Motorcycling in East Tennessee

If you can disintegrate the Walmart, the photo centers, the dollar stores come every block, then there is nothing but distance and freedom to envelope you in the Tennessee Valley and thus, you are free. Turn left and bump through ragged hills, up mountains and just past the Carolina line headed toward Asheville and there you are in true Appalachia. Appalachia enough to murder you. Burned out Victorian timber towns still standing, out of habit. There is not enough time to describe mountain wastes because they are not wastes. There are trees enough and bearshit and possum crossings and creeks to show you what heaven looks like and churches one hundred years old, come out of nowhere on the mountain, “welcome to bikers.” Sure, those people wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, but I don’t worry about dumping my bike, should I blow a curve with gravel hiding in it’s apex, on some lonely mountain crag. Because the next old somnbitch to come along in his beater Ford would carry me the hundred miles back home. Under the racing cumulus and blue sky piercing. And anoint my feet and wash my face, with an old wash cloth from the truck, rinsed there in the steel cold of the creek coming down off that mountain. Under that mountain that I practiced my religion carving around, that mountain that he carved his religion under. That mountain that you have never seen.