I decided to drive to Asheville on a whim. I didn’t have any particular reason to go, but I’d heard my share of good things about the famed mountainside town. More than anything, I wanted to go on a road trip and get away from living another day of winter in Pennsylvania. Admittedly the idea seemed a little lofty for an inexperienced solo traveler.
I want to be the person who spontaneously gets in his car and goes places. The truth, though, is that right now, I’m not. I made it here — yes; I survived my longest car ride yet. Whether my 2011 Ford Focus would even make it this far was no given. But now that I’ve made it here… now that I’m staying in an unfamiliar hostel with a bunch of strangers… I could hardly feel less welcome in this new city. For a hostel, the environment is strikingly hostile.
From the cameras that line the building’s interior to the contract we had to sign in order to be admitted, to the anti-social come-and-go nature of every person residing here, there’s hardly a part of this that feels communal.
Arriving at 11 PM, I expect to walk into a room full of vibrant creatives. Instead, I’m greeted by a bureaucrat with blond hair standing in front of a wall of surveillance monitors. She proceeds to hand me the wrong key and guide me toward the wrong room. There are other people in it, but none of them appear eager to interact. They’re using reading lights and looking discreetly, albeit suspiciously, toward me.
Rather than catch another sidelong glance from a silent stranger, I decide to tour the rest of our living area. There’s a mid-2000s flat-screen TV on the wall atop a C+ selection of DVDs to choose between. Judging by the camera pointed concertedly toward the entertainment area, it doesn’t appear as though the TV spends a lot of time in use.
The couches beside it are welcoming enough for guests to sink into but the red glow of the surveillance light beside them begs to differ. It appears almost like show furniture. Brick walls lead up from a creaking wood floor to a near-auditorium-height ceiling. The kitchen is as lifeless as the rest of this sprawling, snoring hostel.
Remembering the chicken sandwich from Dairy Queen that I reluctantly stopped for on the way here, I go to use the microwave. But as I approach the microwave door and unsheathe the sandwich from its wrapper, I’m greeted with a sign. “No kitchen use between 11 PM–7 AM.”
“Surely this can’t apply to even the microwave…” I think to myself. But the bureaucrat from earlier has made a stealthy return. She lurks up behind me and knows just what I’m about to ask.
“Is the microwave off l — ”
“Yeaah, sorry,” she says with an unapologetic smirk.
Whether she’s been making use of one of the 150 cameras here, or her bureaucratic abilities have granted her telepathy, is unclear. Maybe DMV workers really do peer into my soul and I’m not just imagining that they see my fears, hopes, and dreams with their locked, unwavering stares.
I look forward and backward at the sandwich in my hand, hone in on the ketchup and mayo dripping sloppily from their moistened buns, and I know it won’t survive a night in the fridge. My stomach thanks me as I disappointedly let it fall into the trash can beside me. But when I then take the box of honey nut cheerios from my car and carry it into my pod, I feel a displeased gurgle.
Fortunately, though, my stomach is spared the cereal dinner by the hostel’s strict no-food-in-pod rule that I was unaware of. As I reach into the bag of honey-flavored O’s with two successive, plastic crinkles, I’m informed with a slightly terrifying tap on my pod of the draconian rule that I obliviously agreed to.
It’s rare that I’m driven to regret not reading contracts, but I suddenly begin to wonder if maybe I should have read all of those iTunes agreements as a kid. Maybe if I weren’t so trusting then I wouldn’t be quietly munching dry cereal in an Anne Frank-esque attempt to nourish myself in this cramped wooden enclosure.
Being the writer whose hours often stretch well into the morning, an 11 PM lights out isn’t going to work. So I decide to walk the streets of this vibrant town. But getting out of the hostel isn’t as simple as I’d hoped. The lobby seems almost purposefully designed to confuse. Between the bathrooms, the showers, the living space, the exit, and the office, just about every doorway feels misplaced.
But to the relief of my ego, a sympathetic exchange of words with another flustered woman in the lobby confirms that I’m not the only one who has this trouble. Why exactly this arrangement leaves people so stupefied is unclear, but that everyone who approaches it has to scratch their head for a moment as they consider the options is difficult to deny.
I walk the streets of Asheville and start to wish that I knew some of the people in it. I watch as two people hang out of the back windows of a sports car as it careens loudly down the street.
“I should be here with friends,” I think to myself. I walk a few blocks through the neighborhood and see a happy bevy of drunken dwellers ambling through it. I look for an entrance into just one of their conversations. I eavesdrop on passing fragments of dialogue.
“… and I looked up, and I literally saw this girl giving him head from the window,” a large, bearded man says to the woman standing beside him. He’s the type of large bearded, though, that veers much closer to a new-age Santa Claus than just about any of the bikers I drove past on the way here. His conversational companion looks surprisingly captivated by his slur-laden tale.
I continue around the block. As I circle back to where I started, I spot a bar and decide to enter. I pretend to look thoughtfully at the menu, as bar-goers might do. Of course, I wouldn’t know; I’m not a bar-goer. But after a minute of looking up and down the 10-item menu on a chalkboard above the bar, people seem to catch onto my ruse. As my bar-going charade reveals itself, the weight of a thousand drunken eyes feels suddenly as though it’s bearing down on me.
“I’m already an imposter traveler, no need to be an imposter drinker,” I think to myself as I flee the scene. I try to appear suavely as though it was their menu that was the problem rather than my searing distaste for alcohol, crowds, and the unwanted stares of strangers. But my escape exudes little confidence.
“I wish I liked alcohol,” I think to myself with a sigh as it dawns on me how deeply alcohol has pervaded even this hallowed hippie haven of America. Another car speeds down the street; this one has three people hanging out of it. The engine roars blaringly as annoyed passersby give stares from within nifty craft shops, boutiques, and cafes.
For how quick people here are to boast about what a quiet getaway this tiny mountain metropolis is, its silences are surprisingly well punctuated with these roaring engines. They’re the engines not of cars that lack mufflers, but the ones installed specifically to annoy the elderly, the young, the artsy, and just about every critic of abrasive noises that falls between those demographics.
I’m all for the annoyed suburbanite, but even I have my limits. The drunken chatter and zooming race cars and wafting marijuana smoke inspire me to do what little I can to prepare for sleep in the rickety metal bunk of a bed that they’ve provided me: smoke weed in my car as I listen to the soundtrack of Everything Everywhere All at Once.
After fifteen minutes, I leave the parking garage and make my return to the hostile maze of a hostel. As I approach the lobby again, my eyes a couple of shades pinker, I consider my options with double the confusion from the previous time I approached this confounding crossroad. A woman looks toward me sympathetically from the darkness of the lobby.
“Does this lobby confuse everybody or am I crazy?”
“I’ve even seen people try to walk into the custodial closet.”
As I enter the darkened living area, though, I’m quickly bombarded by a couple of staff members. I begin fearing that my impromptu car intermission wasn’t as private as I’d hoped.
“I’m just realizing we put you in a bunk instead of a pod,” says one of them.
“Oh, thanks! I was wondering about that,” I reply. I hadn’t researched exactly what the difference between bunkbeds and pods was in my bullheaded refusal to read just about any of the details of what I was sleepily signing up for, but going almost entirely off of the name alone, I went with the pod. I’d been a little confused about what exactly made the bottom bunk of my bunkbed a “pod,” but was weary enough from my six hours of driving that I was neither willing nor able to protest.
She collects from me my previous locker key, gives me a new one, and ushers me now toward a pod atop a sleeping man. The bed looks larger, but that it’s directly on top of this sleeping person evens the scales a bit. With a couple of wooden little nooks and an outlet, it’s reminiscent of the micro-apartments that have emerged in some of China’s most crowded cities. As I quietly and clumsily climb the ladder, an arm and backpack full of belongings, I try my best to settle myself.
My body’s tired from the drive, but my mind is hardly prepared yet for a pre-1 AM bedtime. And to make matters worse, my pod has no pillow. Suddenly though, and as if to read my mind, the man beneath me offers out an olive branch in the form of a little, white cushion.
“I got you a pillow,” he says to me. It’s the most welcome I’ve felt in my first few hours here. “There’s something about this hostel and telepathy…” I think to myself as I allow gratitude to wash over the feeling that my mind is being read and my microwave activity surveilled. “Maybe Asheville isn’t so bad.”
Of course, I come to find out the next day that he’d initially stolen the pillow from my pod, to begin with. His kindness was an act of guilt and not generosity!
But as far as apologetic pillow thieves go, he seems like a good dude. It’s hardly helped our interactions to feel less forced than those of the most late-night community college night classes, though, in truth. Like the overworked nurses, full-time parents, and aimless dropouts that speed-walk the darkened campus in hurried discordance, we’re in separate parts of our lives and don’t have a lot to connect over. Our commonalities seem to end with the ladder between our two wooden pods. I feel lonely here.