Strange Highways

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ON THAT AUTUMN AFTERNOON, WHEN HE DROVE THE RENTAL CAR INTO Asherville, Joey Shannon broke out in an icy sweat. A sudden and intense hopelessness overcame him.

He almost hung a hard U-turn in the middle of the street. He resisted the urge to jam the accelerator to the floorboards, speed away, and never look back.

The town was as bleak as any in Pennsylvania coal country, where the mines had shut down and most good jobs had been lost decades ago. Nevertheless, it wasn't such a desperate place that the very sight of it should chill his heart and bring him instantly to the edge of despair. He was puzzled by his peculiar reaction to this long-delayed homecoming.

Sustained by fewer than a thousand local residents and perhaps two thousand more in several smaller outlying towns, the commercial district was just two blocks long. The two- and three-story stone buildings — erected in the 1850s and darkened by a century and a half of grime — were pretty much as he remembered them from his youth.

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