Banner Elk

The thread of western North Carolina seems to have woven itself through the tapestry of my life. It began with a summer vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains, one of only a two family holidays I distinctly remember. The magic in the babbling brooks, verdant mountains, and clean, clear air captivated my young imagination. Since then, their beauty has drawn me back nearly a dozen times for camping trips, Boy Scout camp, driving excursions, novel research, even for Karen’s and my honeymoon. So naturally, this year, we chose to revisit that same inn in Banner Elk for our twentieth anniversary.

I know a lot of geeks, so I regularly hear the pointed questions: Where are our transporters? What about our teleporting stones? I contend that technology already exists, if you know how to squint and look at it. It’s just slower than we’d like. First, we get into small, familiar chambers decorated to our individual tastes with our individual choice of music. Then, we hang out in a large room where we replenish ourselves with familiar brands of coffee and prepared food before we trundle into seats in a long tube to fill the time with that same familiar soundtrack along with our books and other entertainments. And when we eventually emerge a few hours later, we stare out onto a vista of someplace completely different.

Though the settings of this Slow Glass machinery can be bit arcane. If you aren’t careful, you sometimes make a pit stop somewhere back in time. Such was the case with Charlotte airport with its numerous shoeshine stands and full-time restroom attendants (complete with bowls of peppermint candies and tip jars). At least they’ve graduated into an era of pink power tools, you know, for the ladies.  But that was just a thankfully short diversion before we found ourselves standing at the gateway to the mountains.

From the airport, as if to reinforce the magical, teleportation theme, Karen and I drove up mountainsides and through river valleys shrouded with mystery and fog. While the car interior was a little larger and slightly more barren, from its speakers the songs remained the same. Once we finally broke free of the low-slung clouds, the scenery beyond the windows was composed of almost entirely of wood, water, stone and deep blue sky.

Archer’s Mountain Inn perches just over halfway up Beech Mountain, almost a mile high, looking south across the valley toward Banner Elk, Linville and Grandfather Mountain. After a brief stop for provisioning at the local grocery (with a tidy section of organics and a selection of good wine), we settled in for the next five days.

On our honeymoon, we remember touring nearby Grandfather Mountain, Linville Falls, Linville Caverns, and the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We discovered an Everything Scottish shop and a local pottery outlet, both of which seem to have slipped beneath the surface of the lake of time. That trip, though not this one, we brought our hiking boots but didn’t find many public trails.

A few years ago, North Carolina remedied that deficiency with the addition of 2600 acres in the form of a newly christened Grandfather Mountain State Park. The precise moment of the spring equinox found us beside a tumbledown stream on its Profile Trail. Over the next two days, we hiked several miles of trails, the Asutsi and the Nuwati, down a section of the Boone’s Fork and up to the panorama at Storyteller’s Rock. We revisited all three overlooks at Linville Falls, and wandered around the grounds of the Moses Cone Manor. Even without boots, we managed almost nine miles in three days. And I discovered Birkenstocks make perfectly good trekking shoes even over rocky terrain. 

When we weren’t hiking, we were driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway with its bright yellow bouquets of roadside daffodils. Robins darted through the wine-stained branches of the maples that had just begun to leaf. Forsythia and dogwood were already in bloom, with mountain laurel set to be next up on the stage. We roamed across twisty back roads whose fields and farmsteads reminded us of Wales without the castles, Scotland without the sheep. We stumbled across places we’d researched for Aluria’s Tale (my novel). We poked through two of the shops of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, the Parkway Craft Center near Blowing Rock and the Folk Art Center in Asheville.

A couple nights we sampled the cuisine at the adjacent Jackalope’s View Restaurant, and one other at an Italian bistro down in the valley. After dinner each evening, we warmed ourselves by the fireplace in our room, Anonymous 4 on the iPod, books, wine and chocolate in hand. Which is also how we spent the last full day when fog, rain and a few snow flurries with a threat of ice kept us atop the mountain. Neither of us felt up for tackling the switchbacks in a foreign SUV. By the time the fire burned to glowing embers, we found ourselves standing by the bank of windows taking in the view. A comfortable silence spread over us as we gazed across the valley at a tangled web of lights, the pauses between them somewhat shorter than they’d been our trip before.

The last morning, we wandered out to an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and up an ice-sheathed path to an arched, wooden bridge to look down on one final fall of water over rocks. On our way, we saw our one and only deer. We daydreamed as we poked our way back to Asheville and wondered if this was a place to which we might retire as the morning and early afternoon slipped by.

At the airport, the spell was broken. All too soon we found ourselves back home, safely ensconced in our own bed once again, Nyala and Mara purring by our sides, vowing next time, we won’t wait too long before returning to our rejuvenating mountain retreat.


© 2014 Edward P. Morgan III