<i> Uptown, Down-Home</i> Appalachia

Here were the folk art, the fall foliage, the Biltmore mansion looming in the valley. Here were the country roads, the courtly homes and the reminders of Thomas Wolfe, who said he couldn’t come home again but nevertheless rests next to his mother in his hometown graveyard. All these elements were in order when I arrived in Asheville for the first time at the beginning of this month.

So what was it that put me off balance?

The city, often considered the cultural capital of Appalachia, is stocked with all the Americana a visitor could hope for, from the gardens and turrets of the 250-room Biltmore Estate to the whirling contra dancers and old-time musicians who gather on Thursday nights in the auditorium at Warren Wilson College. And each October and November, Asheville’s advantages are further underlined when the rolling hills of birch, beech, poplar, maple, oak and dogwood erupt in fall colors.

Yet something was up. Within hours of arrival, I felt like a playgoer who had stumbled into a nontraditional staging of “Our Town,” finding a New Hampshire hamlet in which the stage manager meditates transcendentally, George Gibbs speaks with a Jamaican lilt and Emily Webb’s dress incorporates the Nicaraguan flag.

Asheville is many things, but homegrown it ain’t.

As the largest city in western North Carolina, it remains a repository of Appalachiana and American folk culture. But if you ask, you find that the contra dance fiddler is from New Jersey, the waitress from Connecticut, the innkeeper from New Orleans, the mayor from Florida. When you call Tom Tveidt, the chamber of commerce research director, for statistics on relocations, you learn he moved here five years ago from Santa Barbara. You also find that Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, grew in population by about 18% from 1990 to 2000. Of the 31,509 residents gained, more than 27,000 were “in-migrants” from elsewhere in the U.S.

Out at the Folk Art Center, this month’s featured woodworker is Simon Levy, 55, who 20 years ago was living in Los Angeles and art-directing album covers for Neil Young, Chicago and George Benson.

Levy, who moved from L.A. to Nashville several years ago, is a regular Asheville visitor now and dreams of moving here. “I don’t know what it is; there’s an energy in those mountains. It just stimulates people,” he told me when I called. “Something just resonates.”

These mountains may not rival Everest for altitude--none rises more than 6,700 feet--but there are plenty of them. The Appalachian range includes the Blue Ridge Mountains, which cluster near Asheville, and the Great Smoky Mountains to the west.

In the retail precincts along Biltmore Avenue and Lexington and Maywood streets, you find avocado-and-hemp-oil lip balm (Asheville Hemp Co., $3.50) and not-so-naive folk art (“Leda and the Chickens,” a cheery, G-rated canvas at the American Folk gallery, $325). And you notice that an awful lot of old buildings’ upper floors are being redeveloped as residential lofts.

The closer I looked, the more I saw how Asheville sustains itself on equal measures of native character and imported personalities. For a century now, much of Asheville’s vitality has been supplied by out-of-towners looking to live well or do good here amid fresh air and mild mountain summers.

That’s the story behind the area’s greatest landmark, the Biltmore Estate, just beyond the city’s southern boundary. Heir to a share of the family’s industrial fortune, New Yorker George Vanderbilt chose to build his faux French castle here after a visit in the 1880s. The estate was completed in 1895, opened for public tours in 1960 and (so tour guide Doyle Wilcox told my group) has been turning a profit, without government subsidy, since 1968.

I made the Biltmore Estate my first stop on the way into town and soon was swallowed up by its 8,000 acres. The principal house is four stories, with 65 fireplaces, 43 bathrooms and a bowling alley in the basement, all built for a patron who was at the time a 33-year-old bachelor. (George Vanderbilt married a few years later.)

Still owned by the Vanderbilt family, it’s a remarkable enterprise: mansion, gardens, winery, a hotel (the Inn on Biltmore Estate) opened in March and a half-dozen restaurants and gift shops. The landscaping was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Manhattan’s Central Park, but this estate is nearly 10 times larger, and it was more than 10 times larger still before the Vanderbilts sold off 87,000 acres of forest to the federal government in 1915.

For a self-guided house tour and a chance to wander the gardens, adults pay $33. A roof tour, which includes vantage points and backstage views of the home and grounds, costs $12 more. Horseback rides ($45 per adult), mountain-bike rentals ($25 for a half day), hourlong river-raft excursions ($30), carriage rides ($20)--all are possible, for a price.

As a monument to living well, the Biltmore stands alone. But for a glimpse of what doing good can lead to, drive north and east for about 20 minutes to Asheville’s Folk Art Center.

The center, which is on the city outskirts at Milepost 382 along the Blue Ridge Parkway, is run by the Southern Highland Craft Guild, a long-standing nonprofit with a membership of more than 700 weavers, potters and other artisans in the nine states that touch Appalachia. The enterprise includes four retail operations in three cities, along with various cultural programs.

It began the same year the Biltmore Estate was completed, when a Yale-educated missionary named Frances Goodrich, who had come to teach in the mountain communities, persuaded Appalachian women to contribute their craft work for sale. In 1902 she opened the Allanstand retail shop 30 miles northwest of Asheville, and as national attention turned to rural poverty and Appalachian folklore and crafts in the years that followed, the guild’s programs grew. (The recent film “Songcatcher,” most of which was filmed in Buncombe County, dramatizes that era.)

The guild’s bright and bustling Asheville-adjacent retail site, open since 1980, draws more than 300,000 visitors yearly. An expansion is planned, but already the art center resembles Goodrich’s original log-cabin shop in the way that an electric guitar resembles a 14th century lute.

Browsing, I admired a chair exhibit--some looked so spare and sleek and uncomfortable that they could have been imported from avant-garde showrooms in Italy or Japan--and baskets priced from $75 to $1,425. The priciest was woven of cotton archival paper, with acrylic paint and metallic threads.

In the wake of the missionaries and the craft lovers and the Vanderbilts, more out-of-towners began coming here to seek their place in the hills, including bohemians such as painters Willem de Kooning and Jacob Lawrence, composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, who were among the parade of creative types to pass through nearby Black Mountain College in the 1940s. (The campus is a boys’ camp now, and the main streets of tiny Black Mountain are crowded with gift shops too sugary for my taste.)

Half a century after Cage and company, Asheville’s population is 68,000, 3,100 at the University of North Carolina, Asheville campus. In the city’s alternative weekly, the Mountain Xpress, you find ads for Nina the aura guide (“for all your business decisions”); “intuitive readings” by somebody named Galaya; and, my favorite, a medical experiment in which participants get paid $2,680 to smoke marijuana.

In Asheville these days, “you can’t swing a cat without hitting a massage therapist,” fiddle player Laurie Fisher (formerly of New Jersey) told me one night as she packed up after a gig.

On old-time music night at Jack of the Wood microbrewery (every Tuesday), I took a spot at the bar next to 27-year-old Connecticut exile Bonnie Rose (“a lot of art, a lot of music--there’s always something to do here,” she said), and together we listened as fiddler Sumio Seo started off the evening’s songs.

Soon the stage was crowded with guitarists, mandolin players and a stand-up bassist, ages 20 to 50.

After about an hour, a whole new team of players stepped up to take their place, and I sidled over to Seo.

He has played the violin for 16 years and has been playing in these Asheville old-time jams for about four years. He nodded to the dozen musicians onstage.

“At least half of them have CDs out,” Seo said. “All in the old-time style.”

Practitioners draw a firm distinction between old-time music--which is driven by banjo and fiddle and evolved from European origins in 18th and 19th century Appalachia--and bluegrass, which uses similar instrumentation, usually at faster tempos, drawing on African influences. Bluegrass was popularized by mandolin player Bill Monroe in the 1940s.

If the folk music isn’t to your liking, two dozen art and craft galleries may be your siren song. You can bed down in any of the 40 bed-and-breakfasts and about 70 hotels. (Many of the cheapest motels are crowded along the unattractive, franchise-ridden North Carolina Highway 70 between downtown and the Blue Ridge Parkway.) The leading bookshop, on trendy Haywood Street, is Malaprop’s, and my favorite meal of the trip was served just half a block away in the Market Place, which stands on Wall Street and specializes in local ingredients such as mountain trout.

The grandest lodging in town is the Grove Park Inn, a handsome but much-amended landmark of Craftsman design that dates to 1913. In the beginning, the hotel had 150 rooms within its stone walls. In 1935 and ‘36, when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, was getting extended psychiatric treatment at an Asheville hospital (where she later died in a fire), the author lived in the Grove Park Inn’s Room 441 and acquired a local reputation for heavy drinking and womanizing.

But you need not drink, or womanize, or even sleep in the Grove Park Inn to enjoy it. A meal on the hotel’s Sunset Terrace, with the rolling hills and blue mountains spread before you, gives an instant explanation why so many tourists end up chucking their workaday lives and retiring here.

In the 1980s, the hotel’s owners added 360 rooms in two new wings, which look a little too modern. A spa opened in February 2001. I stayed one night and found myself lingering in the old great room, where the lobby, bar, fireplace and broad mountain views are, and avoiding my room, which was an unremarkable rectangle in one of the modern wings. I spent the next two nights happily in the friendly Flint Street Inns B&B;, which, at $80 per night, cost half as much as the Grove Park Inn.

There’s no getting around Thomas Wolfe, the bard of Asheville, who grew up in competition with the Grove Park Inn.

Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, was born in Asheville in 1900 to a father who carved tombstones and a mother who went on to open a boardinghouse. When Julia Wolfe opened the boardinghouse in 1906, she moved to the property at 52 Spruce St., bringing Tom along with her and leaving her husband and other children behind.

Wolfe thinly fictionalized his youth in his 1929 novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.” The local library banned that first book soon after it appeared. But by 1949 the ban was lifted and the old boardinghouse was reopened as a memorial. By then Wolfe posed no further threat to municipal tranquillity: He died of tubercular meningitis, not quite 38 years old, in 1938. Perhaps his most famous title, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” was not published until two years after his death. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, whose 87 acres lie beside the historic Montford neighborhood.

The neighborhood and the cemetery make a nice walk. But for details on Wolfe’s short life and oversized persona (he stood 6 feet 6 inches, wore size 13 shoes and confounded editors by turning in manuscripts three times the expected length), it’s best to consult the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, an exhibit room next to the old Wolfe boardinghouse on Spruce Street. Until July 1998, visitors could walk through the house, but that month an unknown arsonist set the building’s second floor afire. Local authorities have vowed a restoration, but for now the locked white building stands under a toupee of blue tarpaulin.

After all that quiet thinking about dead Thomas Wolfe, I was ready for more music. So, following a tip I had heard at the Jack of the Wood, I headed out to Swannanoa, a mountainside community just east of Asheville, to catch a contra dance.

There, shortly before 10 p.m. in the auditorium of Warren Wilson College, a liberal arts school with about 700 students, I found an evening in full swing: scores of young and old dancers arranged in lines, then in rectangles, then in lines again, skirts (and the occasional kilt) swirling, the wood floor resounding with footfalls, quilts dangling from the ceiling like championship banners from bygone seasons.

Instead of sipping alcohol, the dancers kept water in plastic bottles. Many of the dancers were students at the college, but many others were in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They wore gingham dresses, dreadlocks (of white and black varieties), Levis, leotards, Marlon Brando-style T-shirts, black cocktail dresses, the inevitable “VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS” T-shirt, knee pads, sneakers, bare feet, bright green slacks and wide grins.

Creeping from the auditorium around midnight, I ran into a moon so bright and nearly full that I could make out the mountain silhouettes across the valley. And from the nearer fields, I could see the mist rising.

I returned the next day to assess the same landscape under bright sun. Just east of Asheville, on the way to Swannanoa and Black Mountain, the Blue Ridge Parkway runs past.

The parkway’s southern terminus is Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Cherokee, N.C., about 60 miles from Asheville. From that endpoint, the parkway unfurls as a great, foliage-flanked, tunnel-punctuated, 469-mile ribbon of road (commercial traffic is banned, as are speeds above 45 mph) that stretches north to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

I headed south and got as far as the Pisgah Inn, a restaurant with a grand view, neighbored by simple lodgings that begin at $75 nightly, near 5,000-foot Mt. Pisgah at Milepost 408.

These were the very earliest days of the foliage season. Most trees were still green, a few yellow, a very few gone red. Or so it seemed at 3 p.m.

But on the return trip, as sunset approached and the light turned golden, the reddening slopes surprised me. As the light played its tricks, the shadows lengthened and the leaves’ colors deepened minute by minute. And I thought: Who wouldn’t want to adopt Asheville?

Guidebook: All Around Asheville

* Getting there: From LAX, connecting service to Asheville is on US Airways, Delta and Continental. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $375. You can also fly to Charlotte, N.C., then drive 115 miles northwest to Asheville. From LAX, US Airways flies nonstop, and American, Delta, TWA, Northwest, United and Continental fly direct. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $322.

* Where to stay: Flint Street Inns, 116 Flint St.; (800) 234-8172, fax (828) 254-6685, https://www.flintstreetinns.com, are a pair of historic houses in the Montford neighborhood. Eight rooms, each with private bath. Rates: $80 single, $115 double.

Grove Park Inn Resort, 290 Macon Ave.; (800) 438-5800 or (828) 252-2711, fax (828) 253-7053, https://www.groveparkinn.com; 510 rooms, three restaurants, spa and golf course in a historic neighborhood. Rates: $135 to $299, more for suites, cottage.

The Black Walnut Bed & Breakfast Inn, 288 Montford Ave.; (800) 381-3878 or (828) 254-3878, https://www.blackwalnut.com; an 1899 house with seven rooms, each with private bath, in a historic neighborhood. Rates: $135 to $225.

The Inn on Biltmore Estate, 1 N. Pack Square, (800) 858-4130, fax (828) 274-6396, https://www.biltmore.com, in March opened the 213-room Inn on Biltmore Estate. Rates: $139 to $359.

* Where to eat: Cafe on the Square, 1 Biltmore Ave.; (828) 251-5565. An upscale but casual place with American and Italian-influenced cuisine. Dinner main courses: $14-$25.

Left Bank, 90 Patton Ave.; (828) 251-5552. A 2-year-old place with French and American fusion cuisine, including Maryland crab cakes and pear and Gorgonzola salad. Main courses: $13.50-$26.

The Market Place, 20 Wall St.; (828) 252-4162. A popular local spot for 22 years. Dishes rely heavily on regional ingredients and include mountain trout, local berries and smoked meats. Main courses: $11.95-$26.95.

* For more information: Asheville Convention & Visitor Bureau, 151 Haywood St.; (800) 280-0005, https://www.exploreasheville.com. The telephone number and Web site include regular updates on fall foliage.

Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, 151 Haywood St.; (828) 258-6101, https://www.ashevillechamber.org.

North Carolina Division of Tourism, Film and Sports Development, 301 N. Wilmington St., 4324 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-4324; (800) VISIT-NC (847-4862) or (919) 733-4171, fax (919) 733-8582, https://www.visitnc.com.