Motorcycling in East Tennessee 2

I can run most of those curves about 50 plus these days, in the high end of fourth gear, and I’m afraid to run them any faster. I figured I knew what I was doing when the locals couldn’t keep up in their shitbox accuras or beater Toyota pickups anymore. However I’ve nearly ground off both heels on my boots and I can always tripod the front wheel off the tarmac should I plant a footpeg hard enough in a turn, then we get to find out what a highside is like. There’s the gravel trail left by the quarry trucks headed out the Rogersville highway, the occasional sandy washout on the one stretch of 208 headed to Erwin, there’s no phone service on just about anywhere, and I’ve never seen a police vehicle. Should I wreck, I’m in god’s hands with god’s children with wife and two kids back home, back down the mountain.

They used to be dirt tracks, these roads, winding the easiest path through mountain passes and whoever’s farm they bordered. Laid down when there was no way or money to cut through the rock. Laid down with horses and carts, intended for horses and carts. Running the length of the creek that had always been the flat land. The valley, the holler in the mountain’s shade. Running those roads in fourth gear, you are moving through a world of living geometry. Everything is active, the clutch, the brake, accelerate, downshift, your shoulders bearing down. Keep your head level and sight through the turn. Meditate, always, on traction. These are not hills, they are lumps of hills piled against one another, built of ancient rock, rubbed granite, perhaps. Every facet of landscape is transformed into a geometrical problem that you solve as you arrive at it. Including the dogs.

I don’t know what kind of rock it is, except that if you glimpse it, therein lies the root of the smokies. Those houses, with worn grey siding, sit atop those stones, wedged under those mountains. Goat straddled in the yard, rubbed up through the turf and covered in moss. Hidden under moss and pine in the laurel grotto overhang. The rock forming the nubby spine of this road that you ride. The machine under you being the hand rubbed against its crippled form. The hard shove after coming in hot through a turn. Whatever violence occurs on its surface, it is the rock that forms this high Appalachia, it is the rock that shocks clear the creek, and the stones within the creek. Appalachia enough to make you weep.