goin' into town

I'm bummed. My friend's chickens have stopped laying for the winter. That means that I have to buy store eggs in town. So will she, very soon. But we have differing meanings when we say we are "going into town."

When I go up the road to Bethel, I call that "going into town", but most everybody chuckles when I describe it that way. Most folks would save the phrase "going into town" for trips to Canton or Waynesville.

To me, Bethel qualifies as "town" for errand-running purposes. They have two and a half gas stations, two restaurants, at least two churches, a dollar store, a small family-owned general store, a school and a prominent graveyard on a hill in the center of the relatively flat valley floor. And, at 9 miles from my house, it's the closest place to get milk or smokes or gas or anything else. And it's listed as a "populated place" at homelocator.com, Cruso is as well, but there are no shops there - only a church, a fire department, a community dumpster and a handful of campgrounds.

Two and a half miles past my house, Big East Fork is listed as as a "populated place" when in fact there are no structures of any kind there - much less occupied dwellings - save a pair of roofed bulletin boards that mark the two trailheads. The listing for Big East Fork has the locator pointing to the small parking area at the Shining Creek trailhead. The other trailhead, the Big East Fork trailhead, is about 1/10 of a mile away, across the East Fork of the Pigeon River. Many of the kayakers who survive the Class 5+ rapids upstream get out at these access points and the trails themselves are quite popular.