I live in Western North Carolina. The natives of this region are called mountaineers, the team name for Appalachian State University and West Virginia University. Appalachian is in Boone, North Carolina, and of course WVU is in Morgantown. This region that stretches from northern Georgia and Alabama to Pennsylvania (I'm not including the northern portion of this mountainous spine to east coast America) was the home for small, hard scrabble farms on which lived families that barely could raise enough to eat and depended upon the annual burley crop to make a little money.
The region was filled with small towns and crossroad stores. To shop at anything resembling a department store usually meant a long trip by car over roads that were an insult to the word. The people and their families had lived there for a century and a half.
In North Carolina, poverty in this region reigned, and it wasn't until the families began to flee off the mountain to find work that there was a change. Where did they go? To the small towns along the western edge of the state's Piedmont, places like Old Fort, Marion, Glen Alpine, Morganton, Valdese, Hickory, Wilkesboro, and on and on, places with new wealth from the textile and furniture plants newly established there. And for me these towns were the rivals of Marion High School. Our Rippers, as the athletic teams were called, played the teams from each of those towns either in football, basketball, or baseball, if not all three. But time has run its course and there is no Marion High School, Morganton, Valdese, Hickory high schools any longer. They are all relics of a past that no longer exists, much the same as those cotton mills and furniture plants are empty shells in communities that have watched an entire way of life disappear in the past decade and a half.
In the early days of the last century logging was king. If you find old photographs of the period you quickly note that the mountains are stripped of their trees. The logging companies of that day cut everything and left little or nothing behind. In Watauga County the railhead was in Todd, and the line went down the mountain to the east. The principal load in those pre-Great War days was logs sent to build a mighty nation, if you accept the propaganda from the period. Actually, the disappeared forests only fed the personal wealth of the old and newly established rich in this country. It was one of many boom times our nation has experienced since its founding, a building of wealth that ultimately led to a widened gap between the rich and the poor that when it ended always seemed to hurt the small man more than the big man.
Today, those denuded green hills of the pre-war period are once again covered in lush forests. Environmentalists fight to keep from happening what happened in those first two decades. We fight to keep the trees from being harvested yet again for wealth-creation, but we turn a blind eye as they are felled to create the open spaces needed to build the vacation homes of the rich and powerful in this state and others from the southeast.
Old family land has been broken up and sold as the children moved away to escape the back-breaking poverty of their parents. This out migration continues today as our young try to find a better life someplace else while the sons and daughters of the priviledged wish to stay here where no well-paying jobs exist.
The land that was once dotted with farm fields and old barns is now covered with burgeoning vacation tracts. The McMansions and Super Log Homes of the well-off citizens of Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point, Burlington, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh cover the ridges behind their guarded gates. They come here to sit on their expensive wooden decks blind to the remaining poverty of the region and with an unwillingness to pay their fair share for the services they use or the problems they create.
The population of the state has tripled just since I was in high school. While once we numbered about 3 million inhabitants from Murphy to Manteo, today we number about 9.25 million, a figure that puts a strain on the state to provide just the basics in a fair and equitable manner.
The three universities on this end of the state stand as examples of how times have changed.
Western Carolina University and Appalachian were established as teacher-training institutions in the late 19th century. In fact, neither became full-fledged universities until the 1960s. The third institution, the University of North Carolina Asheville began as a junior college in the '20s called Asheville Biltmore College. It basically supplied the first two years of college for the priviledged sons and daughters of Asheville before they left for Greensboro and Women's College, or Chapel Hill to finish at Carolina, or just enough post-high school training to supply Asheville's businesses with the limited trained help they needed to serve the rich and powerful of another era who found Asheville to be a pleasant escape from the clamor of life up north.
Today only Western Carolina seems still to honor its roots by continuing to recruit the region's students, many who are still first-generation college attenders. UNCA and Appalachian have long since grown beyond that to attend to the upper middle class denizens of the metropolitan areas of the state along the I-85 corridor that stretches from Charlotte to Durham.
Many of these students fall in love with the region and want to attend school here after vacationing away from the super hot and muggy Piedmont summers. Both UNCA and Appalachian have only too gladly become expressions of privilege and entitlement that define this particular demographic in our population.
Western North Carolina remains an escape. Today it's an escape not only from the insufferable heat of the lowlands, but also from the growing economic calamity speading rapidly across the face of our nation. Yes, we will suffer, too, but for a time we are protected by the gated communities of upper middle class America, and of the rich and powerful who vacation here in the anonymity the region offers. Did you know that Paul Newman, before his death, maintained a vacation home near Grandfather Mountain. Rita Moreno could often be spotted shopping at Mast General Store in Valle Crucis. And Wayne Huizenga, who made a fortune renting movies and hauling trash before he owned the Miami Dolphins, Florida Panthers and Florida Marlins, is reported to have flown in and out of Banner Elk on his private jet to helicopter around big ticket sports stars and movie actors like Dan Marino and Kevin Costner, among others trying to sell secluded getaway homes the likes of which no local could ever afford.
We've become a playground. Our low-tax local governments keep taxes low to keep what they perceive as the gravy train running. But these communities often don't produce a lot of new revenue for these governments. Afterall, if you fly in your private jet and helicopter to your home away from home, and you stock it with food from New York, LA or some other exotic location because the local markets just don't have what you are used to eating, then how is the local economy benefitting? The truth is it isn't. And when you throw in the incentives local government provide the developers of these communities to get them to build here and not somewhere else, the economy often comes out losing, not gaining.
The state's budget mess is a calamity. Cuts in public schools and in higher education seem to signal the end of the current binge. While the priviledged might be pulling their belts tighter to get through all this, the locals--capenters, electricians, plumbers, sales clerks, janitors, teachers and teacher aides, and all the rest who have to work to get from payday to payday without going broke, they are being hurt and to hear the bitter back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, well, one can only hope they all come to their senses soon and realize that we are in this together. If they don't figure that out soon, the lower economic classes will go under but sooner or later, so will the upper economic classes. And if we go, so goes the world and if you have that many dissatisfied people, conditions are rife for violence and war.
Most of our great science fiction writers, they were futurists in the best sense of that word, seemed to believe that some worldwide calamitous war would send us into a Dark Age to rival that which fell on western civilization when a corrupt and broke western part of the Roman Empire fell in 476 to the Germanic Odoacer who deposed the last western emperor. For us it might not be that we are defeated, even in a weakened state, but that we commit suicide. We have spent ourselves into international poverty. We owe tremendous sums to our enemies who have financed us for decades. And our military has demonstrated it can no longer project a powerful enough footprint to force our will on the unwilling in this world.
For those of us in Western North Carolina it means that once again we become a region defined by poverty rather than bounty, by ignorance rather than knowledge, and by sickness rather than our good health. One can only pray that in time we learn to overcome the problems confronting us.
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