Within and Without: Memories of Asheville and The Great Gatsby

For a Good Book's 100th Birthday, and the Destruction of a Town

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The first thing I did on the day I got my driver’s license was toss my gray Ibanez electric guitar—her name was Wendy, and she had two humbuckers, a true alt-metal-head’s instrument, a guitar for a devotee of the Foo Fighters and the Smashing Pumpkins—into the trunk of our old Volvo sedan and cruise down NC Highway 70 from Black Mountain to Asheville toward my friend William’s house.

I have a memory of slotting the first disk of the Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness into the CD player, stabbing the glowing console with an index finger, and cranking up “Tonight, Tonight” about as far as it would go. It was 2004. The late May air was warm and thick, the windows were down, and the drive was a straight shot past your typical poorly-zoned North Carolina fare: gas stations and Mexican restaurants, stonemasons and bakeries, coffee shops and porn movie shacks with surprisingly clever marquees.

The blue roof of our high school, Asheville Christian Academy, jutted barely visible above the treeline as Swannanoa slid by and became Asheville proper. I rounded the bend in the highway and eased the car a few ticks north of the speed limit, experiencing the first thrill of absolute freedom, that peculiarly American cocktail of gasoline fumes and self-conscious provincialism, feeling like I was nowhere and, at the same time, streaming through the unquiet center of the universe. I was, as the man says, both within and without. And somewhere in my backpack was tucked a little blue dogeared copy of The Great Gatsby. We were reading it for American Lit with Mrs. McIntosh.

Minutes later, I was popping the trunk, hoisting Wendy over my shoulder, and padding down William’s driveway near the old Methodist church to get to the garage. I knew it would open. In fact, I could already hear William tuning up the big bass his dad had given him on permanent loan.

For some reason, that day—the memory of that drive, the guitar, the book—was what I thought of when I saw the pictures of what Helene had done to Swannanoa in September 2024. There it was: that same stretch of Highway 70, but under a quarter mile of streaming brown water, the buildings entirely gone or in the process of peeling off the tarmac like beetles losing their grip on a windshield, one leg at a time, as the car accelerates. The Associated Press—I think it was The Associated Press—had an aerial shot that included, in the upper-right corner, a glimpse of my high school up to its haunches in toxic muck, the roof tattered in places and cars strewn around the campus like windblown paper.

“His count of enchanted objects,” a voice said somewhere in my head, “had diminished by one.”