“Barbecue is all about slow and low,” said Blackrock BBQ owner and pit master James Aust. “The secret’s in the rub, and I can’t share that.”

Barbecue, as a food, lends itself to mysterious discourse, in part, because it’s so simple. Pork shoulder butt (or whole pig) cooked in a smoker until it’s poised to fall apart. For purists, the nuance of flavoring with smokes and rubs is where the art is.

Sylva has a new repository for that art thanks to Aust and his partner in crime Chef Jay Horton. Aust recently purchased the building that used to be Lee’s Barbecue on NC 107, renovated it, and started a whole new kind of shop.

“It just kind of fell into my lap. Lee was looking to get down to one restaurant, so I talked to him about it and thought I’d give it a try,” Aust said.

Horton and Aust met in the kitchen at the Cedar Creek Racquet Club in Cashiers where they worked last summer. Horton, raised in Canton, has 21 years of experience in fine dining and got his start cooking at Ghost Town when he was 16.

“The only other thing I’ve found I’m good at is putting money into the cash registers at a convenience store,” Horton said.

Aust, an Army brat who’s spent the last 16 years of his life in Sylva, was going to school to become a teacher when he decided to take over Lee’s. Blackrock BBQ and Grill has been open for less than a month now, but it’s already packed during the lunch hour with a mix of Lee’s loyalists, WCU students and staff, professionals from the hospital complex and members of local law enforcement agencies.

The barbecue is Eastern North Carolina style pulled pork and they serve it with both vinegar and hot pepper sauce and sweet tomato-based sauce on the table.

Aust cooks the dry rubbed cuts of pork for 15 hours in a smoker, and the result is delicious. Barbecue in the mountains, unless you’re at someone’s house, is often a dicey proposition. The economies of scale that make for barbecue meccas in places like Lexington don’t exist, and the result is often meat that is rushed or over-sauced.

The pork at Blackrock is spot on. The dry rub adds a distinctive signature that isn’t distracting, and the smoke flavor doesn’t overpower the meat. One of the great things about whole pig barbecue is the crispy bits of skin on the outer layer and the strands of pork underneath coated in the rendered fat. When the meat is pulled, it yields a range of textures from crisp to succulent and fatty.

“Slow and low” sounds easy, but getting the right seal on the pork is crucial and you can tell Aust know his work, because the meat pulls right and arrives on your plate in a neat little mound of crispy-edged hunks.

Horton prepares all the sides and a la carte items, like collard greens and hand-cut potato wedges, from scratch and to order. The pulled pork platter comes with two sides and hush puppies for $7.50. The beans were the second star of the show, tangy and sweet with the same distinctive spice signature as the rub.

Another huge upgrade to the Lee’s experience is the total interior renovation that Aust’s father, Jim, contributed to the project. Jim has transformed the kitchen into a clean, efficient stainless steel commercial space and the front room into a rustic, hand-worked wood parlor with four spacious booths and five two-tops.

“We wanted to make it a rustic clean place to sit down for a good meal,” said Aust. “ Everything in here is hand-made, just like the food.”

Aust and Horton plan to add Memphis-style spare ribs and catering to the operation in the near future. They also cure their own bacon for their BLT’s and burgers. Mmmmm, bacon.

The two partners are happy to be out of the fine dining world and confident in their product.

“It’s the kind of food we love to fix,” Aust said. “Just good old Southern food.”

Find them on Facebook or call 828.586.3490.

Sylva resident Susannah Patty thought her trip to Chile would be an adventure, but she didn’t count on living through the fifth biggest earthquake of the century.

In her late 20s now and no stranger to travel, Patty says she has a knack for going places the moment “things go bizarre.”

She was in Paris when large-scale riots between police and teenagers broke out on the north side of the city. She was in Cameroon during a political upheaval that paralyzed the country. Then she was in Chile, in a club in the wee hours of the morning celebrating with friends, and the world was shaking.

“There were no screams, only a few who ran outside, and no massively loud noises where I was. I was instructed to hold on, but there was no time to think about where one should go or what one should do,” Patty wrote in a travel log she kept in the days after the quake.

Fortunately, Patty’s host in Chile, Maqui Ortiz, lives in the northern port town of Valparaiso, far from the earthquake’s epicenter near Concepcion. Ortiz was previously living in Chapel Hill when the two met through mutual friends in Asheville.

When Ortiz decided to go back to Chile to explore her roots, Patty jumped at the chance to visit. The quake registered 8.8 on the Richter scale near its epicenter and 7.8 in Valparaiso.

“It was really over before I realized what was happening, but if I could equate the feeling to anything, it would be the strongest turbulence I’ve felt on an airplane,” Patty said after she arrived safely in Sylva on Monday.

Patty speaks French, not Spanish, so she relied on Ortiz and her network of friends to help her get around in Chile. When the quake struck, she’d already been in Valparaiso for six days.

In her journal, she described the town in a way that makes it easier to feel what the quake must have been like there.

“During the day, the vista looks impossible — multi-story houses of all styles and colors built at the turn of the century are perched on cliffs, within a block there are at least ten rooflines, and the labyrinthine roads approach 45 degree angles. At night, which is when the 7.8 earthquake hit, the hills are cloaked with an enigmatic net of yellow lights that cradle the bay.”

The disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land turned on its head for Patty that night. While the terremoto didn’t level Valparaiso, it did damage nearly every building and knocked out its electricity.

“Chileans are used to earthquakes, so when I was with new friends on the second story of a large building and the shocks began, I looked toward faces that were for the most part calm, albeit a bit stunned. Afterwards, I found out that if you look at glasses on the table, you know you will be fine if they rock and sway, indicating a side-to-side motion that is better absorbed by structures. If they rattle up and down, apparently, you know you are dead.”

After the quake, the town’s residents emptied into the darkened streets, and Patty followed the crowd to safety.

“After a minute and a half, the building slowed its rocking; singing and cheering collided, and the lights flickered, going out completely within a few minutes. Once out on the street, following the tambourines of friends, the city no longer existed in a recognizable state. It was not unrecognizable because of destruction — there was minimal damage comparatively — but because the lights had been extinguished.”

Patty described how in the darkness she was led by the hand of a relative stranger to a safe place away from the buildings then to another apartment to sleep. Her host, who had lived through a massive earthquake in 1985, could not sleep.

In the days after the quake, Patty said the people exhibited a combination of joyful gratitude, relief and fear.

“Relief was so entwined with apprehension, about what was to be found, or not, elsewhere, about gas explosions, about tsunamis, about another quake and temblores that there was no way to compartmentalize the emotions or the sensation which was expressed through a remarkable efficiency of action. Tones of angst only came out in retrospective discussions focused on piecing together fragments of information: where individuals were, what it was like, what kind of damage their houses sustained, if and when they had heard from family members in the south and in Santiago,” she wrote.

The plaster walls in the apartment Patty was staying in were damaged, and the shelves emptied by the quake. She and Ortiz didn’t want to stay indoors the day after, so they went to the beach. There wasn’t a soul there except a group of itinerant clowns. All of the boats in the port were stowed away. The emptiness, she said, was terrifying.

She was originally scheduled to return from Chile a week ago, but Chile’s main airport terminal was destroyed by the quake, and the roads connecting Valparaiso to the capital, Santiago, were closed.

Patty stayed with Ortiz and her friends and watched Chile try to get back to normal. She raised $300 online to donate groceries for people who needed food. She watched her friends throw together an impromptu performance of larger than life marionettes to raise spirits. She noticed how the graffiti on the walls turned positive: “Chile ayuda a Chile.” “Chile help Chile.”

In the end, Patty’s journey to Chile opened up a new realm of experience for her. It wasn’t that she was disconnected from the horror Americans saw on the news, it was that she was connected to it in a way that made it harder to compartmentalize.

That message is clear in one of the searching passages of her journal.

“When there is a sudden transformation of the world or our part of it, there also exists a crucial time-space before anyone can gauge the shift or build up a framework of memories and images that situate the extent of the change; in this space, people intuit what is necessary,” she wrote.

But the quake certainly left its mark on Susannah Patty, and her experience of the moment it hit evokes the fates of the people in Concepcion who were not as lucky as she was.

“You instinctively know that for moments, and possibly forever, your situation chooses you, you do not choose it,” she wrote.

The Town of Sylva finalized an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation last week that clears the way for a continuous sidewalk to Dillsboro.

The town will pitch in $83,000 to build the missing link and maintain the sidewalk, and N.C. DOT will cover the remaining costs.

The sidewalk extension has been a goal for the town board since 2008 and pre-dated Sylva’s pedestrian planning process. But it’s a success story that motivates Town Commissioner Sarah Graham to create similar partnerships in the future.

“You’ll be able to walk from Dillsboro to Webster on the sidewalk, and it just shows how easy it is to partner on projects like this,” Graham said.

When the 4,000-foot extension is completed this summer, it will connect Sylva’s sidewalks to Dillsboro’s by filling in a gap along West Main Street between Mark Watson Park and Jackson Village. The pedestrian planning process initiated in November was intended to lay a blueprint for similar pedestrian improvement projects in the future and to provide a platform for partnering with Jackson County and the DOT.

“I think everyone understands that the money to buy a bunch of sidewalks is not there right now,” Graham said. “But we wanted to hear from the community whether they shared the town board’s ideas about making the town more friendly to pedestrians.”

The town used a $20,000 N.C. DOT grant to hire Donald Kostelec, a consultant from the Asheville office of The Louis Berger Group, to oversee the process and provide technical input. The steering committee –– which includes Graham, Emily Elders, the county’s greenways coordinator, and Ryan Sherby of the Southwestern Commission –– began meeting in early November to develop a vision for the plan.

Last month, residents from a range of Sylva communities gathered for focus groups and offered input that would ultimately shape the plan’s direction.

The focus groups confirmed that the pedestrian plan would zero in on solutions for three primary areas –– Skyland Drive, Mill Street in the downtown district and the N.C. 107 commercial corridor.

Graham said the meetings helped create a consensus about how to focus the planning effort by bringing together residents from distinct neighborhoods.

Both Mill Street and N.C. 107 are commercial corridors that are currently dangerous for pedestrians because of their high-volume traffic and noticeable lack of safe crosswalks.

Kostelec said his intent with the focus groups was to zero in on the physical challenges presented by the areas that need improvement.

“We wanted to get down to identifying on the map where exactly people walk then figure out where those patterns will move in the future,” Kostelec said.

The town used a pedestrian survey to get input from residents. The survey asks people where they walk, how often, and where they would like to be able to walk in the future.

Kostelec said each of the three areas pegged for improvement comes with its own set of challenges. Skyland Drive is an area in need of new sidewalks, which are costly. The goal is to connect Sylva’s downtown with the Harris Regional Hospital campus and Skyland’s commercial district.

“Doing that type of project in one chunk is not going to be possible for a town of Sylva’s size,” Kostelec said.

Kostelec said he is still working on pinning down the right of way restrictions on Skyland, an old state highway route, to see if there is room for a separated sidewalk between the road and train tracks.

N.C. 107 is a heavily trafficked part of town that is cursed by a narrow right of way. Kostelec said any plan to improve the sidewalks would involve getting easements from neighboring property owners.

Mill Street is an area that could see marked improvement at a relatively modest price point because it’s not a terribly long stretch to tackle. But because the road is maintained by the DOT, any work there is contingent on good cooperation between the town and the department, Graham said.

“The implementation will have a lot to do with cooperation from DOT, because Mill Street is a DOT road,” Graham said. “I’m hoping if we have a plan in hand and we’ve been through the process and we know what we want, that those negotiations will be a lot easier.”

The Pedestrian Plan will be showcased at an open house during the Greening Up the Mountains Festival on April 24. Sylva’s Pedestrian Plan Survey is available at www.townofsylva.org.

Community Table, Sylva’s nonprofit community kitchen, has outgrown its existing facility and is targeting a move to the town’s now-vacant senior center.

The county built a new senior center, freeing up space in the old one, which is owned by the town. The building is located downtown adjacent to the town pool and playground.

Last month the Community Table’s executive director, Amy Grimes, asked the Sylva town board if it would support the move so the organization could move forward with concrete fundraising goals for the building switch.

The board voted unanimously to “bless” the project.

Grimes said the Community Table served an average of 120 meals per night in January for a monthly total of 2,076 meals, triple last January’s number.

“We’ve got a lot of new faces every week,” Grimes said.

Community Table –– which serves meals four nights per week and operates a food pantry by appointment –– turned 10 years old last August. The Sylva Church of Christ has donated the current space to operate the kitchen, but Grimes said the Community Table needs more room to accommodate a surge in demand for services.

“We’re busting at the seams,” Grimes said.

Grimes said the Sylva board’s vote cleared the way for Community Table to get cost estimates for the move and undertake a fundraising drive. Grimes expects to get a building inspector’s estimate on the necessary renovations to the building next month.

“We are hoping the town, the county and the community will come together to help us, and we’ve always had tremendous support,” Grimes said.

Community Table serves warm, home-cooked meals to anyone who wants them from Monday through Friday every week.

Sylva Mayor Maurice Moody said the senior center had always been a building devoted to community service. If the Community Table could raise the money to make the move a success, the town would support it.

“What the board did was basically bless the idea if they want to move forward with it,” Moody said.

The Sylva Town Board opposes the construction of a 195-foot-high cellular communications tower on the main commercial drag of N.C. 107, but a state law passed in August may allow the tower to go up anyway.

The cell tower, planned by Pegasus Tower Company of Cedar Bluff, Va., would dominate the ridgeline next to the unfinished Comfort Inn adjacent to Andy Shaw Ford.

Pegasus originally received a building permit for the tower in June 2008, but because construction did not begin within six months, the permit expired.

Sylva amended its cell tower ordinance in November 2008 to conform to Jackson County’s ordinance. The ordinance stipulates a maximum height of 120 feet, which would rule out the tower Pegasus plans to build.

The Sylva board met in closed session last month to discuss legal matters concerning the issue and determined they had grounds to deny Pegasus a new permit.

“We think we’re on firm legal ground to deny it,” Sylva Mayor Maurice Moody said.

Moody said the board considered the tower a safety issue because a “fall zone” had not been included in its design plans.

But Pegasus believes the North Carolina Permit Extension Act of 2009, a state law intended to offset onerous permitting requirements during the down economy, applies to cell tower construction. The company plans to build the tower without a new permit from the town of Sylva.

David Owens, professor at UNC Chapel Hill’s Institute of Government, said Pegasus’ permit is likely still valid.

“If that permit was valid at any time during that last three years, then it’s still valid,” Owens said.

Companies forced to put construction projects on hold during the recession would typically see their permits lapse. The state bill was intended to save developers from having to go through the permit process over again when they were finally ready to proceed.

Owens said the Permit Extension Act defines development so broadly that the construction of cell towers is included. The statute essentially delays the mandatory start period for development projects initiated between January 2008 and December 2010.

Following the logic of the bill, Pegasus would have six months from December 2010 to start work on the tower under the terms of its current permit.

Sylva board member Chris Matheson said she and her fellow board members felt strongly that the tower shouldn’t be constructed in the proposed location.

“I don’t know how much there is to say other than that the town is vehemently opposed to it,” Matheson said.

Matheson also said the town is working with Pegasus to see if both parties can agree on an alternative site for the tower.

“We’re working with Pegasus to see if we could provide a location that would be attractive to them but more in line with that the community needs,” Matheson said.

Sylva Town Manager Adrienne Isenhower confirmed that the town’s attorney, Eric Ridenour, has engaged in discussions with lawyers from Pegasus to resolve the issue.

If Pegasus and the town cannot come to an amicable resolution on the issue, Owens believes Sylva must have grounds other than an expired permit to prevent the project from going forward.

Armed with an e-newsletter and an indefatigable entrepreneurial spirit, Eric Hendrix is determined to bring the fruits of the ocean to the mountains of Western North Carolina.

“The goal is to consistently provide fresh fish in the mountains, because you just can’t get it,” Hendrix said, who runs the aptly named Eric’s Fresh Fish Market on Back Street in Sylva.

But the real magic of Hendrix’s business is the way he has grown the project from an idea into an icon on a shoestring budget.

“The idea came to me when I was walking one day, and it was a full year and a half before anything happened,” Hendrix said.

Hendrix started the fish market in 2008 as a side venture to complement his salary teaching composition at Western Carolina University. When his contract wasn’t renewed last year, he decided to go all in selling fish.

“Necessity is a great motivator,” Hendrix said, laughing.

These days, Eric’s Fresh Fish Market is open Wednesday through Saturday. Hendrix gets deliveries from Inland Seafood in Atlanta twice a week.

His mission may be simple, but the reward it provides is varied. On a Wednesday afternoon Hendrix may have Scottish Salmon, Rain Forest Tilapia, Dover Sole, Costa Rican Mahi Mahi, Gulf shrimp, Virginia select oysters, and Maine Mussels.

Hendrix constantly preaches a mantra of freshness, quality and variety.

“You can eat beef, pork, chicken. Or chicken, pork, and beef, and there’s only three possibilities,” Hendrix said. “When you go into the ocean there’s thousands of possibilities.”

Inland Seafood has been a key to his ability to supply restaurant quality fish in a variety you don’t get at the grocery store. Once he identified a niche market for fresh seafood in the mountains, Hendrix hounded Inland to let him serve as a local distributor. Inland is a gigantic wholesale distributor that covers 12 states by truck. It serves the region’s best restaurants and specialty markets 90,000 pounds of fresh fish each week.

Mike Hulsey, Inland Seafood’s retail division sales manager in Atlanta, is a huge fan of Eric’s.

“I can’t even remember how he found us,” Hulsey said. “But he’s an enterprising individual, and I love the guy. He’s just interested in doing a better job than what the grocery stores are doing in providing fresh seafood with the real information customers need.”

Hulsey, who describes himself as a fish lover, said Inland sells to Hendrix because they believe in what he’s doing.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” Hulsey said. “If a consumer calls from that area –– and this happens all the time –– and says, ‘Where can I get fresh fish?,’ I like having someone I’m confident sending them where I know I would buy the fish.”

For Hendrix, the distribution model is simple. Get the freshest fish you can and get rid of it as soon as you can.

“The fish you get from me is delivered to Inland the day before it’s delivered to me,” Hendrix said. “There is no middle man, and without the middle man the freshness is guaranteed.”

But Hendrix didn’t have the luxury of buying a fancy new space and filling it chock full of fresh seafood on giant beds of ice. He has employed a pay-as-you-go business model and grown the business slowly.

His greatest tool in that regard has been his weekly e-newsletter, which contains information about what’s fresh as well as the community business news of other downtown Sylva merchants. Hendrix has harnessed his skills as a networker and communicator to become a reliable source of what’s happening about town, and he’s growing his business at the same time.

“Networking is really crucial in any economy and in today’s economy particularly,” Hendrix said. “One of the goals with the newsletter is to market downtown Sylva as a real destination.”

With over 1,000 registered subscribers, Hendrix’ e-mail has turned into a marketing tool that drives the business forward. Sure, Gmail made him upgrade to a bulk account, but that’s good news, right?

Customers read his “Catch of the Week” email and reply with their orders. Hendrix knows how much to order from Inland and what people really want to buy, so seafood doesn’t languish in his shop.

David Liberman, a regular customer who reserves fish via email, raves about the market.

“I lived in Miami for years and used to eat fish there all the time, but fish in the mountains is a problem,” Liberman said. “I think of him as a blessing to the community.”

Liberman says he now eats fish once a week and looks forward to his stops at the market. Having grown up in Brooklyn, he likens the experience at Eric’s to the experience of grocery shopping in his youth –– a meet-and-greet transaction with food.

When you visit Eric’s Fresh Fish Market, Hendrix’s energy is evident. He greets all the customers by name. In the space of 30 minutes, you’ll see him cut up a salmon, tap notes on his newsletter, and sell a handful of Dover sole filets all while carrying on a conversation.

Hendrix isn’t an easy person to categorize. Raised as a military brat, he later spent four years in the U.S. Army. In the mid-‘80s he moved to Franklin from Kansas City, Mo., and started the first Mexican restaurant west of Waynesville.

After a divorce, Hendrix used his GI Bill credit to go back to school at Western Carolina University. A writer and songwriter, Hendrix got a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from WCU in 2006 and looked forward to a long run as an assistant professor until his life took yet another new turn.

Sue Lipton is a vegetarian but she visits the market every week to shop for her husband, who favors its sea scallops and Scottish salmon.

Lipton said her loyalty to Eric’s is based as much on the business’s vibe as its product.

“I really, really appreciate the way he interacts with everyone,” Lipton said. “He always has time for everyone. The community is so important to him.”

Cooking with wine is familiar. Cajun chef Justin Wilson, one of television’s first real food celebrities, liberally tipped Chablis into his etouffe (who-wee), and Julia Child introduced America to the French style of cooking, deglazing and saucing with wine in the late 1960s.

But if beer is the new wine in Western North Carolina, then Heinzelmannchen’s beer-focused cookbook is set to open up a new conversation about the way the region’s signature beverage pairs with food.

“One of the en vogue things in the craft brewing circuit is to brew a beer that goes along with the food you eat,” said Heinzelmannchen’s brewmeister Dieter Kuhn. “And that’s been the style of beer we’ve brewed all along. It goes back to early times in Germany when you didn’t drink the water, you made beer out of it. And it was always on the table.”

Dieter and Sheryl Rudd are married and they run Heinzelmannchen together as business partners. Naturally their beer found its way from the brewery into the kitchen. Sheryl explained the genesis of their cookbook.

“We found ourselves pouring a little beer in everything, and my mother saw it and said,‘You really ought to start writing this down,’” Sheryl said.

Sheryl’s mother, Elizabeth Rudd, may not have known what she was getting into when she offered a word of advice in her daughter’s kitchen, but the task of organizing and editing the Heinzelmannchen cookbook eventually fell to her.

An experienced editor, it was Elizabeth who took on the challenge of turning Dieter and Sheryl’s collective effort into a published product. Along the way, the three of them found out there is a lot more to making a cookbook than cooking with a pen and an index card on the counter.

“One of the things we wanted to do is to make it more than just a cookbook,” Elizabeth said.

The result of Dieter, Sheryl, and Elizabeth’s work is a book that incorporates cooking techniques, recipes, and anecdotes into a kind of beer and food field guide. For example, the qualities of beer are dealt with in a succinct section called “Cooking with beer.”

“Hops add bitterness and acidity. Malt adds a subtle sweetness. Yeast produces a light fluffy texture, especially in batters. Yeast can also help to tenderize tougher cuts of meat,” one part reads.

That type of matter of fact, practical information helps you think about the possibilities of cooking with beer. But the cookbook also includes recipes that are tried and true, and the book is spiral bound so it can lie flat next to your stove as you try them out.

I tried the simplest recipe first, one for Mexican Cheese Dip, and I ate it during the Super Bowl and thought about all the delicious beer-infused “queso” that runs like a river through Austin, Tex. The Heinzelmannchen recipe yielded the perfect consistency. I tipped in a little more hot sauce and used the Ancient Days Blonde ale to my taste.

The stories that punctuate the book are fun and disarming, like the one about Dieter using the myth of the Henizelmannchen (German house gnomes) to defraud his little sister of her allowance for two years when he was growing up in Heidelsheim.

But the focus of the book is the recipes, which were generated around a nexus of popular favorites that Dieter and Sheryl cooked for their friends and family over the years. Naturally bratwurst and sauerkraut are on the list, and Dieter’s favorite birthday cake, Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte — a mouthful that turns into Black Forest Cherry Torte in English.

This is comfort food, which is really what beer is great for, and much of it has a distinctly German flavor.

“It’s not that it’s a German cookbook. It’s just stuff that we like to eat, cooked with the beer that we like to drink,” Dieter said.

Not all of the food is German-inspired. For example Dieter’s favorite dish — and the last to go in the cookbook — is the paella. The story behind the recipe exemplifies what Dieter and Sheryl are all about. They are community-focused, small business owners who love what they do.

Eric Hendrix of Eric’s Fish Market, their neighbor on Back Street, had a pile of beautiful shellfish for Dieter’s birthday meal and recommended they turn it into paella. Ross Lorenz, chef/owner of 553 West Main restaurant, said he’d help put it together. So the whole lot of them crowded into Dieter and Sheryl’s kitchen and produced the best paella this side of Valencia.

“They kept saying this has got to go in the cookbook,” Elizabeth said. “And I said it won’t make the deadline. And they said well just write it down now.”

Needless to say, it made the book. Dieter and Sheryl were anxious that the book be produced responsibly, and it was. Using 100 percent recycled materials, Rich Kilby of the Barefoot Press in Raleigh worked hand-in-hand with Elizabeth to design and produce a locally made product that’s friendly to the environment and chefs both.

The cookbook is available at Heinzelmannchen Brewery and City Lights Books in Sylva and may be available at Osondu/Blue Ridge Books in Waynesville and Malaprops Books in Asheville in the near future.

A Sylva teen club that sparked controversy two months ago by disseminating a flyer inviting high school students to “come as wasted as you want” has closed its doors.

In December, concerned parents brought 500 signatures to a town board meeting demanding that it shut down Club Offspring –– a private club for teens that held dances on the weekends. The club’s owner, Nathan Lang, defended his operation as an alternative ministry aimed at attracting “at-risk” youth.

The town board determined that it had no cause to shut the club down in spite of the petitions, but Mayor Maurice Moody admonished Lang about the wording of his flyer.

Last week, Sylva town manager Adrienne Isenhower confirmed the club had closed of its own accord.

“It wasn’t because of anything initiated by the town,” Isenhower said. “I guess the business was failing, and they couldn’t pay the rent.”

Isenhower said she learned the club had closed because Sylva police had stopped noticing any activity during the club’s hours of operation.

The club’s owner, Nathan Lang, used high-minded language to defend the club in the face of criticism from concerned parents.

“We see ourselves in the community not as a nuisance but as a place where teenagers can be who they are,” Lang said. “If anything, it’s a new doctrine attempt aimed at teenagers.”

Now the club has shut its doors, and Lang cannot be reached for comment.

William Maney, owner of Fantasy Travel in Sylva, allegedly defrauded an elderly woman from Franklin out of $7,000 last year by stealing her credit card and using it to purchase airline tickets for other clients, according to charges filed by the Sylva Police Department. Maney will appear in court on Feb. 2 to answer the charges, but it seems Mollie Miller was not his only victim.

For Miller, an 81-year-old Michigan transplant who is legally blind, the episode has been a lesson she’d rather not learn from.

“I’ve always been a very trusting person, and I’ve had no reason not to be,” Miller said.

The story began last July, when Miller showed up at Fantasy Travel to make arrangements for her son and daughter-in-law to come visit. She had never been there before, but Miller said she had always gone through travel agents in the past and didn’t know how to make online ticket reservations.

“He was so pleasant and what not, and I guess I just walked out of there without my credit card,” Miller said.

That was only the beginning of the story. Because of Miller’s poor eyesight, a neighbor helps her with bills each month.

“She says, ‘You’ve got $8,000 on your credit card’ and I said, ‘What a nice limit,’” Miller said. “And she said, ‘No, Mollie. You spent $8,000 on your credit card.’”

Miller didn’t suspect Maney until she got a piece of mail addressed to him at her address. Her daughter-in-law opened it and it confirmed their suspicions.

Miller took the information to the Franklin Police who took it the Macon County Sheriff’s Department who took it to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department who took it to the Sylva Police, which ultimately was the agency with jurisdiction since Fantasy Travel is located within Sylva town limits.

Det. John Buchanan took the case over and gathered enough evidence to charge Maney with 13 counts of obtaining property under false pretenses and one count of financial card theft.

The doors of Maney’s business have remained open with the lights on, but no one is there. Builder Greg Jenkins, who leases office space from Maney, said his jacket is on his desk chair and one of his cell phones on the desk.

“It’s just like he dropped off the face of the earth,” Jenkins said.

Sylva Police released information related to the case in the hopes of finding out if Maney had taken advantage of any other clients. So far, two more people have come forward, according to Buchanan. One resident has said he purchased a $500 gift certificate but it was never reimbursed, and paid $250 for an airline ticket that wasn’t received.

In the case of Miller, Maney used her card to buy over $7,000 worth of merchandise for nine Fantasy Travel clients between June 30 and July 18 of last year, according to court records. Det. Buchanan said Maney has cooperated with the investigation.

It’s a gloomy chapter for a downtown business that had been around for over 25 years. Maney purchased it in 2005 and renovated the space with help from a loan from the Sequoyah Fund, a small business incubator funded by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Maney appeared in court on Dec. 22 and was released on $22,000 bond.

Miller just wants her money back and some sense of peace of mind.

“I felt ridiculous afterwards when I realized he’d gotten away with it,” Miller said. “As long as I don’t wind up paying for the airline tickets, I guess I’ll be happy.”

Maney could not be reached for comment.

An attorney that forged judges’ signatures was caught thanks to the sharp eyes of a law enforcement officer, a fellow attorney and a court clerk who noticed red flags.

But for at least a year, fraudulent driving privileges provided to clients by Attorney John Lewis remained under the radar. The scam began unraveling last fall, leading to a state investigation and culminating with guilty pleas by Lewis in court this week.

The first sign of the fraud arose after one of the drivers sporting a fake document from Lewis was stopped by a law enforcement officer in Swain County. When asked for his license, the driver pulled out the limited driving privileges he’d gotten from Lewis.

“The officer found it was suspicious in nature just by looking at it,” said Grayson Edwards, a State Bureau of Investigation agent who investigated the case.

The biggest red flag was that Lewis had signed his own name on the line where a clerk of court is supposed to sign. A signature of Judge Richie Holt also appeared on the document. But the officer was skeptical that Judge Holt would have granted limited driving privileges to this particular driver. So the officer called Holt, who confirmed he’d never signed such a document for that person.

The confused driver called Lewis to find out what was going on. Lewis owned up to the fraud, but asked the driver to keep it under wraps. Lewis told the driver to call the clerk of court and say that he’d gotten the document in the mail.

“After (the driver) hung up the phone, he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to lie for something that he had not done. So he called the Swain County Clerk’s office back and told them where he’d gotten it,” Edwards recounted in court.

In a second case, a Swain County driver bearing one of Lewis’ forged documents was stopped by a police officer, this time outside the region. The driver whipped out his limited driving privileges, but when the officer pulled the driver’s record, it didn’t show up in the computer and the driver got a ticket.

Confused why his limited driving privileges weren’t valid, the driver called Lewis. Lewis asked for the document back without saying why. The driver got suspicious and photocopied it first.

The driver took the photocopy to another attorney to figure out what was going on, all the while hoping he could get the limited driving privileges back. But the attorney instead referred it to the district attorney’s office.

In yet another bizarre incident, Lewis forged the name of Judge Monica Leslie in a custody case terminating parental rights. No sooner had he filed the fraudulent court order with the Jackson County Clerk of Court than he apparently thought better of it and asked for it back. The clerk wouldn’t give it back, since a signed order submitted as part of the court record can’t be removed from the file. An agitated Lewis came back twice over the course of the day trying to retrieve the document.

“At one point he even went around the partition in the clerk’s office with a sticky note that said the order was void and put it on the file,” said Reid Taylor, assistant district attorney. “The clerk had some serious issues with Mr. Lewis and the way he was conducting himself over that document and was raising all kind of red flags.”

Lewis grew up in Jackson County and came from a low-income family, according to Lewis’ attorney. He excelled in basketball, playing at Smoky Mountain High School then at Western Carolina University and finally Mars Hill. From Mars Hill, he went to law school at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island before returning to Jackson County to practice law. Lewis and his wife live in Glenville.

District Attorney Mike Bonfoey said Lewis’ actions are puzzling for a person who worked so hard to go to law school.

“To come back home where he grew up and throw it all away? For who? People who weren’t entitled to drive?” Bonfoey asked. “Enabling people who shouldn’t be on the road to drive is appalling to all of us. It is appalling to my office, and it is appalling to all of us as attorneys.”

Investigators did not determine what payment if any Lewis got from his clients in exchange for purportedly landing them limited driving privileges, Bonfoey said.

There may be more people out there who think they have a valid document from Lewis. If you are one of those people, contact the sheriff’s office in your county.