The Southern Highland Reader

Once, about ten years ago, I was having lunch at a Sylva restaurant called the Spring Street Cafe.

From my table I caught a quick glimpse down an unlikely sightline — framed just so by some plants and interior drapes, down a hallway, and through a cracked door — of a baker’s table. On the table was a wedding cake, and the cake was being carefully decorated by two hands. The hands were all I could see.

The owner of those baker’s hands would one day become my wife, and we would come to own a house across the street from the cafe, where we live today with our three girls.

Spring Street, which has been closed for nearly a year, will soon open again under the ownership of former employee Emily Elders, a Cullowhee native. One of her ideas for an advertisement is a group shot of kids that have sprung from the many friends that have surrounded the cafe for the past ten years. (It better be a big ad).

All along, Spring Street Cafe has held a particular niche in Sylva’s lively-for-a-small-town restaurant scene.

First, in the nineties, it was City Lights Cafe, a small eatery attached to the bookstore upstairs, and under the proprietorship of Joyce and Allen Moore.

About a decade ago it was expanded into it’s full service self by Faye Holliday, whose culinary flair traces at least a little of its lineage to Asheville’s Hector Diaz, owner of the eclectic and popular eateries Salsa’s, Zambra and others.

Holliday and her unusually loyal (for food service) crew built a strong following through wild explorations of fresh local and world cuisines, and Tuesday night old time jam sessions and Sunday brunches were de rigueur among a certain Sylva social set.

Faye’s slow food influence can now be felt in a number of kitchens in the southern mountains.

Holliday sold the place to Lisa Agee a few years back, and Agee, whose desserts were quite a calling card, closed her business last spring, a victim of the economic malaise.

Enter Ms. Elders. As a single mom, a student and director of the Jackson County Greenways Project, you’d think she might have enough on her plate to worry about what’s on everybody else’s, but she’s game. She and a band of volunteers have been sprucing the place up in preparation for a January 26 opening.

“I’m very much inspired by Faye’s ideals,” Elders says. “We’ll be as local and as organic as we can be. My goal right away is to keep price points down, and bring back a lot of the items people remember and love.”

Elders has assembled a crew of former employees and a front-of-the-house manager that’ll be familiar to Sylva folks: Michael Redmon has been a longtime employee of Annie’s Bakery.

Several of the specifics that fans of the place remember will return, sushi Wednesdays and Sunday brunch among them. In addition, Elders and new City Lights Bookstore owner Chris Wilcox hope to develop a more symbiotic relationship than the two businesses have shared before. The cafe’s hours will be much closer to those of the bookstore, and the bookstore will open on Sunday afternoons.

Spring Street will hit the ground running, events-wise. Elders will host a Chamber of Commerce business after hours on January 28th, and will open for business the next day.

Book-signings and an art opening are already on the schedule for February.

STATEWIDE–Brian Postelle at the Mountain Xpress has a look at statewide smoking regulations that go into effect in early January, and he focuses on the fact that municipalities will have expanded powers to restrict smoking in outside areas.

It’s an obvious subject in Asheville, where hipsters congregate and smoke in lots of places.

Here’s an excerpt from Postelle’s story:

… unlike enclosed bars and restaurants, where secondhand smoke fills whole rooms, some maintain that outdoor areas do not pose as clear a danger.

“We’re outside. Why wouldn’t we be allowed to smoke?” asks Aerin Moonbourne after lighting up with friends at [Pritchard Park].

[Patrick] Mullen, though, points to mounting evidence of secondhand smoke danger. “I don’t think that it’s any question anymore that it’s a health issue,” he countered. The air in the park, he maintains, is “pretty cloudy most of the time, and there’s cigarette butts all over.”

But Gabriel McKinney, also enjoying a smoke at the park, believes there’s a larger agenda lurking behind the ban. “They do this every year,” he asserts. “It’s just digging up dirt to push the homeless out.”

Read the piece here.

STATEWIDE–Newly-elected Asheville city council member Cecil Bothwell defines himself as an atheist, and conservatives say that means that under North Carolina law he may not serve in a public office.

Here’s a blog post from the C-T’s Jordan Schrader that outlines the history of state laws that suggest as much.

An excerpt:

… the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and bans religious tests for office, so a lawsuit against City Council would have little legal ground to stand on. But the clause remains in the state constitution, even after a major rewrite of the document in 1972.

Voters have to approve changes to the constitution, and that’s a fight few politicians would want to take on for little or no practical benefit.

Here’s a news story from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

REGIONAL–The southern mountains’ regional daily, the Asheville Citizen-Times, has learned of another round of cost-cutting measures from its corporate owner, Gannett.

Jason Sandford at the Mountain Xpress gives a rundown, here.

Here’s an excerpt:

Gannett cut 10 percent of its workforce in 2008 and slashed another 3 percent this past summer. At the Citizen-Times, that has translated into about two dozen layoffs. Another 60 employees lost their jobs at the newspaper’s printing plant in January when the company closed down its press. The newspaper is now printed in Greenville, S.C.

REGIONAL–The Artful Parent posts here about a new exhibit on display at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville: Building Small: American Folk Art Houses and Structures.

An excerpt from the Artful Parent:

These folk art houses are from the collection of Steven Burke and Randy Campbell, the largest such collection in the country. According to the exhibit attendant this is the first (and probably only) time this collection will be exhibited.

Here’s a promo at the Arboretum website.

Building Small: American Folk Art Houses and Structures

Note: This post was made in August of 2008, but has been read consistently since then. Here it is again, with comments, and this new link to a story from National Public Radio.

An excerpt from the NPR story:

“People fear roundabouts in America — they’ve been called ‘Circles of Death,’ Vanderbilt says. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”

The geometry of a roundabout eliminates one of the most dangerous moves you can make in driving: a left turn against fast-moving oncoming traffic. Also, since traffic circles involve a lot of other drivers and a driver is not relying on signs and symbols, drivers must make their own decisions and be aware of other traffic.

If that sounds stressful for drivers, Vanderbilt says a little stress might not be a bad thing. “I think they tend to act more cautiously, which is a positive result,” Vanderbilt says.

Here’s the original post:

RALEIGH/STATEWIDE-I lived in Waynesville for a while a little less than a decade ago, and during that time residents were pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to build more thoughtfully planned roads.

That was when the first roundabout intersection that I’d seen anywhere near my native state first came up. It’s long since been installed and works well, and another one or two have been added, but at the time, you’d have thought by the uproar that the DOT was asking us all to give up cars and ride kangaroos to work.

(Story continues below)

Learn more about Roundabout intersections

Examples:

A wikipedia overview
Distracting Miss Daisy: Why stop signs and speed limits endanger Americans; The Atlantic Monthly
Roundabouts USA

(Continued from above)

Meanwhile, the smart roads folks — myself included — would argue ad nauseam — mostly to people who already agreed with us — that skinny roads don’t cause traffic, bad intersections do, and so intersections that require full stops must by nature be bad intersections. When we were really on our high horses, we’d wonder how people who spent their weekends watching a sequence of hundreds of left turns on some racetrack or another couldn’t handle the prospect of a simple roundabout.

Lift quote from an article in the Raleigh News and Observer:

How a roundabout works:

In place of a red light or a stop sign to hold some drivers while others turn left or drive through the intersection, a roundabout pulls everybody into a circle.

When traffic is heavy, you pause at a yield sign until you can enter the counterclockwise flow. When the circle is clear, drivers on each street can move through the intersection without stopping.

It’s a little slower than moving through a green light — but a lot faster than stopping for a red one. That little slowdown is one reason roundabouts reduce crashes.

Here’s another lift quote from the same article:

North Carolina has built about 60 roundabouts in the past decade — not counting all the little ones in subdivisions and shopping centers, says Jim H. Dunlop, DOT state congestion management engineer. He said we could see 600 more in the next 10 years.

And here’s the article itself, written by staff writer Bruce Siceloff.

NANTAHALA–Nantahala Outdoor Center has announced its title sponsorship of the 2010 Outdoor Industry Association Rendezvous in Asheville, NC. OIA’s Rendezvous is an annual leadership conference for the outdoor industry, and NOC along with the Asheville Chamber of Commerce welcome these leaders October 5-7, 2010.

“In a way, we’re welcoming home a group whose industry is a fundamental part of why the Asheville area is such a compelling destination,” said Tim Lampkin, Director of Convention Sales & Group Services at the Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau. “This is a region that celebrates its natural treasures, so we heartily welcome the businesses and associations that help us make our natural assets economic ones.”

Rendezvous will bring together leaders from across the country for a week of keynote speakers, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, recreation and entertainment, capped off with a volunteer service project to give back to the host community.

“We are excited to partner with NOC for Rendezvous 2010 and look forward to bringing the industry to Asheville next fall to showcase their efforts, as well as all the density of outdoor recreation and retailers in the area,” said Ann Obenchain, vice president of marketing and member services for OIA. “NOC’s leadership as a business in the Southeast and as a retailer in the outdoor industry is paramount and we are looking forward adding more paddlesports and retail influences to the event with their help.”

On the final day of Rendezvous, OIA attendees will give back to the community by working together to cleanup recreation areas in and around Asheville. This event will prove to be a special opportunity for leaders in the outdoor industry to make an impact on Asheville’s outdoor and paddling communities.

SYLVA–Last year, when automobile gas prices were through the roof, CSX railroad began running obvious ads, making a point the industry could’ve been making all along: it makes more sense to pull a couple of hundred trailers with two or three engines than a couple of hundred trailers with a couple of hundred engines.

Well, no kidding. That’s true no matter how pricey gas becomes.

CSX’s tagline – “our trains can move a ton of freight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel” – has become a fighting slogan for the entire industry lately, as the prevailing economic and environmental winds begin to signal a railroad renaissance.

Financier Warren Buffet’s purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad recently drove the point home. Said Adam Hochberg on National Public Radio: “Buffett’s $44 billion acquisition, via his company Berkshire Hathaway, is one of a number of signs that freight railroads are in resurgence. While they may have been thought of as passé in the 1960s and 1970s, they’re now playing a vital role in the transportation system.”

Lobbyists for the asphalt and trucking companies, who for so long thought railroads were kaput, still make the argument that logistically, trucks work better.

“You can’t back a freight train up to the Harris Teeter,” one industry rep told Business North Carolina not long ago.

But some industry analysts believe that almost any regulations created to fight emissions will favor railroads, and that logistical issues with moving goods on the local level are easily overcome – in fact, are already overcome in some cases by the use of containers that can then be moved to flatbed trucks.

Closer to home, the topic reminds me of a sidewalk conversation I had in Sylva when gas was at it’s peak. “Before long,” my friend told me, “we’ll be able to ride a train to Asheville.”

I’m not sure I’m buying that – the cost of the necessary trestle work between Sylva and Waynesville alone would raise even Buffet’s eyebrows – but it is safe to assume that freight trains (which are allowed to run on ricketier tracks than passenger trains) aren’t going anywhere soon, even from our area.

A representative from Norfolk Southern Railway told me as much not long ago, saying that the line between Asheville and Sylva, which Norfolk Southern owns, is a money maker. The expansion of Jackson Paper Manufacturing in Sylva can only help.

As for true passenger rail, though, most of its advances will be focused on the cities.

Still, mountain residents can catch Amtrak in Toccoa Falls, GA, or Greenville, SC and ride the Southern Crescent southwest toward New Orleans or northeast toward Washington, through the Piedmont and to all points beyond.

Proponents of the long-fought-for return of passenger rail to Asheville are still at it, so that Amtrak spur — which would run up the mountain from the Piedmont — is still a possibility. (The two links in the previous sentence are from the Asheville Citizen-Times, here’s a Twitter report from MountainXpress from a recent Asheville Rail Corridor meeting).

And plans for the long-considered magnetic levitation train between Atlanta and Chattanooga and perhaps on to Nashville just got an infusion of federal cash. Maglev trains, used widely in Japan and Europe, achieve speeds of some 300 mph, mainly by not touching the ground.

If you don’t plan to hop a train anytime soon, but still like to think about them, this post from Ruminations from the Distant Hills and this one from Appalachian History might tickle your fancy. And here’s a history of the WNC Railroad from Tim Osment for WCU’s Digital Heritage.

Here’s a phenomenal flickr set, if you like to look at pictures.

ASHEVILLE–11th District Rep. Heath Shuler said mildly nice things about Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a speech yesterday in Asheville, and the result was a comical fit of pique by a Republican National Committee spokesman.

In general, Shuler suggested that the criticism of Pelosi might be, oh, shall we say, exaggerated.

In response, RNC spokesman Andy Seré said:

“Heath Shuler is the one who’s ‘misunderstood’. He may call himself a Blue Dog, but Shuler’s lavish Pelosi-praise has revealed him to be little more than a lap dog for the most liberal speaker in U.S. history. She may have let him off the leash this weekend in a vain attempt to salvage his re-election bid, but his political affair with Nancy Pelosi is destined to land him in the doghouse with Western North Carolinians.”

Story from the Asheville Citizen-Times
Story from the Raleigh News and Observer

REGIONAL–Jean Van’t Hul writes Asheville’s Artful Parent, and in an interview with the author of the popular blog Quince and Quire, she gets at the essence of children, home and art.

An excerpt:

My two exuberant children inspire me to bring these disparate interests together in a way that shapes their learning and informs their lives. I want craft to be a daily necessity; I want the shape of letters to be apparent as art; I want the weight of history to feel like a blanket at their feet; I want the urgency of peace to find its form in their creations. I want them to be rooted at home while investigating the traditions of faraway places.

Read the entire post from the Artful Parent here.

REGIONAL–Widely-read Asheville political blog Scrutiny Hooligans has a look at the territory west of Balsam Gap — considered oh-so-mysterious by many Ashevillians – in this post.

Tom Sullivan is the author.

An excerpt:

There are Democrats out there. Not hemp-wearing Asheville Democrats, maybe, but Democrats, and more left-of-center than some here believe. At 10 a.m. on a weekday ahead of the 2006 election, it was a delight to find twenty people gathered at a Murphy campaign headquarters to discuss get-out-the-vote efforts. At a meeting this year after one of the votes on the stimulus bill, Democratic county chairs from across the district gave Shuler’s staff a tongue lashing over his no vote.

NC-11 is, on the whole, a moderately conservative one, with about 35 percent Republican registration and some leftover Reagan Democrats on the rolls. In 2008, Obama won only Buncombe county and Jackson county, home of Western Carolina University. He narrowly lost Madison and Swain. Shuler is a good fit for the district, whether Buncombe progressives like it or not. But it might be strategic for the congressman to show them a little more love whether or not they understand how things are done west of the Balsams. His vote on Saturday night did him damage that only a vote for final passage of the health bill might repair. Might.

Read the post here.

REGIONAL–Author Barbara Kingsolver spoke to 800 or so folks at Asheville High School last night, and the Mountain Xpress pulled together a tableau of tweets to honor the occasion.

An excerpt:

kingsolver says she loves criticism from her braintrust during revision process. Revision is my favorite part of writing. It’s where the art happens.  The best thing is that nobody sees first drafts. For me, writing fiction feels like being in love, kingsolver tells asheville audience.

More:

kingsolver on who she reads: doris lessing… steinbeck, dickens, jane austen, george elliot.

kingsolver: my meditation is: i knit.

i’ve never had time for writer’s block.

Read the piece here.

CULLOWHEE-Some local sportswriters have expressed bewilderment at a recent ranking by a nationally circulated magazine, The Sporting News, that placed Cullowhee at No. 199 among the United States’ top 399 sports cities.

Gibbs Knotts

These pundits seem perplexed that Cullowhee would be ranked 26 spots ahead of Boone, home of archrival Appalachian State University. When comparing Boone and Cullowhee, the sports reporters have focused on the higher attendance at Appalachian State football and men’s basketball games.

In their haste to criticize The Sporting News ranking, some journalists are missing a point that The Sporting News apparently did not miss – Cullowhee is home to a LOT of sporting events, many of them successful by regional and national standards.

Focusing solely on football and men’s basketball overlooks the achievements of at least seven of the other 13 Division I collegiate sports at Western Carolina. Last year, three WCU teams – women’s basketball, women’s soccer, and men’s track and field – won conference championships. Women’s track and field, baseball, men’s golf and women’s golf also have posted notably successful records.

WCU’s women’s basketball and soccer teams have been ranked in the nation’s top 20 academically. The women’s golf team regularly places individuals on the National Golf Coaches Association All-American Scholars list. In the spring 2009 semester, 87 student-athletes made the dean’s list and 18 earned perfect 4.0 grade-point averages. At Western Carolina, athletic victories usually go hand-in-hand with academic successes.

Part of what makes a sports town a sports town is tradition and history, and Western Carolina has its fair share. The first three-point shot in men’s college basketball was made in Cullowhee. Every year at NCAA basketball tournament time, the networks roll out the footage from 1996 when the Catamounts came within a whisker of being the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed. And Asheville’s own Henry Logan opened the door for student-athletes of his race when, in 1964, he joined the WCU basketball team and became the first African-American to play at a predominantly white institution in the South.

Adding to the game-day experience in Cullowhee is WCU’s Pride of the Mountains Marching Band, whose crowd-pleasing halftime shows over the years are being recognized nationally by the John Phillip Sousa Foundation, which has awarded the band the 2009 Sudler Trophy – the Heisman Trophy of collegiate marching bands.

Aside from Catamount athletics, Cullowhee also features outstanding outdoor sporting opportunities. The area is a haven for cyclists, hosting numerous group rides and the annual Tour de Tuck bicycle ride. Anglers flock to Cullowhee for many miles of rivers and streams, and Cullowhee is a world-class boating and kayaking destination. Some Olympic athletes train in the area.

The university engages students in outdoor experiences through its Base Camp Cullowhee, a campus organization that hosts nearly 2,000 people per year on outdoor adventures and supplies students with low-cost outdoor gear and supplies. Base Camp employees serve as a resource to the Cullowhee community, providing trip advice, trail maps, and other outdoor tips to local individuals and families, and to hundreds of the millions of Americans who visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway annually.

Is Cullowhee really the 199th best sports town in the United States? Scientifically, I can’t say, but when you look at the entire picture, why not? What I can do is invite sports fans of all persuasions to come to Cullowhee and find out. Attend a soccer match or a women’s basketball game. Bring your bike and ride the Ring of Fire. Float down the beautiful Tuckaseigee River. Or bring your binoculars and watch track or cross country or some other Olympic sport. You may discover that The Sporting News has it right – sporting opportunities are abundant in Cullowhee.

Gibbs Knotts is faculty athletics representative at Western Carolina University where he teaches political science and public affairs.  In his free time, he attends Catamount sporting events and enjoys Cullowhee’s many outdoor opportunities.

SYLVA–Don’t get me wrong, I like lists, too. In fact, I remember a teenage addiction to that eighties phenomenon called “The Book of Lists“.

But these days, when publications have less and less money but reader’s appetites for content are growing leaps and bounds, the lists come at you from every direction. US News and World Report, for example, which was a weekly news staple when I was a kid, is now a monthly publication that seems sometimes wholly devoted to lists of schools, hospitals and whatnot.

Sylva and Cullowhee made a couple of lists recently. Cullowhee got a controversial edge over Boone and Asheville in North Carolina as a “better sports town” in the Sporting News, and Sylva was named by the Mother Earth News as one of 11 “Great Places You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of”.

The Sporting News list ranks 399 “sports cities” in the U.S., using a methodology that is vague at best. That aside, the upshot is a 199th-place finish for good ol’ Cullowhee, 15 spots ahead of Asheville and 26 ahead of Boone. The howls of wonderment from the Asheville Citizen-Times sports desk will likely brings wails of  self-defense from Western, all amounting to a tempest in a teapot.

Update: Citizen-Times sports editor Bob Berghaus back-pedaled like a slow cornerback today, publishing parts of an op-ed from WCU’s Gibbs Knotts and arriving at the conclusion, more or less, that maybe Cullowhee is a great sports burg, who knows?

Sylva, meanwhile, is unaccustomed to the limelight. The Reader’s home base is a busy working town, described, out of context, by Edward Abbey as having “the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat”. You can get just about anything you need on Sylva’s Main Street, from fresh-brewed beer to fresh-roasted coffee to fresh-baked bread to fresh fish. You can still get shoes fixed here, and the downtown dentist’s family has been at the same trade in the same place for well over a century.

But in this pre-packaged age, Sylva doesn’t fit the mold of a “destination” (a surprise to its many visitors), so the tourism folks don’t circulate its name much.

Of course, the Mother Earth News isn’t all that concerned with tourism. Here’s what it said about Sylva, which was one of two southern towns to make its list:

“Sylva embodies a vibrant small town that engages its citizenry in a variety of ways,” said John Rockhold, managing editor for the magazine. “Mother Earth News focuses on cool things you can do to live wisely and create community, and we think our readers will identify with a place like Sylva.”

Read about Sylva in the Mother Earth News here.

REGIONAL–Highland Brewing Company’s annual Cold Mountain Winter Ale is due out before too long, and this is the week the folks at Highland create the recipe. Self-interested Asheville blogger Ashvegas is all over the story.

An excerpt:

The rules are that the Highlands crew will come to work at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, having brushed their teeth at least one hour before and having not had any coffee or eaten anything. It’s all about arriving with a clean palate. They’ll then start sampling their brewmeister’s concoctions to start whittling down the winning recipe.

Read the whole post here.

REGIONAL–Asheville Citizen-Times op-ed contributor Kim MacQueen makes a pitch for the importance of town centers, using Asheville as an example.

She writes:

Despite their size, locally-owned businesses offer benefits to our communities that big-box stores simply cannot:

• Local flavor.
• Contributions to the local economy.
• Money spent in locally-owned businesses stays in the community.
• Donations to charities at more than twice the rate of national chains.

She also writes what the community needs to continue to improve:

• Continued support from the city government and Chamber of Commerce.
• To understand the problems with downtown are problems for all of us.
• To make a commitment to shop downtown and support local merchants …
• Those of us who live and work downtown have a responsibility to sustain our neighborhood, keeping it vital and attractive.

Read the specifics of her arguments here.

REGIONAL–The Asheville Citizen-Times‘ Mark Barrett reports today that some 6,200 mountain residents will lose unemployment benefits during the next six months.

An excerpt:

The number of people scheduled to lose their benefits will not match up with the number who actually do, since some will surely find jobs first. But projections suggest getting a new job will be particularly tough over the next few months, and other workers not eligible for a lengthy period of benefits will join the ranks of the unemployed.

Holiday hiring in retail businesses usually moderates the typical job losses that come toward the end of the year as seasonal businesses like tourism and construction slow down. But this year, consumers are expected to rein in holiday spending and as a result retailers nationwide aren’t expected to add as many workers as usual.

Read the story here.

REGIONAL–Xpress writer Hunter Pope, a Waynesville native, does a bang-up job bringing to life the roots of the Asheville music scene, circa the early nineties.

That scene has local ties a plenty, and there is a reunion event forthcoming.

An excerpt from the long feature story:

Asheville’s music scene in the early ’90s was a lot different than today’s band-on-every-street-corner, band-in-every-bar land of plenty. Downtown was gritty; the bars raw. “When we were starting bands, adults pretty much frowned on it,” says Carter in an interview from his home in New York.  “When we were in our early teens we would go see any band that played at the Spiders Web, or Fine Arts theater and later Squash Pile (the defunct venue on Riverside Drive that now houses Curve studios).”

He adds, “It was fun. We wanted to be rock stars and the world was our ashtray.”

An overflowing ashtray: The DIY grit-rock and punk scene of that era (born in reaction to the bluegrass and hair bands that dominated early ’90s Asheville) spawned two CDs plus one cassette tape anthologizing (then for kicks; these days for posterity) the sounds of bands like the Mathmatics, Biltmore Forest Overdrive (BFO) and Tripod under the “Decline of WNC” umbrella. The cover art parodied, appropriately, the classic L.A. punk compilation The Decline of Western Civilization.

Equally fitting: The idea for a Decline reunion came about from a drunken conversation between Carter (who now owns a T-shirt company in New York City) and Bailey, now a local filmmaker. This weekend, July 24 and 25, some of the Decline bands will play again at Broadways and Stella Blue (two of the clubs where it all began). Maybe for the last time.

Read the whole piece here.

Notes: Smalls’ funeral was today, in Mt. Pleasant, SC. No cause has been established in Smalls’ death, although an autopsy has been performed. Results from the autopsy will be announced within three weeks. Some of the follow-up stories in the media use his death as an opportunity to discuss heat-related deaths among football players (AP story below), but this cause seems unlikely in this case; temperatures were cool and the workout not particularly strenuous, according to the university.

Asheville Citizen-Times: Witness accounts
Asheville Citizen-Times: Autopsy performed Thursday
Sporting News: Sickle cell disease?
Charleston Post Courier: Follow up (Smalls was from the Charleston area)
Asheville Citizen-Times: Follow up
Associated Press: Cut back on two-a-days
Asheville Citizen-Times: News reporter Jon Ostendorf on possible physical causes.

SYLVA–In its August issue, Backpacker Magazine names Sylva a “top town to raise a kayaker”.

Writes Jason Stevenson:

A virtual nest of rivers with every class of rapids a kid (or parent) could want, Sylva is home to American Whitewater Association.

The same issue names the country’s top 25 cities in which to raise an “outdoor kid”, and three area towns make the cut: Asheville, Brevard and Sevierville.