Tonight's Electron comes to you from Asheville, North Carolina, a town renowned for its social freedom, quirky shops and restaurants, and artsy atmosphere. I can now state for a fact that I have never seen so many Asian fabrics and trinkets, colorful handmade ceramics, sequined scarves, South American weavings, jazzy baubles, and, uh, specialty smoking equipment….since the Sixties. Asheville reminds me of what Cambridge, Mass. and Greenwich Village in New York were like forty years ago in 1968. I spent many hours of my youth in Cambridge, and I felt, walking along the streets of Asheville, that I was in a time warp.

Not that it was a bad time warp, it brought back fond memories. All that was missing was the sound of Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe and the Fish. Not only that, I got to meet fellow blogger Jennifer Saylor in "real life." She isn't just pixels any more! And I suppose the same is true for me, from Jennifer's viewpoint. Write on, Jennifer! I enjoyed the local cuisine (trendy international) and went into a lot of gift shops. But January isn't a very lively time in Asheville, when it is usually wintry weather and people stay home. I hope to return at another time when it is spring or summer, the street is more active, and the hills and mountains are green.

I have been traveling through the Appalachians now for more than a week. I have enjoyed mountain vistas from the Shenandoah to the Great Smokies. There are majestic forests, deep gorges, rugged rock outcrops, rushing rivers, and cell phone towers. I have seen weathered barns, grazing cattle, country cottages, and more cell phone towers and satellite dishes. Hunters in muddy camouflage talk on their cell phones. Rustics in overalls talk about accessing Web pages. Even little roadside craft shops have websites. I noticed this the last time I was down South, in 2004, and the cyberization of rural America has progressed steadily since then. I may be traveling in the back woods, but the woods are wired.

I didn't expect to be so much in communication during my vacation days. With my laptop, and wireless internet available in most hotel rooms (even the cheap motels now advertise that they have it) and my own cell phone, I might hardly notice that I am away from home. I chat online with my usual friends, e-mail and blog as if I had never left my studio. I am not sure whether this is good or bad. Would I voluntarily go offline and blog-silent during my next roadtrip? I'm not sure. Some people like to hear from me while I'm away from home having adventures. I am taking plenty of photographs. Some of these will be used as references for later art work. But I will omit the cell phone towers (and possibly the electrical wires and poles as well) when I paint my idealized Appalachian scenes.

This view has no cell phone towers in it.

Posted at 11:50 pm | link