To young people raised on the Internet, it would be unimaginable. A boy from Sylva had been killed in Vietnam, another badly injured, but the war never felt within our world. Neither did the antiwar movement in Berkeley, the civil rights protests spilling into violence in Louisville and New York, or the killings of Sharon Tate and her friends in California. We saw these events on WLOS in Asheville, the sole TV station we could pick up, but drained to black and white and behind glass, it was if we peered into a telescope at some alien world. So little changed in Sylva. As they had since my earliest memory, the same stores stood on Main Street, and what was inside varied little. The smallest things had their assigned place. If I went into Pike’s Drugstore, candy bars were in front of the counter, comic books on a wire rack to the right. Winkler’s Restaurant had the same menu year after year, the same food served on the same green plates. A few things might change, a new brand of sunglasses at Dodd’s general store, some bell-bottom jeans at Harris Clothing, but these anomalies, like the first cracks in a house’s foundation, went unnoticed.
