The distance to the door

My wife and I moved to Asheville in early 2020. We had a few weeks here before the country shut down.

So our first real picture of this place was a city under strain: restaurants going dark, neighbors out of work, everyone improvising. Then we watched it claw its way back. Storefronts reopened. People came back. And just as the ground felt solid again, Helene came through and took a lot of it away.

Like many people after the storm, I wanted to do something. Not in the abstract. Something with my hands and my time. I started volunteering at AHope, the downtown day center that is part of Homeward Bound, and delivering for Meals on Wheels. Different work, but the same fault line runs under both: people one bad month from the edge, or already over it.

I should be honest about where I was standing when I started.

I'm retired. My wife and I live in a gated community in south Asheville. It's a cocoon. For most of my time here I could go weeks without seeing the version of Asheville that AHope greets every morning when they open their door. The distance between my street and that door is the whole reason this site exists.

Most mornings, it's the same faces. A few new ones turn up each week, and now and then someone I'm used to seeing doesn't come for a stretch, and I catch myself wondering where they went, and whether they're all right.

The doors open at 8 and it stays busy until we close; some days we log more than two hundred visits in a five-hour window. Upstairs is check-in, the mail room, a kitchen with coffee and refrigerated donated food (thank you, Food Connection), two hard-working microwaves, four bunk beds, and the patio out back. Down below, which is what I call the basement, are the showers, lockers, and bathrooms, the washers and dryers, and a few more bunk beds: a chance to wash off a little of the day and feel something closer to normal. At 12:30 we start closing down, cleaning up, and shepherding everyone out to face the rest of their day, and their night, on their own.

You learn not to ask "How are you?" It's the wrong question in that space. So I say, "Hello, good to see you, how can I help?" and offer a smile and a kind word.

It would be easy to look at a room like that and decide it says something about the people in it. Spend enough mornings there and you stop believing that. The place runs on people, the clients and the staff both. The staff show up every day for the things most of us arrange our routes to avoid seeing, and the grit and dedication that takes is its own kind of argument.

The people coming through that door aren't there because of a flaw the rest of us managed to avoid. They're there because the math stopped working. Rent outran wages, a job ended, an illness hit, a street flooded, and there wasn't enough slack left in the system to catch them. The same arithmetic would catch a lot of us, given a bad enough year.

None of that means addiction and mental illness don't play a part. For some people those challenges are a big part of the story. In the 2026 Asheville and Buncombe County Point-in-Time count, of the 824 people counted, 91 adults reported a mental health condition and 62 reported a substance use disorder. Those are self-reported numbers, and they almost certainly miss people who didn't want to say. Even so, some of the people I see at that door are struggling with one or both, and they need real help. What the same count shows is that most of the people in it reported neither. The officials who ran it point to what I see too: the recent rise came mostly from Helene and the cost of housing, not from a sudden wave of addiction. And for the ones who are fighting it, losing your housing makes it harder to fight, not easier.

Meals on Wheels is the other part of my week. It's a small operation, a handful of staff and a large force of volunteers who cook, prep, and deliver hot meals to more than six hundred homebound neighbors every weekday, and they've done it in Buncombe County for fifty years. The need climbs every year, and there is a waiting list. I like to take the fill-in routes, the ones that need a driver when a regular can't make it, mostly through the Asheville housing projects. You knock, someone answers, you say hello and hand over a hot meal, and you try to trade a few words, enough to let them know somebody noticed and cares. It's not just the meal. Most of the people on my routes are seniors living on a fixed income, and the distance between some of them and the people I see at AHope is perilously short.

When people ask what I get out of it, I don't have a tidy answer. A few hours inside someone else's daily routine has a way of shrinking my own problems. Most of us, and I include myself, get so wrapped up in our own corner of the world that we forget to look past it. I'm hoping these mornings keep teaching me what actually matters, and maybe help me do better.