From the managing editor, February 2015
Let’s get something out in the open: I’m not from around here. My love for the Southern Appalachians runs deep, but I can’t regale you with tales of my Smokies ancestors or show you faded photos of my family’s cabin in the woods. “Y’all” doesn’t cross my lips naturally, at least not yet. I play the violin, not the fiddle, and have never done so on a porch—though I have hopped on a bicycle with my instrument strapped to my back.
Perhaps worst of all, as the new editor of a magazine devoted to life in the mountains, I come from flat land. Growing up in a Mississippi River town, I was raised to treat slight inclines as hills and to only steer my sled down smooth descents. As a precocious young bookworm, I once spent my Christmas money on a complete set of Little House on the Prairie books, a series of stories that rang true on visits to my grandparents’ farm on the wind-whipped plains of northern Iowa.
And yet mountains have shaped my identity. At 18, equipped with an overweight backpack and poor lung support, I found faith in my own two feet in the backcountry of the Colorado Rockies. Years later as a newlywed living in Washington, D.C., I taught my husband how to pitch a tent and cook tinfoil dinners at Shenandoah National Park; I learned patience as he caught up from a childhood that had no use for kindling. We fell into step as partners on repeat trips to those waterfalls and overlooks. One long weekend we followed the Blue Ridge south to North Carolina. Though we didn’t know it at the time, that road trip reset our life’s course.
A couple of years later, after seven years living and working in the heart of D.C., life in the nation’s nerve center began to feel more stifling than exciting. We knew just where to go. We packed a steel pod full of our belongings and said our goodbyes. Upon arrival to our new home in Asheville last June, we possessed a spirit of adventure and a love of the mountains. We had a mortgage; we didn’t have friends. The first night, we unpacked and ordered pizza. The second night, we craved community.
Where to find a friendly face in a city full of strangers? We headed to a downtown music club to see an old friend. That is, we watched a favorite singer take the stage. Over the years, we had seen her perform enough times that she qualified as our closest kin that night. Shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of fellow fans and new neighbors, we set our newcomer status aside. We belonged. A couple of hours later, the show ended, sending us back to our menagerie of half-empty cardboard boxes. But that spark of connection had filled us up.
Such is the beauty of a shared experience, its power to wrap up everyone as equals in its fold. Of course, fellowship happens outside the all-encompassing presence of music. It brightens grocery store aisles and mountaintops and is passed in church pews and crosswalks.
Community is rarely more conspicuous, or more contagious, than at a public festival. Annual celebrations welcome one and all to honor heritage, share tradition and breathe new life into both. Attendees can choose to wander lost in the crowd, or to join the party. To be lonely at a festival here is a decision.
And so it feels fitting that I begin my post at Smoky Mountain Living with an issue centered on the unique festivals that fill the calendar and enliven these mountains. At nearly every festival I have attended since moving here, from craft fairs to harvest happenings, I have walked around in an air of presumed anonymity, still an outsider in my mind’s eye. And then, inevitably, a neighbor or friend stops to say hello, reminding me that I’m not such a stranger anymore.
— Katie Knorovsky, managing editor