By Susan Sapienza
Executive Director, Cashiers Area Chamber of Commerce

We fall in love with the way a place makes us feel.

Sometimes it happens slowly. A familiar road. A favorite table. The person behind the counter who remembers your name. A trail you have walked enough times to know where the view will open up before you get there.

Sometimes it happens all at once.

You round a curve and see a scene you weren't expecting. You step outside and realize the air feels different. You hear music drifting across a lawn on a summer evening and, for reasons you can't quite explain, think: I want to come back here.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why people come to the Cashiers area.

It's part of my job.

We can count visitors. We can measure spending. We can study where people stayed, what they did and how long they remained.

Those numbers matter.

But numbers can't really explain why someone comes back.

Because returning is different from visiting.

Returning means something stuck.

What Makes Visitors Return to Cashiers?

Maybe it was the landscape. Around here, that's certainly a good place to start. Mountains have a way of making us look up from whatever seemed terribly important five minutes earlier.

But beautiful places are not exactly scarce.

I think what draws us back is something more complicated.

It's the landscape, yes, but also the people we associate with it.

It's knowing where to get the biscuit you like.

It's recognizing someone at the grocery store.

It's the annual event you begin planning around instead of merely attending.

It's bringing your children to a place you remember from your own childhood and discovering that memory can somehow belong to two generations at once.

It's having a "usual."

It's knowing the shortcut.

It's being asked, "Are you back for the summer?" and realizing how good the word back sounds.

At some point, without ceremony, a place stops being somewhere you go and becomes somewhere you return to.

And I wonder if that's when belonging begins.

When a Destination Becomes a Place That Matters

Not necessarily with property ownership or a mailing address. Not even with how many years you've been coming.

Maybe belonging begins when we start carrying a place with us after we've left it.

Its stories become stories we tell.

Its traditions become dates on our calendars.

Its businesses become our places.

Its people become people we look forward to seeing again.

And eventually, we begin contributing something of ourselves in return.

We volunteer.

We support a local business.

We introduce a friend to a favorite trail.

We show up for an event because we've always shown up for that event.

We learn a little of the history.

We care what happens next.

From Visitor to Steward

That's the part of tourism that will never fit neatly into an economic impact report.

A visitor can become a regular.

A regular can become a neighbor.

A neighbor can become a steward.

And somewhere along the way, a destination can become a place that matters.

Maybe that's why the places we love aren't really destinations at all.

They're relationships.

And like any relationship worth having, the best ones leave us wanting more.

About the author: Susan Sapienza is Executive Director of the Cashiers Area Chamber of Commerce. She writes about business, community and the connections between people, ideas and places that help shape the Cashiers area and western North Carolina.