Day Three: Weaverville, N.C.
"I don't know how many people would be employed setting up the infrastructure, but a heck of a lot of people would be employed on their computers with high-speed Internet who otherwise could not, just simply couldn't compete." (Watch the interview)
Brooks Townes has been frustrated ever since he moved to the mountains 11 years ago. His heart and his home are on the West Coast, near the boats and the salty, warm sea air.
He moved to “these hollers” – the Smoky Mountains of Weaverville, N.C. – to help care for his ailing mother. Thinking the move would be temporary, Brooks didn’t worry much about his career as a maritime writer for publications like Wooden Boat and Professional Boat Builders, even though he's now four hours from the ocean. With dial-up Internet, he could file his stories from the “puckerbrush.”
But that was more than a decade ago. Brooks’ resilient mother lived to be almost 99 years old, and telecommuting via dial-up was only practical when everyone else was on the same slow connection. Unable to get high-speed Internet, Brooks has been marooned in the mountains and forced into early retirement.
Crawling with Dial-Up
“The Internet at first was a great boon,” Brooks says. “I had no idea what I was going to do when I first got here to look after my mother. But as time went on, and more and more people in the rest of the world got high-speed Internet and we were still stuck with dial-up – 36-what’s-its a minute – well, I lost my ability to stay with it.”
Brooks says it’s frustrating to watch the rest of the world whiz by while he’s stuck crawling.
“Web sites are much more complex,” he says. “To go to a Web site and browse takes me so much longer than anyone in civilization. After a while you say, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I ought to grow potatoes or something. I would be more effective.”
Brooks grew up with an insatiable love of boats. He built his first when he was 11 years old, naming it Mom’s Worry. But his upbringing wasn’t all-things nautical. His father, William A. Townes, was a newspaper man. Brooks worked as a copyboy in the bustling heart of one of his father’s newsrooms, gaining a reporter’s instinct and learning the unshakable thrill of words.
The Coffee-Shop Commute
He returned to writing when he was 30 after a stint at sea as a professional sailor. “I didn’t want to be an old salty character on a dock somewhere telling stories,” he says. Instead, he wanted to write them.
Yet something that he never considered took the wind out of his sails: the lack of high-speed Internet. When Brooks realized that dial-up would not meet his needs, he began driving to coffee shops to work and download large files.
“The biggest frustration is going to a café and you get a little tiny table,” Brooks says. “You bring files with you, but there’s no place to put it. Not being able to swivel around and open a drawer and pull out something pertinent to what you’re doing is kind of like a car mechanic that’s only got a crescent wrench and no other tools to work on a complicated machine.”
Brooks’ mother passed away in 2008, and he and his wife are finally moving back to his beloved West coast. But Brooks says that lack of broadband has deeper reverberations than his own career.
“I might still be doing my maritime work from here and not thinking about moving back to the oceanfront if I had high-speed Internet,” Brooks says. “That may be a small impact on the economy of Asheville because my wife and I spend our money here. But if you multiply me by several hundred or thousand people who live in these hills and hollers ... ”
Day Three: Mars Hill
"We have learned from the B&B business that if they don't find you right there ready to roll, they move on to somebody else... We can't afford to lose a single customer."
Martha Abraham is devoted to her Web site, tending to it the way others spend hours in their gardens coaxing flowers. She knows that to make it in the bed-and-breakfast world, she has to have a flashy site that sets her business apart.
But Martha doesn’t spend hours at her computer for the joy of editing her site. High-speed Internet is not available in her area – 30 minutes from Asheville – and dial-up Internet and even her recently acquired satellite connection make building a business with an online presence tedious, time-consuming and expensive.
“I found out real quick that I had just as good a chance of getting a reservation than the guy who had been in the business for 20 years as long as I had a good Web site,” Martha says. “But it was very difficult to do when I realized that I was limited to dial-up. In the beginning, I didn’t know the difference between dial-up or DSL or whatever you computer people call them, but I knew the difference between fast and slow.”
Satellite Internet has been marketed as the high-speed answer to people living in places where the phone and cable companies refuse to bring broadband. Yet installation and monthly fees are often very expensive, and the satellite connection can be unreliable.
“On some days, [satellite] is not any better than dial-up, and you don’t know when it’s going to be working and when it’s not,” Martha says. “Rainstorms, it’s down. Snow, it’s down. Wind, it’s down.”
Competitive Disadvantage
Even though Martha is doing all of the right things to market her B&B, the lack of dependable broadband puts her at a competitive disadvantage. As the economy falters, Martha’s reservation book is looking empty. Today, there are no guests, and for several weeks, the phone didn’t ring at all. And Martha fears that not having broadband puts her business at greater risk.
An almost obligatory question for travelers these days is, “Do you have Internet?” Even romance-seeking couples want to tow their laptops. Martha’s reply: “‘Yes, I have it, and if we’re lucky it will work when you get here.’ It’s definitely a deal-breaker.”
Another deal-breaker: slow online reservation pages. “If [people] don’t find you right there, ready to roll, they move on to somebody else,” Martha says. “If that satellite and that online booking isn’t working, and they can’t continue with pushing a few keys, they will definitely go to somebody else. And being as small as we are, we can’t afford to lose a single customer.”
Martha’s cheery, worry-free nature disappears as she thinks about what’s at stake. “We went into this business for all the right reasons,” she says somberly. “We’ve worked really hard on our product. But it’s like giving a party and nobody coming. It’s hurting our pocketbooks. We’re baby boomers. We thought we did everything right for our retirement. This was a great stage to go into do something really worthy in a beautiful part of the country. But we certainly didn’t do it to fail at it.”
Yet Martha’s tenacity may be no match for a situation beyond her control – the decision by Internet service providers to bypass her community.
“You’ve got very sophisticated people with very sophisticated businesses that are living in the mountains,” she says. “And we need to be served just like everybody else. There’s no difference except for the hill that’s in the way.”
