Motorcycling in East Tennessee #3

In 2001 my ex-wife took a job at Tusculum college in the town of Greeneville Tennessee, and she and I moved our oldest child and five cats there from Jersey City, New Jersey. She was still teaching and the kid was still a baby, so I went down beforehand with a video camera and found us a house, showing her the footage when I came home. It was a wonderful house, a little brick cape but she essentially moved to the town site-unseen. When we got settled in she told me she hated the place, so I spent the following four years renovating our house so we could eventually move back to Richmond. 

During that time my mom would complain that I was always working, either on a job or on the house or both while taking care of the kid, which wasn’t exactly true because I spent a good amount of time drinking while doing all those things. It was this reason she sold me my first motorcycle-  a yellow Honda 750, which most of you have seen, but also because she wanted to upgrade to a Harley. I think this was in 2003 maybe.

Riding around town was boring, so I would head west and climb into the mountains between there and Asheville, North Caroline. I’d read how to corner from a book called Proficient Motorcycling but I was terrified most of the time. I’ve since learned this area has some of the most technically challenging roads in the country. I had no GPS, there was hardly any cell service, and I navigated with a laminated trifold map my Dad had given me years before. I would stop and smoke and figure out where the hell I was. I was ever drawn to more of the squiggly lines, getting further and further out, sometimes being gone for eight hours or more. I realized they ran the roads next to the creeks and rivers up there because that was the easiest place to build, and farm I guess, so logically that’s where the towns would be as well.  I got lost all the time, riding through actual ghost towns, or caught in rain or even snow before I had bought gear for it. 

To this day I have no interest in bike nights, or poker runs or group rides or any of that shit. I’ve gotten to where I don’t even like riding around Richmond because it seems like everybody’s either on their phone or smoking weed or both. The only thing that excites me anymore is a curvy ass mountain road with nobody else on it.

So yeah, for me anyway, to read about these places in the news the last couple days being hit with catastrophic flooding has obviously been pretty upsetting. Maybe even more specifically the roads where I learned not just to ride but the art of what’s called “mountain riding”. Hot Springs, Marshall, Erwin, Newport, I-26, 321, 421, rt70, 11w and 11e, places I used to have memorized, the tempo of the curves, what came next, because I had to. So I wouldn’t die LoL. It’s interesting to see a video of a torrent running where a road used to be and recognize it even though it’s been twenty years since I ran it. I would say it’s almost exactly like hearing something terrible had befallen an old friend or lover.  

I’m not sure what else to say about this, but I felt the need I guess to “testify” about it all. 

Tulip Magnolia

Sorrow is my own yard 

where the new grass 

flames as it has flamed

often before but not

with the cold fire 

that closes round me this year

  William Carlos Williams- The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

Every spring I have to ask for the name again. Tulip poplar, Saucer Magnolia, something like that, you’d think I wouldn’t be surprised by her anymore. Whereas last week empty arms cast veins of silhouettes across a cold carpet of previous year's leaves, today I’m able to come home from a long day of work, and face her canopy of flowers, half open like teacups, and that is miraculous news. I take it as further evidence that after two years the sucking wound in my chest has finally closed. 

Each March was a celebration, a maelstrom of pink hung beneath the blue, pinks so dark along thick shouldered leaves, almost purple, and then bleeding out rapidly to porcelain white, there was no ignoring it. I notched one end of an eight foot pallet we brought home into the main cluster of stems, six feet up and propped the other end with a door. Of course the kids never climbed into the blossoms, but we did. 

Now everyone’s gone but me and the whole yard creeps more every year, abandoned gardens filled with weeds crawling out of their beds, privet’s relentless march choking everything in between. A cold wind brushes the tulip against the rafter tails outside my bedroom, waking me. Limbs resting on roof shingles, a stitch of yellow rope left from a swing I hung years ago cut deep into the bark like a tourniquet. Her blooms will turn brown and slimy and clog the already rusted gutters. Neither tree nor house belong to me but as far as I’m concerned, I’m the steward of both, for now. 

So I spend sixty dollars that I do not have on a bright orange pole saw from Lowes which I run up into underbelly pierced with morning light, trying not to focus on saw teeth tearing past bark into white flesh, or sap raining onto my cheekbones. I’m grateful for the strength I have in my arms for this work today but I worry I got started too late in the season and the half dozen or more wounds I’ve left will become infected and kill her. Despite all this I work for the better part of a morning, and pile up branches tall as me in the burn pit in the middle of the yard. In the fall I’ll light it up and likely scare the new neighbors. The blossoms lining the crooked pile go for broke and open their white faces wide to the sun.

The days are consistently warm enough and the new tires on my motorcycle beg to be chewed up, but my heart’s not in it. Not yet. One morning soon I’ll blast out 64 sometime before eight thirty, get away from the Florida interlopers that keep trying to kill me and hit the Blue Ridge Parkway and adjacent counties on this side of the mountain- Nelson, Rockbridge and Amherst. 

The best road out there is also the most dangerous, and yet with half a dozen ways up to the Parkway, I still find myself on route 56 more often than not. A million years ago I guess, before someone gave it a name, the Tye river cut a gorge out of the mountains, twisting impossibly through the rocks and at some point homesteaders ran a road alongside and named that 56. Highly technical, it’s not the curves that will dump me. Every rental cabin and vacation home has a driveway cut into the shale and sandstone hills which provide, after every good rain, an opportunity for gravel to spill out on the tarmac. If I’m not on top of my game that’s what will kill me. 

But before all that, when it breaks off from the Rockfish Valley highway, 56 passes through a couple thousand acres of farmland on one side, and the Tye river on the other. For some reason I think a good bit about the people who work that land. Last year the fields appeared to be left fallow, two years previous, in the fall, thousands of pumpkins were left scattered and rotting on the vine, collapsing into orange pulp. All I could think was that the pumpkin patch contract fell through. 

I want to find the old timers and see if anyone will talk to me about August 1969, when Hurricane Camille dumped two foot of water in three hours and drowned birds in trees. When the Tye jumped its banks, broke the back of every bridge that dared cross it and cut the census of Massies Mill nearly in half.

Sometimes I see the pictures they post and get jealous of my friends who travel abroad, but I’ve decided what I need is to ride a motorcycle entirely too fast through the middle of some fields in Nelson county every three months and do that in perpetuity. I’ve been in that valley headed home late in the day with the sun low under the clouds turning everything golden, worried that I’m too far out. I’ve encountered the Tye river in a spring flood, washing across 56 nearly to the point where I had to turn back and find another route. I’ve ridden it half frozen in a driving rain, tucked behind the fairing with a mother of three on the back seat holding onto me for warmth.  

Back in 2022, at my lowest, whenever I talked about tulip flowers or graveyard moss carried home from a chapel where it crosses over the mountain and heads down toward Vesuvius, my closest friends would encourage me to move out. They’d point to the marks on the door casing in the kitchen chronicling each child’s growth, five years worth, both hers and mine, and yeah, I got it. My argument was I’d have to find something else just like it- a shed for my tools, a garage for my bikes, somewhere to write. I dunno, man, I would say, it just feels like I belong here.

One of these days, instead of waving to them on their harvesters, I’m gonna pull over and talk to one of these guys. Yeah me, a wild eyed weirdo biker from the city rambling on about something I don’t know if I could even put into words. The idea of the two of us having a shared language with a place, a connection, whether it be on a tractor or a motorcycle, bound by both sorrow and joy. The connection running deeper because you’ve seen it flood, seen it bake, seen it come alive every year in a blaze of green.