 Terri Dolan, photo by Gene Dolan
Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit.
Issue No. 173The Root Bar After the Flood
Carrie Frye
The Root Bar After the FloodThe first night, after the storm was gone, it was quiet. The trees that at daybreak had been creaking towards the house, shaking their heads and bending in too far, were still. My husband and I sat on the couch. We had lit candles. Lowell began to run down a play-by-play of the rootball tournament he’d played the Saturday before. He said, “I had a game winner against Zach, and then started the next one against Jeremy with another game winner.” I said, “You realize I can’t get away from you, don’t you?” The next day, Saturday, he said he’d like to drive over to check on the Root Bar. He plays rootball there usually once a week, and he wondered how it had fared during the storm. But the exhausted-sounding officials on the radio were asking people like us, who were safe, to please stay home and leave the roads free for emergency vehicles. On Sunday, cell service returned. Someone sent Lowell three photos of the Root Bar, and that’s how we learned everything had changed.
If you’re a friend visiting Asheville from out of town, there are likely two places I’ve offered to take you. The first is for a walk in the neighborhood of Montford, where there’s a lovely old cemetery where Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry are buried, and then the neighborhood itself has lots of beautiful old houses. There’s the site where Zelda Fitzgerald was killed in a house fire, and further up the same block another gray stone building, castle-like, where Nina Simone took piano lessons as a girl. The second option is the Root Bar. In making the pitch for it, I would tell you, “It’s a dive bar where they play a game, rootball, that’s played nowhere else in the world.” The bar sits next to the Swannanoa River. The building is turquoise-painted cinder block, the profile of an old filling station. It’s got your standard bar amenities inside, a pool table, one dart board, and a small stage for music. (Great musicians and bands play there. Or so I’m told. We’ve become “first shift” over the years.) What’s different is when you walk through to the back and step outside. There are three outdoor courts in back, glimmering with white sand. The game is like a combination of horseshoes and bocce. You throw a donut-shaped disk (the root) towards a stake—that’s the part that feels like horseshoes. Then you toss a ball underhand, hoping to hit either your root or the stake or, ideally, a combination of the two. The ball toss is the part that’s like bocce. (If you get the root around the stake, and then land the ball in the root, that’s an automatic “game winner.”) Rootball was invented by Max Chain, who opened the Root Bar in 2004. He named it the Root Bar #1 because it was going to be the first in a chain of bars where you could play. In a right world it would have been. The game is so much fun. Max once told me he wanted to have a game where people could play equally no matter their physical strength; the tossing part doesn’t require a lot of power. You can drop by and have a good chance of playing a decent game your first time out. But the game can be played at a serious level, too. At this level, you can talk about sand conditions and how they’re affecting the roll of the ball. You might have different throw styles to try depending on the wind. At its zenith, there were perhaps forty or so players who would play in the tournaments. In recent years, maybe twelve to sixteen.
 The author's dog on a visit to the Root Bar I’ve played root ball with my cousins. With my sister, after she had surgery for lung cancer. My best friend from Milwaukee, who wore three-inch black platforms, and from whom I bummed a cigarette like we were still in high school. I’ve sat on a bench on 4/20 and listened to people shout back and forth from different courts, “Wait… what’s the score????” There’s a tournament schedule across the year, with the main ones being: Dyngus Day in early spring, the 4/20, and then the East Coast Championship in fall. Lowell’s birthday falls in mid-January, and for the past ten years there’s been a tournament for that, too, called Old Man Winter. Its first year, my stepdaughter drove from Greensboro to play in it. She was newly pregnant with her first child, just far enough along to start telling people. It was freezing cold—you could see your breath if you were sitting outside—and only got colder, the later it got. Scrap wood was burning in barrels. She’s her father’s daughter and she kept on winning till midnight. We brought the writer Jane Hu to the Root Bar one New Year’s Eve. Not much was happening but we were all trying to make the most of it. From nowhere, a man at the end of the bar said, “Bartender? Bartender! A margarita for all the ladies at the bar!” Then he seemed to regret the impulse and you could see him inventory how many of us there were. (Four.)
You do not want to drink a margarita at the Root Bar. Or an old-fashioned, unless you like Wild Turkey with sugar sprinkled on it. You might, however, want to have a Peyton, which is two shots of bourbon, ginger ale, bitters, and lots of ice. It’s named after one of the regular players. If you’d prefer something nonalcoholic, a virgin Peyton is also delicious. Or on Fridays, after work, lots of people order a shot of Fireball with a Busch Lite or a PBR.
When standing out back at the Root Bar, you would see the three sand courts bordered by a high wooden fence. Beyond the fence: a field of sheds for sale. Running alongside the bar: the river, wrinkled and pewter. Across the river: homes on stilts and a church on a hilltop. Geese in flight back and forth along the river in formation. As night comes, even the sheds take on a look of rightness, like pumpkins in a pumpkin patch.
Here are the three pictures Lowell received the Sunday after the storm. Terri Fisher, who is now Terri Dolan, bought the Root Bar from Max 17 years ago. She grew up in Charlotte but came to Asheville at eighteen to go to the University of North Carolina at Asheville. At the time she took over the bar, she had a small Italian greyhound named Vini (rhymes with “mini”) and he would walk up and down the bar top on his delicate legs, reeking of Italian machismo. Terri’s also the proprietor of the bar the Town Pump in Black Mountain. When she took over the bars, she was in her 20s, single, formidable, but also game for the occasional joyous leap around the courts at 4/20. She’s now married with two kids, ages six and two.
As you drive along 70, the east side of Asheville gives way to Swannanoa which, as you keep driving, becomes the town of Black Mountain. Terri’s house is in Swannanoa, midway between her two bars. The land is low there, rumpled looking, oddly beautiful, with shades of gray and green that seem to belong only to this place in the Appalachians. There are woods and hollers, and weirdly still many more places that sell sheds. The day before the storm, Terri arranged for her kids to stay with her parents in Charlotte. As the storm was departing, she called her mom and said, “I need you to know you have the kids until.” “Until Sunday, yes,” her mom said. “No, until,” Terri said, and then the call cut off. Cell service was down. As soon as it felt safe to leave the house, around 9:30 am, she began to check on her neighbors, walking up and down the hillside. Within a half-hour she’d learned one neighbor had died, washed away in the flood. The roads were impassable by truck so she and her husband, Gene, drove a golf cart to Black Mountain to check on the Town Pump. It was fine, and she expected the Root Bar would be too. The year Max opened it, 2004, had been another flood year, and the river had crept up outside the building. “I thought the worst that would have happened,” she told me, “was that there might be some water inside the bar.”But then, early the next day, someone showed her a picture of how high the river had gotten. “It was the first time I realized, ‘Oh, it’s going to be really bad.’” She and Gene made their way over. When they arrived, a house was sitting on the road next to the bar where a house shouldn’t have been sitting. All the dwellings along the river—the houses on stilts, the apartment house just past the bar—were gone. It was a moment of sheer recognition that what she was seeing was a place where there had been “a lot of death.” Of people who had gone to their beds thinking some version of what she had thought about the bar (“The worst that will happen is some water inside”) and then gotten trapped. “It started early in the morning, then the water is rising, and you’re having to make choices.” Later she would talk with a man who had made his way to the hilltop with the church. He was there from 3:00 a.m. to noon. As houses would float by, with people trapped on the roof or an upper story, he would work to get them to shore. Sometimes he couldn’t get to them. Sometimes they were already dead. When I talked to Terri, she was in Charlotte, coordinating help for her neighbors as cell service in the region is still spotty. I’ve been tracking it on Facebook. She’s been arranging food drop-offs. Getting EpiPens sent in and distributed (the ground bees are stirred up right now). One neighbor, an elderly man, needed an oxygen tank—a mission that, by my observation, ended up involving six hours of phone work and the help of three different people to be convoyed to him. She has an uncle and cousins in Stanley County, and they’re one of the groups of people who have brought in their team of mules to help get supplies to people. As far as the Root Bar, she says, “It took me five to ten minutes to be over it. It doesn’t compare,” she said. Sitting in that parking lot on Saturday, she told me, it had been like: Fuck that bar. Moving on.
Something horrible ripped through the mountains of Western North Carolina last Friday. We won’t know how many people were killed for at least another week; efforts to find and check on people in remote areas are still ongoing. We’re just beginning to count what’s gone and what’s lost. All this week I’ve been trying to take in the scale of it, and I can’t. But I wanted to tell you about one of the places and some of the people. I also wanted to get down what it was like to not really know what happened and to slowly start to figure it out. What I’ve felt sure about is that if the Root Bar were still here, there would be a fundraiser happening there every night. The lights would be on, and a band playing. Everyone would stuff their fives and twenties into the passing bowl. We would fill it up.
Swannanoa is one of many communities hard hit by Helene. If you would like to make a donation to help with relief efforts, Terri recommends giving to the Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry, who have deep roots in the area and do great work. And there's a good wishlist at Swannanoa Relief for donating necessities.
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