My Journal of Avery County

Everybody's talking about gas prices these days, but I guess it's still better than if that Y2K had happened, huh? We laugh, or simply forget, about it now, but I wrote a front-page profile on a guy out on the highway that opened an actual Y2K store. You could buy giant tins of powdered everything and water tablets and gas masks and all. Whenever I think about him, I wonder whether he was ticked that it didn't happen. I think we can at least assume that he's holed up in the same bunker to this day either way.

Meanwhile, a mile away from the Y2K store, up on Dick Watson Road, when the calendar turned on all four of its dials. . . The perfesser was nine and a half months pregnant. I was named publisher of the Avery Journal. My son was born. I turned 30. And all this before the end of February.

I was knocking out a column for each week's paper, and I had plenty to write about. And sometime, when I wasn't looking, I became the eye of the hurricane. I quickly realized that things that are taken as obvious and acceptable in Athens, and even Boone, are still frowned upon in Newland, North Carolina.

Take, for example, drinkin' beer by a river with your buddies. "What's better than that?" I asked my Avery County audience in one of my weekly diatribes...Now, I had a radio show out of the A.M. in Newland, and that week's show was a barn burner, I tell you what. Was I unaware that demon spirits is the hand of Satan in the world? Why yes, I was unaware of that. "Mr. Gizzard, don't you realize that alcohol destroys families and takes Daddies away from the Lord Jesus?" Um, I hadn't thought of it like.."No you haven't!!"

But the best was the Baptist minister who stood in front of the cameras that Sunday, and broadcast to his congregation and his dozens of local cable access viewers, that 'the feller down at the Avery Journal has sinned.' He held up the paper and quoted my heathen words: "What's better than sitting by a river with your buddies and drinking 10 or 20 Budweisers?" Then he balled it up and threw it across the front of the church! If I were you, I would think this was an exagerration, but someone sent me a videotape of it. I'll see if I can set up a link to it someday.

Anyway, the drankin' stuff was just the beginning. Turned out that the county had been dominated by a rampant, conservative political machine for years and years. There were two parties, the good ol' boy mountain republicans and the newcomer Floridian republicans. As a regular opponent of corruption, and an advocate for the greater good, I ended up falling in with the Floridiots, and I mean that in the sweetest sense of the word, for you Floridiots that might be reading this. So the old mountain machine (or the 'Green Hat Gang,' as I dubbed them due to their leader's choice in haberdashery) came to despise me. I've got a million stories about the showdowns, but the best was when one of them stood up in front of a meeting of about 100 good ol' boys in the courthouse and blamed all their problems on 'that Gizzard at the Avery Journal.'
Or maybe the best one was the $500 bounty to anyone who gave me a beating. Really.

Of course, the number one story might have been the meltdown of the relationship between me the publisher and the matronly Southern lady that had served as the 'editor' of the paper for the last couple decades. As a member of one of Avery's old-time families, she was more comfortable in the pocket of the Green Hats. In a matter of weeks, we found ourselves on opposite sides of the campaign to remove the sheriff and replace him with a former sheriff that the Green Hat Gang could control. The HI-larious part was that they were accusing the current sheriff of embezzlement and beating prisoners, and the one they wanted to return to office had resigned after admitting to embezzlement and beating prisoners. And there was another guy who had just been sheriff, and had barely lost the election and had never been accused of beating anybody! By the time the meeting of the committee that decided the outcome rolled around, I had already played Lyle Lovett on my radio show and dedicated it to her..."I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore..."

So Y2K may not have seen the end of our technology-driven world (but hey, maybe when the oil runs out, we can pull out the powdered turkey and dressing after all). My year 2000 started a couple of crazy years when my writing brought truth to many, and frustration to almost just as many, and it was a rush. And I was selling papers at the same time.

Of course it's nothing compared to the influence my words are having on the six of you out there reading this. See y'all in next week's Journal.