The Bywater

I live in a touristy town, but for 10 years before I moved here, it was a vacation-y haven for me. I visited my in-laws here at least 4-5 times a year, and while I still get to see the town occasionally now that I live here, much of my life is now full of the mundanity of where you actually live, the commutes and grocery stores and mailbox to open and shut and open and shut.

When we used to come here as young scamps with tons of vacation free time, though, there was a wonderful, scrappy little bar called the Bywater. It was aptly named, a ramshackle just-more-than-hut with a stage for live music and a bathroom but otherwise mostly outdoor, mostly picnic tables looking over the French Broad River and various little encirclements where you could gather with family or friends, drink your booze, and just be in the environment. It was a brilliant idea for a bar, and I kinda loved that the building was a smidgen ramshackle, tied-together-with-twine-and-fastened-with-duct-tape chic. (This may or may not have been true; memory fails me often.)

I have since heard a rumor that the bar was established/bought when it became clear that eminent domain would take the land eventually for the I-26 connector project, which would essentially let them get in, make bar money, and then get out without having to own the land any more. I have no idea if this is true either, and Reddit won’t tell me one way or the other. Still, it is a remarkable idea, imagining a project where you know how the story will end, not with taking over the world with a line of franchised waterfront watering holes, but as leaving the space eeriely asphalted over, to become as absent as you were from that landscape before.

But when we were there, oh, how there we were. I got very tequila-toasted and explained my theories of (something philosophical?) to my husband’s cousin, and I looked at flickering firelight, and I felt safe. I thought, if this place could ever be my home, I’d feel so safe, wouldn’t I?

I don’t remember ever desiring to live here before my son was born, because it was just too bright a dream to consider. Once my son was born, though, it was all I could think about. Getting to move here three years ago has remained a bit of a magic trick, like I could wake up back in my isolating old home in the Midwest any day now. But by the time I was here, the Bywater was not, which has served as a little reminder of time passing every time I pass it.

The Bywater closed up in 2020, with an ominous January posting about how many weddings they’d had requested and how they were gonna try doing that for a year. I wonder how many happened; maybe some, since it was such an outdoor venue. But the building didn’t sell, or didn’t sell to anyone who wanted to keep it up, because it was characterized by very slowly returning to nature during the years between 2020 and 2024.

Last year, in September, floodwaters washed away huge swaths of the riverfront. The Bywater’s disintegrating building wasn’t much by the time the floodwaters swept a lot of it away. Everything, it seems, except this one bar.

My son, upon his return to preschool after close to a month out, documented the changes with small words on our drives: “smashed car,” “smashed building,” “flipped car,” “mud.” He was not excessively concerned, as he was still young enough and pre-verbal enough that he was still absorbing what was unusual and scary and what was usual and part of life. How was he to know that every community wasn’t periodically washed away? He’s never been one to resist when environments change, bless him. He watched the riverfront go from a muddy wreck to less mud and more construction equipment. Some things were rebuilt. Others stayed, dried out.

Every day, I drive past the lot where the weeds are getting higher and higher, and no movement is made to rebuild anything, but this bar just won’t fall down. I keep driving and imagine all of the people who have lost things this year to Helene and to other struggles. I imagine us all gathering wordlessly around the bar, where bartenders will sling drinks and someone will crank music and we’d all dance in the weeds, stomp a bluegrass beat and pay homage to the rainwater and the music of the past that was here, and all the things that we cannot stop.

I wonder what, from the outside, I look like these days. The past few years have been profoundly changing, and when I see myself fleetingly in the mirror, I wonder if this is what I looked like a year ago or five years ago. The people closest to me watched me deteriorate during the same season as the Bywater was declining, the pieces of me that were never particularly strong buckling under the weight of early parenthood. It became clear that I wasn’t made of very sturdy stuff, and that I’d reveled in my scruffy nature before, just like the Bywater had.

Around the same time as Helene, I’d been turning things around, making changes for the better. I’ve been looking very different than I did before. Rewildifying. Figuring out what I look like now. Like the Bywater, I am now a lot of foliage, a lot of raw existence, and just a little core of self, uncertain in direction or future but still standing.