I live in Western North Carolina, specifically in a little town called Mars Hill. Mars Hill is named for a geophysical location in ancient Athens upon which the apostle Paul delivered a sermon to convert the Greeks to Christianity. Fittingly enough it has a bunch of churches and a private baptist college called.... Mars Hill College. Apollo Creed came to visit on some of his travels and enjoyed a spectacular sunset, which aren't uncommon. It's a nice little town and not as hateful as most people would imagine a southern town.

Mars Hill is also home to SART, the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater at Owen Theater on the college's campus. One year when I was twelve, the college hosted a haunted house in Owen Theater that was led by a beautiful African American man in drag with a blue wig. The town is a mixture of people. Recently the college has been the source of a lot of crime in the surrounding communities, which is sad. I hope it doesn't stay that way.

SART has a really bad website, but a really great mission and lots of good regional actors come through on occasion. I've seen other things there, aside from beautiful drag-queens. The college also has a large auditorium. Every semester, the county-wide middle school dance & drama and music & band classes hold enormous productions there. I participated in five. I was a forest flower during the performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird, a mirror shard and the play narrator in Anderson's The Snow Queen, a twisting vine in Sleeping Beauty to name a few things. I had great teachers.

Madison County is the greater municipal area for Mars Hill, and it's unusual. There are three major towns including Mars Hill, the other two being Marshall and Hot Springs. Marshall is the county seat and it sits perched on the banks of the French Broad River. The river is a dirty reminder of interstate pollution, which is sad. Thousands, heck hundreds of years ago, it was a lifeline for the region providing food and water for the isolated residents. It's getting better, but it's still along way from what it used to be. The trains that come through only carry freight now which is a sad thing. In the 20's, river cities and towns were thriving places, full of people. I hope the trains carry people through the mountains again someday. There's some beautiful things to see along the tracks. Not that I have broken federal law and walked them... and Hot Springs is truly an entire post unto itself.

As you may have figured out, when someone starts to talk about this place, it's hard to focus only on the towns and cities in a standalone way. I'm from Mars Hill, but due to the nature of economic growth in the region, I don't spend much time here. The best jobs are in and around Asheville which is the closest city to me and largest in WNC. I have a ~45 minute commute every weekday to a new doctors practice in Enka, a suburb of Asheville. It's a long haul, and it's death to your fuel economy, but I'm used to the ride. It gives me time to myself, which I lack nowadays. Asheville is... unique. So unique it's difficult for me to come up with a metaphor that would properly describe all of the city's attributes. It's artistic. It's organic. It's fueled by peaceful protests, redneck bars, hillbilly music, art, history, beer... I could go on and on and labels would still not suffice to describe how weird and joyful and terrible it is. I defy any of you to visit and not fall in love with something there.

But even bigger than that is the region. I live on the outskirts of The Pisgah National Forest on the north-east side of a steep valley that's heavily wooded. I can get lost in my own backyard. Or I can get lost in someone else's front yard. At any point in time I am mere steps away from an ecology that is older than my lineage, I can wade in a creek that ancestors I never knew used to irrigate their crops. I can lean on a maple that my great grandpa planted before his children were born. I can stumble into bear-wallows, I can look out over valleys carved eons ago by tectonic shifts, I can eat wild strawberries straight out of the ground. I can say with complete sincerity, that Eden ain't got trout on where I live. (Fun fact, I can walk to those overlooks if the mood struck me.)

This post is entirely too long and probably no one will read it. I just hate the reputation my region has around the world and wanted to even out the good with the bad that everyone already knows. I love it here, despite its flaws.