The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  Taking up the fiddle changed Shane’s life in a big way. He’d recently married a woman he met who was taking lessons from the same fiddle teacher. They live in a so-called “tiny house,” a mere nine by seventeen feet, that his wife designed and built, and her self-reliance and practical skill are something he clearly admired. Originally from eastern Tennessee, Shane studied boat building in Seattle and worked at that craft in Maryland before he moved south and became an architect. As we would learn many times on our trip, most people are eager to share their stories, given the opportunity. Then he asked about Albie and me and I told him we were on a cross-country car trip together.

  “Oh,” he said, “like Travels with Charley!” Shane loves Steinbeck and told me he often read passages from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row before bed.

  “Yes, that’s the inspiration,” I told him.

  “That is awesome, dude!” he replied. “I think people should throw everything they have at whatever they do, even if it’s stamp collecting. That’s great! Where you headed next?”

  “Tomorrow we’ll stop for night in Maryville, Tennessee,” I answered, and pronounced Maryville as you would expect: “mary-ville.”

  Shane laughed. “You mean Muhr-ville. That’s how they pronounce it. Muhr-ville.” I’d just had my very own “Mass-uh-two-shits” moment.

  Since he was a musician and interested in traditional American music, I wondered if he’d know why we were planning a stop in Okemah, Oklahoma. He paused for a minute, then it hit him.

  “Woody Guthrie!” he exclaimed.

  “You got it. A hero of mine.”

  As we got ready to move on, I said, to my own surprise, “Maybe when you’re my age you’ll make a trip like this.” Without meaning to, I must have sounded like some sage, slightly self-involved old man giving the younger man advice. I think most of us in our sixties continue to see people even a generation behind us as “our age” somehow, but at forty-five Shane was young enough to be my son. Maybe I was giving advice to my younger self. I wasn’t sure.

  The next morning, I noticed for the first time that my car looked and smelled like someone with a dog had been traveling in it for nearly a week. There were strands of yellow fur all over the black dashboard and the carpets. The seat cover Albie had been lying on, or occasionally taking refuge behind, was dirty and smelled of wet dog since it had rained for the first few days, and naturally he was damp after even a short walk.

  The trunk, which had been so neatly and carefully packed to make the best use of limited space, was also becoming disorganized. How we pack, and how we use the stuff we pack, don’t always align. What worked for making sure everything fit nicely wasn’t optimal in terms of what we were using most often. Dog treats, the cans of vegetables added to Albie’s kibble, and the can opener needed to open them were buried in the farthest reaches of the trunk which meant practically emptying the trunk every time we needed to get to them. Things we weren’t using at all—paper plates, utensils, a tent—were right at my fingertips. Thus began constant tinkering to make life on the road more convenient, especially when I had to manage Albie on the leash and carry what we needed for the night into a hotel. About two days before we finally returned home I had it down to a science.

  We rejoined the Blue Ridge Parkway just outside of Asheville. After our brief sojourn on the interstate the day before, it was like returning to an old friend. No more cars and trucks screaming by at high speed along four lanes of traffic. We were back on a graceful, and peaceful, two-lane road. It was bucolic, and I wished it would go on forever.

  A road trip is a perfect metaphor for life which may explain why my thoughts turned in this direction. A road, like life, has ups and downs and twists and turns. Sometimes it throws us a curve. But, perhaps more to the point, and most poignantly, all roads have a beginning and an end.§ We travel the road of life knowing the final destination. For someone with a persistent dread of mortality, me, the notion of a road that goes on forever has a lot of appeal.

  As we drive roads like the Blue Ridge Parkway, we tend to take them for granted and give little thought to how they got there. But on this, our second day on the parkway, I began to appreciate the vision behind it and what a Herculean effort went into its creation. Half a century in the making, this beautiful ribbon of asphalt, nearly five hundred miles in all, didn’t just materialize.

  How many men and women and machines cut paths along and sometimes through mountainsides—we drove through twenty-five tunnels one day—to create this road for our pleasure? Who built the bridges and the guardrails and hauled the materials, cut the trees, and graded the earth? Throughout our trip I often saw, in my mind’s eye, the entire country being built as if in a time-lapse film; not just this extraordinary piece of roadway engineering meandering over and through the Blue Ridge Mountains, but all the great cities from New York to San Francisco, the small towns from Fort Kent, Maine, to Forks, Washington, the great bridges from the Golden Gate to the George Washington, the tunnels from the Chesapeake Bay to the Lincoln, and all the many thousands, nay millions, of barns, ballparks, and barrooms, factories, fences, and filling stations, and homes, hotels, and high-rises in between. Out of pure wilderness this massive country was, at the most basic level, built and rebuilt brick by brick, plank by plank, and girder by girder and the building never stopped. It’s truly something to behold and I would return home with a newfound appreciation for how Americans built America, ever mindful, however, that to do so we forced Native Americans off their land, which they had been stewards and developers of in accordance with their own values, and turned them into third-class citizens, often through bloodshed. It is America’s original sin.

  We soon returned to the heart-in-your-stomach climbs and curves at high elevation that sometimes had me feeling we were about to sail right off into the wild blue yonder. About thirty miles beyond Asheville we came to the highest point on the parkway, the Richland Balsam Overlook, at 6,053 feet more than mile in the sky. We got out to have a look and when I mentioned to Albie we were more than a mile high he just looked at me and cocked his head slightly as if to ask if he was supposed to be impressed.

  Again, spring climbed the mountains like a slow-moving brush fire: it looked like winter at the higher elevations and lush, late spring when we descended to the valley floor and arrived in the town of Cherokee where evidence of our original sin was very much evident.

  Over the course of our six weeks on the road, Albie and I saw many forlorn, depressed towns that were shells of their former selves, places that looked like everyone had either left or simply given up. Cherokee was not one of them. Indeed, even in mid-April, this town, the heart of the eastern part of the Cherokee Nation and a gateway to the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, was bustling with tourists. ¶ But few places we visited were more dispiriting.

  Cherokee’s soul seemed to have been sold for the price of a tourist dollar. It was a collection of tawdry amusements, some still shuttered for the winter: mini-golf, bumper cars, waterslides, gem shops where you could ostensibly pan for gold, and Chief Saunooke’s Trading Post (with the chief depicted in full Indian headdress), one of about a dozen such “trading posts” selling cheap souvenirs and knickknacks. There was a “medicine man” shop, a “ruby mine,” and motels named Warrior, Arrowhead, and Wigwam. Every Native American stereotype seemed to be represented in the town’s commercial center.

  Well over a century ago we forced these and other native peoples off their land and onto reservations. I wondered: what do the Cherokee who live here make of the tourists, the descendants of those who forced them onto reservations, who come this way? Are they anything other than a cash cow? And can you blame them for exploiting perhaps their most valuable asset, their heritage—or, more precisely, a white man’s limited conception of their heritage—to make a living? Is there any other work nearby or work that would be as lucrative? To make money the Cherokee had turned to “trading posts” and “medicine man” shops and other Indian-themed amusements. Th
ey had, at least for the benefit of tourists, turned this town, and with it themselves, into a caricature.#

  In the middle of town was the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, a heritage center devoted to perpetuating Cherokee history and culture. There was nothing about the town itself that seemed to be doing that other than the street signs which were in both English and Cherokee. The noble history and culture of the Cherokee had been distilled and refined to the point where it could be squeezed inside this box of a building and packaged for consumption by people passing through in their shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. The museum seemed to invite people to see the Cherokee as they once were, not as they are, and that’s what was especially disturbing.

  As we drove out of town we passed a historical marker that declared the Cherokee reservation had been “created for” the Cherokee people, as if those who created it (powerful white people in Washington, D.C.) were doing something magnanimous for these otherwise forsaken people they’d forced off their land, something they should be grateful for. It spoke to all the hubris, callousness, and racism that white Europeans and their descendants brought to the lives of those who were here long before them. It was the story of colonialism writ small.

  The Blue Ridge Parkway was now behind us, and we were once again on lightly traveled state roads. And once again, the feeling of discomfort I experienced the day before around Wilkesboro crept in. Confederate flags were a common sight, the religious messaging on yard and church signs was overt and oppressive, and half the men in their oversized pickup trucks looked as if they were on their way to audition for a ZZ Top tribute band. It was as though I’d defied my parents’ admonition not to drive up into the Ramapo Mountains in New Jersey to take my chances with the “Jackson Whites.”

  These were my biases and prejudices, a kind of culturalism akin to racism I suppose. And perhaps all of it was ill-founded for we were never hassled or harassed in any way by anyone in the South or, for that matter, anywhere in the course of our entire 9,000-mile odyssey.

  * That night, once we had finally reached Asheville, I went online and learned that a seven-mile section, the last section of the parkway completed, the Linn Cove Viaduct, was closed for repairs between March 1 and May 24. It had never occurred to me to check and I wondered why there wasn’t signage to that effect at the northern terminus of the parkway where we had entered the day before.

  † The forty miles we drove on I-40 to Asheville would be the only interstate driving we would do between Dickinson, Pennsylvania, and New Orleans.

  ‡ I am Jewish by birth and ethnicity, but I’m not religious.

  § OK, there are loop roads, but you get my drift.

  ¶ There are Cherokee people across the Southeast and into Oklahoma. Indeed, about two-thirds of the federally recognized tribe’s 300,000 people live in Oklahoma. Those in North Carolina are part of the eastern band of the Cherokee people.

  # I admit that we were in Cherokee only briefly and largely because I found it so unappealing for the reasons stated here. Fair or not, these were my impressions.

  FIVE

  Tennessee Waltz

  There are many ways to get from North Carolina into Tennessee, but by far the most terrifying, if you’re into that sort of thing, is through Deal’s Gap on U.S. 129. Just yards before you enter Tennessee is the start of what’s known as the Tail of the Dragon, an eleven-mile stretch of road through mountain terrain into which are packed three hundred and eighteen sharp, steeply pitched turns, and once you’re on it, like a roller coaster, there’s no way off. If you are at all prone to motion sickness, or simply hope to live to see tomorrow, this is not the road for you.

  What makes this short section of roadway doubly terrifying is that it’s a magnet for every motorcyclist and sports car enthusiast with a death wish. They come from all over the world for this thrill ride. The parking lot of the Tail of the Dragon Motel, which sits in splendid isolation right at the North Carolina entrance, was filled with them.

  As we slowly slalomed our way along the Tail of the Dragon like lost retirees from Florida, a group of racing bikes crawled up our own tail, engines revving, the drivers looking for any opportunity to blow past us. Since there weren’t any I had to improvise. Any sudden move by me could mean death for the riders twelve inches behind us, but rather than frustrate them for another ten miles I took a chance and managed to bump to a sudden stop on a tiny crescent of pavement alongside one of the hairpin turns. Three motorcyclists dressed like ninja warriors roared past. To my surprise none of them flipped us the bird.

  It wasn’t just the bikes and cars behind us, but those coming in the other direction, also at high speed, that were causing second, third, and fourth thoughts about taking this tortuous, nausea-inducing route. Since so many of the motor heads who come here do so to push the limits of their motoring skills and any idiot can give it a go, your life is literally in the hands of people you wouldn’t trust to watch your dog for two minutes. Every year since 2004 at least one person has been killed on the Tail of the Dragon, and usually it’s more like three or four. It would not have surprised me in the least if these were the daily fatality statistics.

  At various points along the way photographers in folding chairs were snapping pictures of every vehicle that passed, a job that must surely have one of the highest mortality rates in America. Next to each was a banner with a website address, which if you had time to glance at it and remember it meant you weren’t paying sufficient attention to the road. That’s why I’m embarrassed to admit to you that the address was www.129photos.com.

  When we finally reached the end and U.S. 129 flattened out, straightened out, and spit us out, we pulled over and I practically had to peel my fingers off the steering wheel. I turned around to check on Albie in the back seat.

  “So, Albus,” I said, feeling a little green. “Whad’ya think?” I often call him Albus, as in Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame.

  He was sitting upright and smiling. He couldn’t have seemed happier. I swear the expression on his face seemed to say, “Do it again!”

  That evening, once the thrill had worn off and I started to regain my equilibrium, I went to www.129photos.com where you can peruse thousands of photos by date and time, find yours, and, for about $25, order a copy. Now, why anyone would order a still photo of their car on the Tail of the Dragon beats me since they all look like pictures of cars parked at a slight pitch. The motorcycle pictures are infinitely more dramatic since the riders appear as if they are defying both gravity and common sense which, in fact, they are.

  I’d chosen Maryville, or Muhr-ville, to spend the afternoon and night based on nothing more than its location on the map. I had no idea, and neither did Albie, if it was a worn-out mountain town, a charming artsy town, or nothing but a strip mall and a gas station. It turned out to be absolutely lovely.

  One of the joys of traveling is the pleasant surprise. In 1985, on my first and only trip to Rome, I ditched my maps (iPhones were still in the future) and just walked, for hours, in whatever direction struck my fancy. After a couple of hours, the street opened onto a capacious and magnificent plaza lined with cafés and ornate fountains and filled with children chasing pigeons across the cobblestones. This, I thought, is the reward you get for daring to go off the beaten path; you find a hidden gem no one but the locals know about. Only later did I learn I had walked into the Piazza Navona, one of Rome’s most famous, most visited, and picturesque squares.

  Because the weather had been so uncooperative for so much of the early days of our trip, I’d been promising Albie a good, long walk at the first opportunity. I wasn’t expecting a Piazza Navona in Maryville, but within a few minutes of parking at the town hall we found ourselves on a network of fifteen miles of pleasant walking and bike paths, part of Maryville’s “greenway,” many of which parallel the gently flowing Pistol Creek. It was a glorious spring afternoon. The temperature was in the sixties, the grass was a deep green, and spring flowers bloomed all around us.

  When St
einbeck traveled with Charley he, too, passed through western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. But our route from here to New Orleans would deviate from his as he traveled to these parts from the Big Easy.* Our plan was to go farther west in Tennessee, to Nashville, and to take the Natchez Trace Parkway all the way from there, for four hundred and forty-four miles, to Natchez, Mississippi. We would be paralleling Steinbeck across this stretch of the South, but some two hundred miles to the west so we could drive the Natchez Trace.

  To reach Nashville from Maryville we hewed to secondary roads that took us through rural Tennessee, squarely in the Bible Belt. Even small towns of a few hundred people often had four or five churches, and almost every one had a religious message posted on a sign board in front. There seemed to be some friendly, and often quite witty, competition to see who could conjure the most clever way of appealing to God’s appreciation of the double entendre:

  Unlimited Text: Have You Talked to Jesus Today

  God Answers Knee Mail

  Weather Forecast: God Reigns, Son Shines

  The Key to Heaven Was Hung on a Nail

  Forbidden Fruits Create Many Jams

  There were dozens of similar messages that helped pass the time. I had gotten so used to trying to puzzle out the meaning of these little ditties that when we passed one that said, “Space to Lease, Time to Plant,” it took me a moment to realize we’d just passed a garden center, not a church.

  Late in the morning we stopped in Sparta and parked near a marker declaring the town to be the “Home of Lester Flatt,” the famed bluegrass musician. In a pleasant square near the courthouse we found the Coffee Collective, a warm, spacious, high-ceilinged coffeehouse with exposed brick walls and a 1960s-era tandem bicycle hanging from the ceiling. Ever since unearthing the story of my great-grandaunt Annie Londonderry, the ’round the world cyclist, I’ve had an affinity for antique bikes, so I liked the place straight away. Albie was invited in and the owner, Mariangela, and her daughter, Rachel, were friendly and welcoming.