The distance to the door

My wife and I moved to Asheville in early 2020. We had a few weeks here before the country shut down.

So our first real picture of this place was a city under strain: restaurants going dark, neighbors out of work, everyone improvising. Then we watched it claw its way back. Storefronts reopened. People came back. And just as the ground felt solid again, Helene came through and took a lot of it away.

Like a lot of people after the storm, I wanted to do something. Not in the abstract. Something with my hands and my afternoons. I started volunteering at AHope, the downtown day center, and delivering for Meals on Wheels. Different work, but the same fault line runs under both: people one bad month from the edge, or already over it.

I should be honest about where I was standing when I started.

I'm retired. My wife and I live in The Ramble, in Biltmore Forest, about as buffered as life in this region gets. It's a cocoon. For most of my time here I could go weeks without seeing the version of Asheville that AHope meets every morning before it unlocks the door. The distance between my street and that door is the whole reason this site exists.

Most mornings, it's the same faces. A few new ones turn up each week, and now and then someone I'm used to seeing doesn't come for a stretch, and I catch myself wondering where they went, and whether they're all right.

It's busy. Some days we log more than two hundred visits in a five-hour window. Upstairs is check-in, the mail room, the kitchen, coffee, and the patio out back. Down below is showers and lockers: a chance to clean up and change into something fresh. At 12:30 we start closing down, putting the place back together, hoping the regulars turn up again next time.

You learn not to ask "How are you?" It's the wrong question in that room. So I say, "Hello, good to see you," and I smile.

It would be easy to look at a room like that and decide it says something about the people in it. Spend enough mornings there and you stop believing that.

The people coming through that door aren't there because of a flaw the rest of us managed to avoid. They're there because the math stopped working. Rent outran wages, a job ended, an illness hit, a street flooded, and there wasn't enough slack left in the system to catch them. The same arithmetic would catch a lot of us, given a bad enough year.