For the last three seasons, Austin Maynor, a lifelong Oz enthusiast, has performed as a Winkie Guard and the Munchkin Mayor for the Autumn at Oz festival in Beech Mountain. He resides in Asheville, N.C.
BEECH MOUNTAIN, N.C. (828newsNOW) — This September, for the first time in more than three decades, The Land of Oz on Beech Mountain is silent. There are no visitors, no vendors, no music, no green makeup or gingham costumes – nothing beyond a vacant yellow brick road.
For those of us who have found a niche performing in the annual Autumn at Oz festival, this has made for a melancholy fall. We, whom in many cases have learned to measure the run of the calendar year according to the proximity of the festival, have been forced to write off this year as an unexpected and anticlimactic disappointment.
After all, 2025 is a year bookended by the massive popularity and anticipation of the ongoing “Wicked” film saga and punctuated by the immensely successful screenings of “The Wizard of Oz” now showing at the Las Vegas Sphere. This is a year replete with all things Oz, and we as a cast were looking forward to sharing in the energy that surrounds a moment like this. That energy, however, is not our biggest loss with the festival’s absence. Neither is it the sales deficit, nor the cherished kinship of fellow Oz fans. No, something larger than these has been missed this year.
As I reflect on a year without the festival, I remain aware that Oz talk – especially from adults – might sound bizarre to someone who has never felt summoned toward the fairy tale drama that unfolds over the rainbow. To them, I imagine, the one-way ticket from our small Kansas set into the lights and fog machines of our glittering Emerald City sounds like a waste of hard-earned money or, worse still, a vain attempt to reach back into our inaccessible childhood pasts and escape.
I disagree. To pass a day at The Land of Oz, whether as a guest or cast and crew, is more than a pricy race toward nostalgia.
Embracing joy on the Yellow Brick Road
There is nothing wrong with nostalgia, to be sure, but fancies of childhood can only sustain us so far. As the Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller once said, trying to live on nostalgia is like “trying to live on a diet of sugar water.” Nostalgia is sweet for the minute or so that it lasts, but it has no lasting effect when the experience is all said and done. Rather, it only serves to remind us that where we once were is not where we are now. Limited to a backward glance, nostalgia, being devoid of any enchanted broom or magic slippers, possesses no special power of its own to repeat the past.
One could limit their visit to The Land of Oz by confining their trip to clawing after reminiscence. However, I believe that the Autumn at Oz festival is best when it brings its visitors beyond the past by showing us how to embrace the present: how to be joyful, how to play, how to love and be loved.
Most hobbies and passions can teach us to tap into our own joy, yes, but fairy tales like the Oz story are uniquely adept because they show joy and beauty through the eyes of a child. They show a mode of being happy that is not self-conscious, placing raw delight at the forefront of existence, not into the background. For an adult reader – or, in this case, an adult guest at The Land of Oz – these tales show us how to exist “like” a child without trying in vain to become one again.
The annual Autumn at Oz festival reminds us of the fundamental importance of being happy. This lesson, not the statistics of commercialism or the energies of fandom, is what we have missed most this year. To visit the park is to pay homage to the great sanctity of joy. It is to chase after happiness for its own sake, knowing that the right to smile is not a privilege granted only to the children in our midst, but to all who courageously accept the gift of the present moment with a tender heart and an open mind. At The Land of Oz, we may become like the children for whom L. Frank Baum wrote. When we let down the guards that barricade our happiness, when we allow our hearts to be housed in the joy of the moment, and, having embraced that joy, we look within, we learn anew that Dorothy is right. There really is no place like home.
The reality of Oz
It has been my intention in this essay to avoid using the word “magic” to express our Land of Oz phenomenon because, at its core, I am not talking about magic. I am talking about something real.
Of course, I know that there is nothing real about flying monkeys, singing lions and good witches who travel in bubbles. What is real is how the messages of the Oz tale – the value of friendship between lonely friends, the nature of home, the unconditional affirmation of all that we are in spite of all that we lack – can become embodied on Beech Mountain to such an extent that they affect those themes into the lives of our guests.
I have seen this with my own eyes, having spent the last three years as a Winkie Guard at the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West, watching and waiting for guests to come visit. Technically speaking, I, painted in gecko green and wearing a nose prosthetic to match, am one of the “bad guys,” but still I spend each shift bearing witness to joy in its raw and unfiltered form. That happiness washes over children and spreads across the faces of grown, bill-paying adults who do not mind letting the world see them laugh and grin.
@pishposhpiper the emerald city is SO BRAT! #landofoz #landofoznc #wizardofoz #wicked #oz @The Land Of Oz @Charli XCX
♬ Apple – Charli xcx
I see the virtues of Oz every year in the eyes of one man, disabled and in his fifties, who always visits the festival with his family, reliably giddy to plant his feet on the Yellow Brick Road. When he speaks to a cast member, he communicates as a man befriended, not as a mere tourist.
Similarly, I recall a moment from last year when I nearly broke character with my tears when my friend and fellow Winkie, seeing that a guest was Deaf, signed his lines to her in American Sign Language.
“This isn’t Oz,” she exclaimed back in ASL. “This is heaven!”
During Autumn at Oz, things like that happen every day on Beech Mountain, igniting wonder and reminding us of the great thrills of being human in a world enchanted by love.
There’s no place like home, especially when home is WNC
This year, Western North Carolina is worse off without The Land of Oz. I think we lost something vital in this season’s park closure.
Now, to be sure, I am not implying that Southern Appalachia requires a fairy tale theme park to be reminded of the value of human happiness. What I am saying is that in a year overshadowed by the harrowing tempest we called Helene, it would have been therapeutic for the region to hear laughter and music where there has otherwise been little more than one communal sigh for the last 12 months.
Park leadership maintains that Helene’s rage across Avery County is what made The Land of Oz inaccessible this year, the closure being the latest announcement in a year’s worth of unexpected transitions in the slow recovery of our battered region.
Indeed, the regional features of Avery County, tested by the hurricane’s winds and flood waters, are so tied to The Land of Oz experience that the fact the park is locked away only compounds our loss. Historically unique among theme parks, The Land of Oz is constructed at the pinnacle of Beech Mountain, one of the highest peaks in Southern Appalachia. The rocks that comprise its mystical aesthetic are natural formations as old as the mountain itself, and its flowers – outside of the silk poppies – are all indigenous to the town.
Mix these ridge-top glories with the fairy tale at hand and the soil alone nearly becomes transfigured in that grand merging of beauty and delight. Now, it’s true that healing light can shine from any of our enduring mountaintops, but I still believe that we in WNC would be richer citizens if the park atop Beech Mountain had helped to summon us beyond this long, lingering rainstorm and into the promise of all that waits just over the rainbow.
