S5, E39: Asheville Wellness and 150 Years of the Mountain Cure | The Travel Guide

This is the second stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it reaches back a lot further than you might expect. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene unpacks the long, strange story of Asheville wellness, and why doctors have been sending patients to these mountains for more than a century and a half.

To understand where Asheville wellness began, Aislyn talks with David Freedman, an infectious disease physician and travel medicine expert who retired to the city. He explains the era of climatotherapy, when clean mountain air and a just-right altitude were prescribed for the respiratory illnesses of the Industrial Revolution, and for the deadliest disease of the 19th century, tuberculosis. It’s a history written into the architecture itself, from buildings angled toward the prevailing wind to the once-ubiquitous sleeping porch, and even into the phrase “health resort,” which Asheville helped invent.

Then Aislyn brings the story to the present, where Asheville wellness has grown into one of the most diverse scenes in the country. She heads into the Asheville Salt Cave and Spa, surrounded by 30 tons of ancient Himalayan salt, and hears from owner Jodie Appel about the surprising family story that started it all. She also sits in on a sound bath with sound therapist Kristin Hillegas, and gathers the full, wonderfully weird range of what you can try here, from hydrotherapy and aura photography to a practitioner known as the Breath Nurse.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a portrait of a place locals call the Happy City. Whatever draws you to these mountains, it’s a reminder that the best travel experiences often start with simply feeling better, and that knowing where to go can be its own kind of medicine.

Transcript

David: With each tone, your body grows heavier and your spirit lighter. With each wave of sound, your mind becomes more spacious. With each breath, you prepare the inner soil for renewal.

Aislyn: Back in the day. And by that I mean like a century and a half ago, doctors had one prescription for almost anything that ailed you go to the mountains, and a lot of those doctors pointed their patients at exactly one place. Asheville, North Carolina.

I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked by Afar. Most weeks we roam to different topics. This week we’re staying in one place. And in fact, we made you a guide. 5 episodes, 1 city. All of it reported on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina this year. So think of this as your audio guide to Asheville. Where to go, What to know, and everything worth unpacking in between.

Today we’re unpacking why the city has been in the wellness business longer than almost anyone else. To unpack the history of wellness in Asheville, I called up David Friedman, not just because he lives in Asheville, but because he has some expertise that I think will help us shine a light on this story.

David: I’m an infectious disease doctor with a special interest actually in travel and tropical medicine. So I’ve written some textbooks on travel medicine, but we retired here 3 years ago. So I was a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As you might know, Alabama is quite hot and miserable in the summer. So the tradition has always been that when you want to cool off, you come to the mountain.

Aislyn: David has been cooling off here for about 25 to 30 years. And then finally it was time to retire.

David: We’d always loved Asheville and about 10 years ago, large numbers of retirees from all over the country started retiring here for the lifestyle here, outdoors, artsy, etc. and, you know, here we are.

Aislyn: The history of wellness here begins with the history of Climatotherapy, which is just what it sounds like moving to a specific climate as a remedy for chronic health issues. And there were two big chronic health issues facing Americans in the late 1800s. The first was industrialization itself.

David: Remember, we’re in the Industrial Revolution, and the northeastern cities especially are just filthy. They’re polluted. They’re burning coal. Respiratory illnesses are absolutely horrible. And here you have a mountain town that has good fresh air.

Aislyn: European countries also have a strong tradition of escaping to mountain towns for health and early Climatotherapy practitioners believe that a combination of fresh air and altitude was especially helpful.

David: Asheville is at about 2,000 to 2,300 feet above sea level. And that was deemed by these climatotherapy gurus to be the best altitude for respiratory illnesses. The altitude was not so high that the air was so thin that there was a lack of oxygen. But this altitude was perfect for also reducing the labor of breathing, the work of breathing.

Aislyn: As we’re going to hear in a few minutes. Asheville’s wellness tourism has evolved into an incredibly diverse set of businesses. Believe you me. But in the beginning, the air itself was the big draw. So how exactly do you build a business around air? In 2015, a couple of Canadians put up bagged air from the Rocky Mountains on eBay as a joke. It turned into a global enterprise that sells, quote, pollution free breathing on the go to people in highly polluted cities. But in the late 19th century, eBay was, of course, absolutely nonexistent. So customers still had to travel and the burgeoning wellness tourism businesses had to think of ways to center their establishments around the product air. And they did all the way down to the architecture.

David: Part of the thing is that you always position your buildings facing the prevailing wind and had big windows, and that’s something we forgot before, by the way. Everybody thought we discovered, um, fresh air and ventilation and etc. for Covid and the need to have lots of air flow, you know, in these sealed buildings and everything like that. We knew that in the 1880s and the 1890s, when we were building sanitaria, that you needed huge windows and a wind.

Aislyn: And I lived in one of the documents that you sent me. There was a photo of all of these women in beds on a porch. I think it was advertised as a porch bedroom, and it was just side by side. People sleeping outside or maybe just resting outside in beds. That was quite a powerful visual.

David: That’s actually a very specific term. It’s called a sleeping porch

Aislyn: Sleeping porch.

David: And a fundamental aspect of the design of any wellness place, any boarding house was the sleeping porch.

Aislyn: David tells me that in the 1900s, there were an estimated 5,000 beds in the city for people seeking that fresh mountain air. And for a little context, there are around 10,000 hotel rooms in Asheville today, and the city is much, much larger.

David: So at that time, there were only a small number of big hotels as we know them. Most, you know, are what we would call rooming houses or boarding houses or whatever, just for people to get away and get to the fresh air. But, you know, 5,000 is a whole lot for the year 1900.

Aislyn: You might remember from our last episode that one of the wealthy tycoons of the time, Edwin Grove, left the industrial district of Saint Louis for Asheville on the recommendation of his doctor to help with his breathing, and for the same reason that the fresh air was an escape from factory pollution. It also came to be thought of as therapeutic for the deadliest disease in human history, tuberculosis. In the 19th century, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in America, with estimates ranging from 15 to 25 percent of the entire population killed by the disease. Its death rate among young people was even higher, which earned TB the nickname Robber of Youth.

David: There were a number of tuberculosis sanitaria that were starting in Europe, and they had the same thought.

Aislyn: So I was curious to know, at the height of all of this medical tourism, how many sanitaria were there in Asheville, would you say?

David: There were something like at the peak of about 125, I believe, sanitaria as far as the TB oriented sanitaria. There were probably about, I’d say 25 out of 125 were for TB patients.

Aislyn: This conversation reminded me of a story that a guy named Tebbé told me on a walking tour through the city.

Tebbé: This town wasn’t even founded until after the revolution, and it wasn’t really populated until like the turn of the century. And a lot of the population came from people looking for opportunities and people looking for a cure for tuberculosis, because we had a doctor here named John Dixon who told the world he had the cure for tuberculosis. The only cure for tuberculosis at the time was a funeral?

Aislyn: And then, perhaps not too shockingly, people got nervous. They didn’t want all these sick people wandering around. So the city passed strict laws in the early 1900s that segregated buildings into sick houses and not sick houses.

Tebbé: In the 1905-06 fiscal year, we had a war in this town between the city commerce and the hospitals, health and the sanatoriums. And they had a problem with what do we how do we market this place? So many people were coming here. They didn’t want to be a place where people come to die. And they didn’t want to say that, even though it was sort of true. But they wanted people to come here for opportunity. So they invented a term that we use to this day, all over the world. It’s called health resort.

Aislyn: Oh many sanitaria, oh, excuse me, health resorts simply moved outside of city limits. But Asheville’s future as a health resort destination was cemented and helped create a very healthy flow of tourism until the Great Depression, when tourism pretty much died in every American city. So eventually sleeping porches faded into history. But in the last several decades, an entirely new, wildly diverse array of wellness experiences took their place. And that brings us back to the present era, where I find myself in one of those experiences a little hungover. So I’m sitting in this little meditation area about to head into the salt cave, and I have to admit, I’m feeling a little tired today. Last night, went out, had a couple drinks. Um, so I’m curious to see how I’m going to feel on the other side of this experience.

David: So we are surrounded here by 30 tons of Himalayan salt and it’s estimated to be about 300 million years old. We’ve harvested this salt from the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in Pakistan. In the darker, more purplish chunks that you see are from Poland. Poland is actually where salt therapy originated from. It was the late 1800s. And they started to realize that the salt miners weren’t experiencing the same respiratory issues as the other types of miners in the area. So they began to bring people into the salt caves to receive the healing benefits.

Aislyn: The sound of the water, the warmth of the room, the almost solid quiet of the salt is so relaxing. By the end of our session 20-30 minutes later, I can’t quite tell how much time has elapsed. I’m feeling recalibrated. I do feel oddly recharged and reinvigorated. Yeah, it’s, um, a little bit of a vibration, although maybe that’s the strong coffee I had this morning, but really powerful. So to understand this effect, I had to go to the salt source.

Jodi: My name is Jodi Apple and I own Asheville Salt Cave and Spa here in Asheville, North Carolina.

Aislyn: What year did you open?

Jodi: We opened in 2012.

Aislyn: So what was that holistic wellness landscape like at that time?

Jodi: I think to be honest, if you would walk into our grocery store, you would say, who’s a massage therapist? And every single human, even if they were the cashier, would raise their hand. So everybody was doing some kind of holistic care, mostly massage, I would think, but I’m sure there was lots of yoga instructors and things along those lines. It’s kind of always been a little bit this way, to be honest. I went to school in Florida for massage, and the people there would constantly talk about how great Asheville was for wellness.So I think that that 200-year long process has continued and it just keeps evolving and shifting and changing and yeah.

Aislyn: Jodi’s salt story started, of all people with her dad.

Jodi: 20-something years ago. My father, unfortunately had a really bad car accident and he had punctured his lung. He also had really bad asthma and allergies throughout his whole ind of lifetime. Real trouble breathing. And he is not holistic at all, which is impressive. He’s very much a pharmacist, but he was driving to visit me long before I lived in Asheville. I lived in Greenville and he was traveling down and they like Williamsburg, Virginia. And so he stopped there and there was a salt room. He called me because I had done massage and worked on animals holistically and a number of other things, hydrotherapy and stuff. And so he was like, hey, we found this place. And it says, it’s really great for like breathing. And you know, me, I have all these issues. And I was like, oh yeah. Like, I’ll be honest, dad, I don’t really know much about salt, but it kind of sounds hokey, but it’s 20 bucks. Like, go to it. How bad could it be? Well, it changed his whole life. 2 or 3 weeks after he had called me and said he hadn’t really had to use his rescue inhaler for that period of time, and that was the only thing he could really correlate it to.

Aislyn: After learning a great deal about salt therapy, Jodi finally agreed to open the spa with her dad. It’s one of the many modalities of wellness therapy here in Asheville. I tell her about the many things I found during my visit. Aura photography. Hydrotherapy. Even someone called the breath nurse.

Jodi: She’s great. It goes from, yeah, like breathwork to, you know, yoga classes. It goes to things. I gotta be honest. Some things I don’t even really know what they are sometimes because there’s so many. And it’s so vast and people are bringing all sorts of unique things like on wellness level, you know, we’ve had things like scalar waves, which I gotta be honest, I don’t understand it, but I do feel like there is like a really great spread. Like for any weekend, there’s going to be something to feed the soul, right? Whether we’re looking at. My thing is yoga or I hate yoga and I want to do tai chi. Great. There’s different classes that involve pools or, you know, like getting in the water. There’s like a lot of sauna and cold plunges kind of coming up. That seems to be kind of a new trend.

Aislyn: And let’s not forget the experience. We opened this episode with the sound bath.

Kristin: Hi, my name’s Kristin. I am a sound therapist. I’ve been doing this for about 5 years. Got my start here at the center for Spiritual Living Asheville. As we play the chakra bowls, seven of them before every service, just to set the tone and get the stress to relax and find that peaceful center.

Aislyn: Well, we just spent an hour having a wonderful sound bath, so and we’re looking at a carpet filled with instruments. So could you walk me through a few of the really kind of unique ones or ones that you think have cool sounds?

Kristin: What would you like me to play them as we do?

Aislyn: Okay, wonderful. Thank you

Kristin: So Crystal balls is one of the mainstays of any sound bath. That’s a crystal ball. See notes H. Uh, frequency of 432 hertz. Okay. And then you have many different Himalayan bowls. It’s another tone. Couple more Himalayan bowls. That’s kind of the foundation. And then you can build from there. Like we have the chimes here. There’s a gong. That’s the loud version of it. And I have a harp, some gentle chimes. There’s drums. So it’s a culmination. It’s a sound journey. It’s a painting. A vibrational picture of starting off sweet and building in, rising and falling and just letting the imagination go on this beautiful journey to soothe the body and your mind and your spirit.

Aislyn: That’s amazing. Why do you think that Asheville is such a unique place when it comes to wellness? Because there are a lot of different ways to access it, and a lot of people who seem to be drawn here for that kind of work.

Kristin: I think it’s like a some type of a vortex here that just draws people. It’s loving and grounded and spiritual. People come because they feel good, and there’s a really good sense of community on all levels. It’s not just a retirement community. There’s young people here, a lot of outdoor activities, you know, from rafting and kayaking to sound healing and lots of wellness. So people are just attracted to the energy. I think we just feel good. And we were known as the happy City.

Aislyn: I love that.

Kristin: Whatever your interest, I’m sure you can find something here in Asheville.

Aislyn: People have been coming here to feel better for a century and a half. And honestly, I think it still works. We have several more Asheville episodes for you to enjoy, so check out the feed. Next up, the little college in these mountains that quietly rewired American art.

I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked by Afar. We’ll see you in the mountains. Unpacked is a production of Afar. This episode was hosted by me, Aislyn Greene, and produced by Nikki Galteland and Chromatic Media. Music from Chris Collin and Epidemic Sound. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers podcast.