Sitting at the large, vacant table of my Asheville hostel, I’m feeling slightly sorry for myself. It’s a vibrant town full of interesting people and I don’t know any of them. I’ve had prolonged conversations with a couple of people at the nearby coffee shop, but neither talk rose to anything particularly meaningful.
I feel mired in the traveler’s realization that I arrived at a few years ago in Hawaii: you need to know people to meet people. Of course, that’s not always the case. Friendships can emerge sporadically. But more often than not, when I’m with a group of friends, I’m not exactly on the hunt for new ones.
I don’t have an “in” into so many of the groups and conversations that I’d want to be a part of here. Making friends in new places can be challenging. I’m getting a little better at powering through the discomfort and sometimes it’s a successful strategy. But other times, it’s clear that people are happy in their cliques and aren’t exactly scouring the streets of Asheville for lonely-looking creatives to invite into their drunken shenanigans.
So I’ve wandered the neighborhood and found unique little shops and talked to their owners. I’ve certainly encountered no shortage of good food. At a local sandwich joint, a man with a warm-hearted Tennessee accent persuaded me to try a personal recipe he’d been attempting to perfect. It wasn’t yet listed on the menu.
“It’s kinda like a Nashville dry rub — nice little concoction I been workin’ on if ya wanted to give it a try,” he explained. I couldn’t help but take him up on the offer.
But apart from absurdly good chicken sandwiches and the scenic overlooks of surrounding mountains, I’ve begun to feel a little out of place here. Maybe it’s just that my desperately-in-need-of-a-haircut look has me appear more like a vagabond than the rest of people here. So far, though, it’s been a challenge to make new friends in Asheville.
As I spend the beginning of my Friday night seated at the hostel’s unreasonably long wooden table, I allow my eyes to lazily scan the room. There’s a tan-skinned woman working on an arts and crafts project beside her open laptop. She’s seated at the table with me. During a more popular tourist season, I imagine this table might be filled with eccentrics from across the country, but right now, the only other person making use of the sprawling wooden surface hardly wants to talk to me about her creative endeavor.
As we sit at the table in cold indifference, I imagine that even Westeros is home to warmer dinner table discussions. The only other person in the hostel is seated on a couch on the other end of the room.
She has gray hair, wrinkled skin and appears to be roughly seventy. She’s spent enough of her time here silently immersed in her computer, too, that I’ve ignored her up to this point. But the growing desire not to spend the remainder of my night in stark silence prompts me into action.
“What are you working on over there?”
She looks toward me, confused to be addressed. At first, she appears doubtful that it’s even her I’m speaking to. But as she prepares to turn her focus again to her computer, I continue looking inquisitively toward her.
“Me?”
“Yep!”
“Oh — I’m just playing online poker.”
For a second I’d hoped we might connect over a shared love for writing. I’m not sure whether it’s because I have nothing to contribute to a poker conversation or because this seventy year old looks like a good confidant, but I decide to open up about the struggles of solo-traveling.
“I was having an amazing time in Virginia and enjoying myself just fine wandering through national parks on my own. But so far here in Asheville, I’ve been feeling a little aimless.”
“You just haven’t found the right places yet!” she seems suddenly to brighten. “What are you interested in this trip? Are you interested in food… in scenery… in photography… are you interested in music?” she asks me.
But I’m not prepared with a good answer. “I guess writing and photography are the two main things I’m interested in,” I explain after a moment’s hesitation. “I’d love to catch some live music while I’m down here, but that wasn’t exactly the main draw.”
“What was the main draw?” she presses, kindly discontented with my previous answer.
“I want to be the type of person who gets in his car and goes places. And I don’t feel like I am yet,” I admit.
“What are you doing sitting indoors!? Why aren’t you out exploring?!” she asks me urgently now. “The action’s out there! You know there’s jazz around? Good jazz. I mean — all these musicians!”
At this, I tell her a little bit about my parents and my musical upbringing. My explanation, though, is punctuated by the sound of a car’s roaring engine and the raucous cries of college students hanging out of it.
“Asheville is a really fun place; it’d be a shame if you drove all this way just to spend a day or two,”
“Have you lived in Asheville for awhile?”
“I’ve lived here for years. I’ve moved around a bit but this place has always felt like home to me… and you know… if you’re not big into alcohol, they have these places around town called kava bars.”
“Kava?” I mispronounce the word.
“Kava. A lot of the bars that serve it have open-mics. They’re not exactly heavy-alcohol, pick-up places but the music in some of them is just amazing…”
“Not sure I’ve ever heard of those before!”
“In Hawaii, it’s a sacred drink… kind of like coffee. It’s a bit of a stimulant,” she explains assuredly before guiding me toward a map of the many businesses here in town.
So with no small amount of pressing on her part and little else to do with my night, I find myself inside of a kava joint getting a “first timer special” from an all-business bartender. This bar counter is even longer and lonelier than the wooden table back at the hostel. The room is lit up in a warm purple glow and on the other side of the room are two musicians performing.
After a couple of drinks begin to settle in my stomach, I notice that my lips have gone numb. “That’s peculiar,” I think to myself. Whatever I’m feeling now certainly isn’t the coffee-like stimulant that my septuagenarian companion had suggested.
“So is kava… like… a stimulant?” I ask as the colors in the room appear to intensify.
“No, not at all. That’s kratom.”
“Really? I’d heard it had an almost coffee-like affect,” I continue.
The bartender clearly isn’t enjoying my line of questioning about this new substance I’m trying. He looks at me with vague annoyance as he hurries the unreasonable distance between both ends of the bar. Why this bar needs to be half the length of a football stadium is unclear.
So instead of demanding this kava-bartender make the half-mile trek across the bar to reluctantly answer one of my questions, I remember I have a phone that has access to the entirety of known information sitting conveniently in my pocket. So after a little googling, I’m able to determine that my senior friend has misled me. “Oh well,” I think to myself, eyes gliding panoramically across the sideways auditorium of a room.
Why my septuagenarian friend told me kava was a stimulant, I’m not sure. But as I’m handed my third glass of it, this batch the strongest yet, I’m beginning to care less and less about being misled and more about the music and the lights dancing overhead.
The setup of this bar is strange. The sheer number of seats to choose from makes the prospect of socializing nearly impossible. To merely sit next to someone would feel almost like an invasion of privacy. But as the kava continues to take affect, I’m feeling more and more comfortable in my isolation.
Being the strongest batch of kava yet, the bartender gives me a Capri Sun to help me wash it down. “This one’s free,” he says generously of the roughly $.50 children’s drink, sliding it deftly across the bar toward me.
This final cup of kava has an unpleasant taste, but an herbal unpleasant rather than the toxic, please-get-this-out-of-my-body unpleasantness of just about any liquor I’ve ever tried. It’s a welcome reprieve.
As I sink deeper and deeper into a kava-fueled trance, I make my way toward the music. I plant my kava down beside my Capri Sun on a stool made from a wooden stump. It’s pre-equipped with two condoms. With the kava and Capri Sun at their side, something inspires me to take a noir photo of the unfolding scene.
As I make it further into this final glass of kava, its flavor grows increasingly heinous. These unfamiliar musicians and this Capri Sun pouch stand as my only saviors. What had hardly seemed like an exciting musical performance before has grown now into something enthralling. I watch with captivated eyes as pink and blue lights shimmer along the wall behind the singing pair.
As the performance comes to an end and the bar to a close, I’m shocked that I’ve spent nearly three hours here. I return to the hostel. For some reason, I’d hoped that this 11 P.M. bedtime here might have some leeway over the weekend. But as I enter the living quarters ready to socialize, it’s to the sound of snores. I’m confined instead to watching a new episode of “The Last of Us” in my little wooden pod.
Whether taking kava under false pretenses at the behest of my septuagenarian friend represents a good night in Asheville, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly an improvement.