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.
