meant to them. (Root ball is a game unique to Asheville, where you first throw a frisbee-like object with a hole in it, which is called the root, and then toss a spiked plastic ball towards a stake.)

Another big deal was how many players showed up. It was a draw doubles tournament, meaning you didn’t pick your partner, but had them picked from a hat. Root ball is a game well suited to doubles, with players alternating between throwing and tossing. The tournament started at noon; the last game ended past eight. There were thirty-four players in seventeen doubles teams. I haven’t seen that many players in a tournament in years.

The final big deal was that the tournament happened, not at the Root Bar, the game’s official home—a dive bar destroyed in Helene—but seven miles down the road, at Pisgah Brewing. Behind the brewery’s main buildings, there’s a wide lawn with a gazebo, a stage for music, picnic tables, and two sand courts. (Some of the brewery’s employees had been Root Bar regulars.)

The courts at Pisgah Brewing have some rocks arranged in a stack in the middle of them. Some of the sand in the second court is cratered around the stakes, creating a basin for the ball to orbit around in. These obstacles and any other chaotic elements in a court, like the basins around the stakes, are integral to the pleasures of root ball. They force you to strategize and adjust your technique accordingly.

“The sand on that court rolls slow,” my husband Lowell pointed out when I arrived. Also: “When I got here everyone was hugging. People even tried to hug me.” Soon after, someone had handed him a joint so strong that after one hit he had to go lie down on a picnic bench and stare up at the blazingly blue autumn sky for a while. Then he got up and played his first game.

Sometimes in the past month I’ve felt myself turn into a shuddering, angry wolverine. A few weeks ago a perfectly nice woman I met on the street in New York learned I was from Asheville, MEANING WELL, grasped my hand and said, her eyes big with sympathy, “Oh, and the city is rebuilding?” and the wolverine in me answered, “NO, NOT REBUILDING. WE’RE STILL DIGGING OUT.” 

The other day Terri Dolan, the Root Bar’s owner (she bought it from Max), told me about a passing allusion someone had made to her about “the flood,” to which she had wolverined, “MA’AM, IT WAS NOT JUST A FLOOD.” Because while it’s true that Helene caused historically high floods, the storm also featured high winds and twisters that touched down and tossed the forest trees around like matchsticks, and, equally ruinously, caused at least a thousand mudslides and landslides, so many that the U.S. Geological Survey has categorized Helene “a geological event” because this one storm has permanently reshaped the Appalachian landscape.   

After 53 days, Asheville’s water became drinkable last week, a truly amazing feat by our water department. And there are so many other good things that have happened—for example, the same night that Terri and I were comparing wolverine notes, I met four volunteers who were in town from all over the country helping to drywall homes so that people can move back in.

The mail is running in Asheville. Delivery trucks are dropping stuff off. Now, two months and a day after Helene, the city has settled into a form of “normalish" that is messy but routine. I’m not sure how long this stage will last. A year? Two? I have no idea. In some places you’d have no idea the storm even happened. In others, you'll look around and realize that the damage won't be put right in our lifetimes.  

Meanwhile, winter is drawing in; many families are in tents, campers, and hotel rooms. Rent is a big worry, hanging in the air; so many businesses are gone or had to stay closed while the water was out that people have missed a lot of paychecks or had to change jobs. When you meet the people who took the hardest losses in the storm, who went numb in the days immediately after, you can sense an awareness coming back, jangly and raw and painful.

I had one of the easiest runs of anyone I know (truly!), and I still cry at odd times. I miss jokes, misunderstand simple statements, brain-blip odd things. I have less air in my shocks for the small, routine hiccups of life. I wolverine on the innocent. The storm will show up at odd times, in odd places. At a yearly check-up, the nurse was briskly running through our business together—medications, medical history, etc.—and then there was a pause where for twenty seconds she cried and then we went on again, the same as we had been before.

Here are some photos Lowell and I took this week along I-70 in Swannanoa, one of the towns hardest hit by the storm.

Last week there was a big windstorm. It lasted from Wednesday to Friday, and for two nights I lay in bed, listening to it howl through the woods next to my house, more scared than I’d been during Helene. It was a logical fear: many trees were loosened by the storm and are just waiting for a nudge from the wind to fall. But it was also not logical: just an animal’s fear as it lies in the dark and listens to the universe’s roaring and hopes by sheer vigilance to ward off the worst of what can happen. This animal-ness has been a steady background hum of the past two months. 

There’s a route I take for errands now which, because of road closures, takes me down to a certain intersection by the river. There’s always orange dust roiling in the air there. A semi is overturned. Debris is piled in every direction, on and on, on both sides of the roadblocks. There are trees down and plastic bags caught in their branches, a bit of degradation that always stands out. When I drive by, my conscious thought is not of sadness—I’ve gone by there many times now—but still, on some level, I keep returning to the image over and over, thumbing over it, like my mammalian self is still trying to work out what is so upsetting. 

There is so much animal processing like that.

You might, for example, have cognitively known that your friend was alive—you’d seen it on Facebook! or you’d texted them, sometimes in long group chats, and taken in the news that they’d had a hard time, sure, but along with it evidence that they were OK (or at least “OK”)—and still when you saw them for the first time, their actual physical self standing there in front of you, you might start to bawl—like until then, you didn’t actually know that they had made it. Not really, not fully, not till you were together. 

It was a beautiful day for a tournament, everyone agreed. The cold and the wind had departed. Someone had a drone and we gathered on the stage for a group picture. Seven miles down the road, the Root Bar sat by the river, empty, with the pool table going through the wall, and a pile of trees and brush where the courts once were. 

Those seven miles along 70 take you through Swannanoa, and for many people, the tournament was the first time they’d seen the damage—the empty, battered houses, the fields of mud, the piles of debris piled up by people digging their way out. One building will be utterly destroyed and then, a little farther up, there’s the Hot Dog King, totally fine. Looking at the drone picture, you’d have no idea how desolate things look just a mile away.

People laughed and people cried. We told stories about where we’d been when the storm hit, what we’d done after. “Group trauma,” someone would say,  and listeners would guffaw. Music played from speakers. There was such a lot of food. It wasn’t yet Thanksgiving but it felt like it was. 

The roots flew through the air, followed by the balls. “Johnson, don’t grip your thumb so tight,” Damien advised during one game. “Shut up,” Johnson yelled back from the court. His son, age four, was playing with a dinosaur in the sand behind him. Another little kid streaked by in a red-and-blue tutu, weaving around the trees. We were all seven miles away from the bar where most of us had met, and that was different. But if the animal body can apprehend grief and fear and sadness, it can apprehend joy, too, and gratitude, and this is what was winging through the air that day.

The Swannanoa Christian Ministry does great work for the people of the area. And the volunteers I met were from All Hands and Hearts.

If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe? Just $3/month.

Thank you from everyone at Flaming Hydra for making this year such a beautiful and fiery adventure.