But both are sublime to drive because there are no traffic lights (and we’re talking nearly 600 miles of road combined), no traffic, no gas stations, and virtually no restaurants (you need to exit the parkways for that).‡
We had both roads virtually to ourselves this day. Being out here, far from home but with the magnificent handiwork of nature all around, time seemed to operate differently. There was no particular time we needed to be in Roanoke and no one waiting on us anywhere.
In the early afternoon, for the first time since leaving home, the skies started to clear and it became alternately sunny and cloudy. Wherever the sunshine struck the Earth it lit it up in sharp contrast to the nearby land that remained in shadow. In the morning we had driven by bare trees and snow-covered ground and walked in subfreezing temperatures. It may as well have been mid-November. The tide was starting to turn at last. Now, later the same day, it finally felt like the trip I had imagined had begun.
As we climbed the mountains and descended into the valleys the seasons again toggled back and forth; it was winter in the mountains and spring in the valleys. As we dropped into the James River Valley the temperature steadily increased until, at the valley floor, it was sixty-two degrees and everything around us was exploding with color (for me) and lush smells (for Albie.).
For the first time since leaving home, we lowered the convertible top. Albie stuck his nose straight up toward the sky, the better to take in all the fragrance of an Appalachian spring. For us humans, sight is our principal way of taking in the world, but for a dog it’s smell, and he wanted to “sniff around” just as we would “look around” when confronted with a beautiful sight.
Our top-down celebration was premature, however. Within a few minutes we started to climb again, and the temperature rapidly dropped to a chilly fifty degrees. In the rearview mirror, I could see Albie curled up in a tight ball as far into a corner of the back seat as possible. He was cold and, try as I might, I couldn’t persuade myself that I wasn’t, too. So, we pulled over and back up went the top. But at least we’d had a taste of what lay ahead as we continued south into what would surely be milder weather.
Though it had taken ten hours to reach Roanoke, it was never boring, and the day passed quickly. There was, for me at least, so much to see and the road commanded my attention. This was not the kind of mindless driving you experience on the interstate; you could ill-afford not to pay attention at any point. The irony is that time driving on such roads passes much more quickly than when you’re driving twice as fast on major highways. I’ve been on two-hour drives that were tedious and seemingly never-ending. When we drive simply to get somewhere we choose the fastest route possible—getting there is the only goal. The time often feels wasted. In our case, this day was not about getting to Roanoke. Roanoke was beside the point, just a place with a motel where we could spend the night. It was about the going.
It may be a big country, but it’s a small world. Albie came with me into the lobby while I checked into a seedy Motel 6. I had seen the couple ahead of me at check-in get out of their car and noticed the Louisiana license plates. The woman greeted Albie and told me they had three dogs of their own.
“Actually, Albie came from your neck of the woods; he’s a rescue from Alexandria, Louisiana,” I said.
The husband had been listening, and he turned and said, “We live not far from there.”
“He was picked up as a stray in Deville,” I added, figuring they might know the area. Deville also happens to be the town where Keri Toth, our adoption coordinator with Labs4rescue, the rescue organization who helped us adopt Albie, is from.
“I’m from Deville!” exclaimed the wife. Naturally, I mentioned Keri’s name, and it was familiar to both of them.
“Some of my family go to church with her,” said the husband.
I explained that we had a reunion with Keri planned a couple of weeks into our road trip when we would be in Louisiana, and we all marveled at what a small world it was.
The room at the Motel 6 was as Spartan as any we would stay in the entire trip, and I was quickly learning that those first moments after getting into our room were always the worst of the day. It was when I missed home the most. I wondered if Albie felt the same way, especially as he lay down on the hard wood floor. I put a few things away, then lay on the bed with pillows to prop myself up. I invited Albie to join me by patting the mattress next to me, which he did. I can’t say for sure, but for Albie I think home is wherever I am. As for me, I was starting to feel like we were on the lam.
* “Oh, Shenandoah,” or sometimes just “Shenandoah,” is an American folk song of uncertain origin dating to the early 19th century. In one version, the opening lyrics go as follows: Oh Shenandoah/ I long to see you/ Away you rolling river/ Oh Shenandoah/ I long to see you/ Away, I’m bound away/’Cross the wide Missouri.
† Construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway began in 1936 and was completed, except for one section, in 1966. That final section, the Linn Cove Viaduct, was completed in 1987.
‡ There was one National Park Service operated hotel and restaurant on the Blue Ridge, as best I recall.
FOUR
Gone to Carolina
The next morning, our fourth day on the road, we resumed our passage down the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was sunny (finally!), but cool, too cool to put the top down, especially because it’s breezier and colder in the back seat. Up front the driver can blast the heat, and the windshield breaks the wind, but for Albie it would have been very uncomfortable. So he could enjoy the smells of the outdoors, I lowered the back windows a bit and he stuck his nose out toward the passing scenery.
The terrain was less dramatic, the road flatter, than the day before, but the driving was a dream. The pavement was perfectly smooth, and we passed through massive corridors of wild rhododendrons, twenty-five feet high or more. In the first hour only seven cars passed in the other direction. Near midmorning we stopped in a parking area with access to some hiking trails. It was a beautiful early spring day and we could, at last, after three days of rain and cold, go for a proper walk.
About a quarter mile down a wooded trail we met a hiker and stopped to chat. He told us he was a retired builder and lived nearby in Roanoke.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Near Boston,” I answered.
“Funny, I met some people hiking here last week from Massachusetts.” He pronounced it, as many people who are not from the state do, “Mass-uh-two-shits.”
“There’s lots of people moving down here from Mass-uh-two-shits, Vermont, and New Jersey,” he told us. “They come down here and see what they can buy for so much less and they sell their houses and move down.
“Usually the wildflowers are out by now,” he added. It had been a grudging spring all along the East Coast. “Is he an old dog?”
Since we don’t know Albie’s exact age, I gave the same answer I would give countless times to others along the way: “Well, he’s a rescue and they think he was about three when we adopted him six years ago. So, he’s about nine, we think.”
“Well, he’s really well-behaved.”
As we talked, Albie just took a seat and watched us patiently, his smiling face turning toward whoever was talking at the moment, as if he was following the conversation. He was well-behaved, and had been for the past four days, better, in fact, than at home where the other dogs often get him amped up. He’d been so much more mellow here on the road.
I remarked that the terrain was flatter than what we’d passed through the day before.
“You’re on the Blue Ridge Plateau,” the hiker explained. “A few miles south and you’ll start climbing again.”
He directed us to another nearby trail where we could get a great view to the east, and we said goodbye. He didn’t steer us wrong. A short walk from where we were, there was an expansive view of gentle green hills with two larger mountain peaks off in the distance. After days of gloomy weather and drear it was a wonderful, uplifting sig
ht.
As the morning passed the air warmed. By 10:30 A.M. it was in the low sixties, and by noon had reached seventy. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We stopped right on the North Carolina state line to put the top down, and when the top went down, up went Albie’s nose, like a periscope, to take in the aromas of spring. I often glanced at him in the rearview mirror and saw him sitting up, eyes closed, and nose tilted into the wind.
A few miles farther south we pulled into at an overlook at High Piney Spur.
A northbound SUV with California license plates pulled in and a couple about my age got out. Albie drew their attention and the husband immediately took out his iPhone to show me a picture of their recently deceased yellow Lab, Honey, also a rescue. The resemblance was striking.
We didn’t exchange names, but he told me they were on a two-year journey around America in a large camper. They tow the SUV behind the camper when they’re on the move and use the smaller vehicle to explore their surroundings. Every few months they fly home to Fresno to see their children and grandchildren and their doctors and dentists. He recently retired as the city manager of Clovis, California.
“I want to see all the places in America I’ve never seen before I travel overseas,” he said, his own personal “America First” philosophy. He was the first of countless road-trippers we met along the way just wandering about to have a look at their country.
As we chatted, another SUV pulled in, this one towing a camper and headed southbound, with Maine plates. Another couple, also around my age, got out, and soon we were all talking. The couple from Maine told us they also had a rescued Lab, but he doesn’t like the car and was staying with their daughter. All of us who had reached this point at the same time had rescued Labs; a coincidence that gave us something in common to talk about, in addition to our travel plans. And it gave Albie practice at meeting the countless strangers down the road who were drawn to him and wanted to lay hands on him.
“We have no itinerary,” said the woman from Maine. “We just wanted to do all this before we got too old.” I understood. We had all come to look for America, as Paul Simon might have said, while we still could.
As we continued south I no longer had a clear fix on what day of the week it was. Differentiating weekdays and weekends no longer mattered. We had nothing on our agenda that required us to be in any particular place on any particular day, so the name for any given day of the week was irrelevant. There were no appointments to miss, no friends waiting for us to show up for coffee or dinner, and no deadlines to make.
One reason the Blue Ridge Parkway is a motorist’s dream is that it’s impossible to get lost. It’s like following the Yellow Brick Road. But the dream was suddenly and abruptly interrupted, about a hundred miles from Asheville. We had planned to stay on the parkway all the way there, but just north of Wilkesboro, a gate, usually used to close the parkway in winter, was drawn across the roadway. The weather was fine so that didn’t explain it, and there was nothing to indicate the reason for the closure or even a detour sign. The parkway was simply and indisputably closed.*
We turned onto the short access road that connected the parkway to Highway 18. There was no cell phone reception, so I turned for the first time to the Rand McNally Road Atlas I had brought just for such circumstances. But its detail wasn’t nearly granular enough to be of help. We’d have to follow Highway 18 until we could get our bearings. For some twenty-odd miles we took the road south, on a long, gradual descent into Wilkesboro. Unsure of how long a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway was closed—could have been a mile, could have been a hundred—and feeling it had been a good run of nearly five hundred miles along these scenic parkways (Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge), I decided to navigate directly to Asheville, whether it took me back to the parkway or not. Judy and I had been to Asheville a few years before while visiting colleges with Noah. There are many worse places to kill a few extra hours.
As we approached Wilkesboro I looked in the rearview mirror to check on Albie. The top was still down. Earlier he’d been lying on the protective seat cover that hooks behind the two rear headrests and covers both the seat back and seat itself. To escape the wind, he’d managed to work himself behind the seat cover to use it as windscreen. All I could see was his smiling face beaming above the top edge. He seemed utterly delighted with himself for figuring it out. That is just so cute, I thought, and so clever.
The route to Asheville wound through rural North Carolina for more than fifty miles before connecting with Interstate 40, and as we traveled the backroads I was slightly uneasy.† We were in a BMW convertible with Massachusetts plates and stuck out like a sore thumb (or so I believed) along these very rural backroads and in these very conservative towns. The religious messaging was overt and ubiquitous. We passed dozens of lawn signs that said, simply, “Thank you, Jesus.” A sign in front of one church proclaimed, “The Tomb is Empty, so the Church Should be Full.” Whether there was any reason to feel uneasy is another question. It’s much easier to unpack our suitcases when we travel, than to unpack our biases, anxieties, and preconceptions and the drive was, in the end, uneventful. But it did get me to thinking: what was the root cause of my unease about driving through the rural south?
I am old enough to remember, just months after the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, the three young civil rights workers from the North—Mikey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—who were murdered in Mississippi in June of 1964, and the impression it made on me at age ten that two of them were Jewish as am I. I clearly remember the assassinations of civil rights advocate Medger Evers near Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, and Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968; Governor George Wallace standing defiantly at the entrance to the University of Alabama to block the entrance of its first black student in 1963; images of bombed-out black churches where little children were killed by the Ku Klux Klan; and civil rights marchers set upon by snarling police dogs and high-power fire hoses. The world has changed since then, the number of elected black officials in the South has increased dramatically, voting rights expanded (though still under assault), and the nation has had its first black president, but the resurgence of hate crimes and extremist violence—the murder of nine black members of the Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and the chilling march of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to name just two—had me wondering if we’d completely backtracked on decades of slow and arduous progress. With no voice of calm and reason at the very top, indeed quite the opposite, and political tribalism intensifying by the day, anything seemed possible and here I was, a liberal Jew‡ from Massachusetts passing through the deep South in his little red convertible with his rescue dog. Yes, it had been half a century since the events that shaped my early impressions of the South, but the images were indelible.
Once on I-40, I felt a mild sense of relief. Here, cars and trucks from every state blend together in a great, never-ending flow of traffic. It’s a melting pot of metal traveling at seventy miles an hour. You become anonymous, just another droplet in a great asphalt river, just one more car rolling down the road. But as conspicuous as I had felt, the whole point of driving as much as possible on secondary roads was to experience the country rather than pass it by. After Asheville, we’d get back to business and onto the backroads again.
When we arrived in Asheville around 4:00 P.M., it was ninety-three degrees, a far cry from the twenty-seven degrees during our walk just the day before on Skyline Drive.
Albie and I strolled through downtown, found a coffee shop where he was welcome, and then strolled some more until we found the restaurant where Judy and I had eaten on our previous visit to Asheville that was run by a fellow from Puerto Rico. We took an outdoor table in an alley alongside the restaurant, and for the first time on our trip the weather was nice enough to enjoy a leisurely dinner outside together. Albie lay down on the brick-paved alley by my side, as quiet and calm as could be. He sure was a different dog than he was at home.
When we first adopted him in 2012 we often took Albie with us when we knew we could dine outdoors, and he was always docile and patient. In more recent years, he’d become less predictable in his interactions with both dogs and humans. He sometimes barked or growled at other dogs nearby, or even the server, so we were unable to bring him with us to eat out anymore. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go on this trip, but, fortunately, so far at least, he was reverting to his original form. It was a huge relief because it gave us so many more options. I wasn’t about to leave him in a strange hotel room while I went out; in fact, on only a couple of occasions during the entire trip would I even leave him briefly in the car while I had a quick bite to eat somewhere, and only because there were no other options and it was cool enough to do so safely. Why he reverted to his old form I don’t know; perhaps because I was now the only familiar marker in his life and pleasing me was now his top priority.
After dinner we walked some more and stopped to listen to a fellow with glasses and a dark, neatly trimmed beard playing old-time fiddle tunes at the entrance to an old JC Penney store.
Shane Elliott is an architect in Asheville. In his midforties, he had been taking fiddle lessons for just a year and half, which was remarkable considering he was quite skilled at it. His fiddle-playing style, he told us, is known as Round Peak, a fiddling tradition passed down over many generations and named for a small unincorporated community near Mount Airy, North Carolina. It’s a variation on “old time” or mountain string band music with Anglo-Celtic roots. As Shane explained it, there are just a few basic notes involved but with deceptively complicated accent notes added in. “There are countless great fiddle players around here,” he told me.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 5