the laws of harmony

After leaving Patrick at the decidedly un-romantic location of Waffle House, I headed down through Pigeon Forge and the Smokies to get to the beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 9: Blue Ridge Parkway Landscapes).

I’d wanted to be able to say I’d driven the whole BRP. It’s only 469 miles, so I was like – psh, no bigs. But drive that thing and you start to understand why it’s a bit of an accomplishment to have driven it, never mind hiked it. Especially the first stretch, which is through the Cherokee Indian Reservation and Nantahala National Forest, and it is windy as HELL. Not windy like blowing, windy like switchbacks. Windey?

My first stop for my dorky little passport stamp was the Waterrock Knob Visitors Center, where they had a board updating travelers on the conditions on the BRP. I saw that the road was closed from Elk Pasture Gap to the Carolina Arboretum, a distance of about 10 miles starting about 65 miles into the highway. I didn’t write down precisely why it was closed, but nearby there were a ton of trees blown down, so I’m assuming the road was blocked. I went as far as I could on the highway, but soon found that it was getting hazy due to some incoming storm systems, and since I didn’t even start driving the Parkway til nearly 3 pm, it would be getting dark soon – and I didn’t see much of a point of driving the BRP in the dark.

So at around 5 pm, I took the exit near Elk Pasture Gap, which is NC route 151 – an incredibly windy/windey road down through the hills all the way to 19/23, then to I-40. I got on 40 again and was pretty disappointed to be back on a boring old interstate, but I made do. I was supposed to take I-40 to 77 to 81, and as I neared Statesville, I took note of the 77 south exit. And then…. for some unknown reason… I didn’t take the 77 north exit. I spaced out, I was thinking about something else, I have no idea – I just didn’t take it.

I whipped out the atlas quickly while driving (yeah, I’m skilled), and saw that if I stayed on 40, it would hook up with Highway 64 west, which would connect to NC 901 north, which would eventually bring me diagonally northwest to 77. So 64 it was.

The drive through the small North Carolina towns was beautiful. Really and truly beautiful. People say these kinds of towns don’t exist any more, and who knows, maybe they just appear close-knit and comfortable and full of people whose families have lived in those mountains for generations. But if it was a façade, it sure had me fooled.

As I was going up 901, I came across a rodeo in a small arena just off the road. I first drove past it, then turned around and doubled back. A seriously sweet woman in a purple leather fringed Western shirt, who was taking admission, said it was $6 to get in, and there was an ATM back where 901 met 64, about four miles back the way I came. I told her I would be right back.

So I went to the gas station with the ATM. I asked the woman behind the counter, “Where’s y’alls ATM at?” – yes, New Jersey friends, I seriously talk like that now, apparently.

She said, “Right over here. But it don’t got no money.”

I guess I made a really disappointed face, because she burst out laughing and told me she was kidding – “Nah, sweetie, it’s got money. I think. Try it!”

It did indeed have money in it. I took my cash booty back to the rodeo and paid the woman $6.

“Park your car over here next to this barn, ‘cause I know you’ll wanna leave your dog in there. I can watch it and make sure no one messes with it,” she said. Seriously, why aren’t people in the rest of the world this nice?

When I pulled my car in next to the barn, I heard a THUNK under my tire. Fack! I must have run over a rock, I thought. I cracked the windows and told Blake to be good and went to the arena.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 11: Youth Rodeo in Harmony, North Carolina).

I got there at about 7:30, and the rodeo wasn’t set to start til 8 pm. When I arrived, the crowd’s attention was on a preacher who was sitting on the rodeo gates with all the contestants lined up at the fence behind him and the spectators sitting on the bleachers in front of him. He was talking about sin and virtue – and honestly, that’s all I can remember. He kind of babbled on and on and on, as preachers are wont to do. I was busy taking pictures of the horses.

After he was done preaching, he asked for prayer requests – first off was Jordan’s mother, who has cancer. Next was a request from a teenage boy on the bleachers to pray for Matt, who works at the Circle K (people on the bleachers nodded – “Yes, I know Matt”) – who was in a car accident and will not be leaving for the Marines next month because he has six broken ribs, a punctured lung and brain damage. A little boy on a horse at the far end of the rodeo rider line raised his hand and asked to pray for the families who were hurt by the tornadoes in Kansas City, and to pray for “our rodeo family.” Heads nodded.

Ay-men.

The preacher wrapped it up and the riders got to warming up their horses. Some walked in circles, some galloped back and forth with quick turns (they must have been the barrel racers), others cantered figure eights.

I became suddenly very jealous of the girls riding their horses in the ring. This was the Tri State Youth Rodeo Association, and all its contestants were between ages 3 and 18. So these girls were in high school, with their tiny waists and blow-dried hair and their horses whose manes the girls braided that day to prepare for the rodeo. Crocheted crosses hung from the horses’ martingales. One little girl sat in the saddle cross-legged, comfortably as if she were on a classroom floor. Three girls walked their horses abreast and laughed and gossiped and reached across saddles to swat each other on the arm at a particularly sassy comment. What I wouldn’t have given in high school to have been in their place – to have a horse of my own, girlfriends who had their own horses, friends with whom to ride on weekends.

The sun was on its way to setting when the rodeo finally began. After the flag ceremony, a boy rode a bronco for “a little over a second” (he later came and stood near me on the fence with his family – “it was more than a second, gosh”), and then it was mutton butsin’.

I’ll tell you, either the North Carolina sheep are calmer than New Mexico sheep, or the mutton busters are WAY better on the East Coast. The kids had to be able to ride the sheep for at least four seconds, and probably six out of twelve made it that far. Some of the kids fell over to the side of the sheep and rode along the sand with their head on the ground and their feet wrapped around the sheep’s ribs, one leg under and one leg over. After all the little kids were done, some of the older little kids rode calves.

At this point, the sky, which was glowing cobalt, was really threatening to the West. The announcer declared that they weren’t calling the rodeo off, but they were simply pressing pause until the storm blew over.

It was nearing 9 pm by this point, and I wanted to get to Virginia to sleep (Harmony is approximately 50 miles from the Virginia border), so I thought I’d cut out even though the rodeo wasn’t over. I went back to my car and thanked the woman in purple again for watching my car. She said thank you for coming, and urged me to come by again and come to another rodeo – they hold them about once a month. She gave me a brochure and wrote her e-mail address on it so I could get a schedule. And the weird thing is, I kind of wouldn’t mind going to another one, and if I’m in the area again when a rodeo is scheduled, I might make a point to go. It was just that nice.

So I climbed in my car, started her up, pulled out of the parking lot, and… Okay, what’s that? Something’s not right. At all.

I pulled back into the parking lot and checked on my tires. Yup – the front right tire is shot to shit. That “rock” I ran over was actually a hunk of 4x4 in the tall grass.

My fancy tires have their own 24-hour roadside assistance, so I called the service and relatively uneventfully was able to get a tow truck sent my way.

After a few minutes, I received a call from George Cardin, who runs a 24-hour emergency roadside service in the Statesville area. He said that a big rain was coming, and he was going to drive toward me, but if it started to rain hard, he would stop and then start driving again once it passed. “And I’m not talkin’ spittin, now,” he said, “I’m talking like you get outta the car and you look like you had a shower.” I said it was totally fine, and that I’d just wait. The sky was starting to drip in Harmony.

I sat in the car and waited, and soon people began flowing out of the arena and getting into their cars and driving off. The rodeo had been called off after all. I stayed put in my car while pickups flowed out of the lot around me, and soon, Cardin showed up.

At first it seemed like he was pretty irritated to be there. I wasn’t sure what I was doing – I had never had to deal with my spare tire in my trunk (my car is a 2002 Ford Focus, and the tire was still in the well with all the original Styrofoam around it), and when I didn’t know how to turn on my back dome light and didn’t know that there was a screw in the middle of the tire holding it in place, that was not what Cardin wanted to deal with. Blake was barking at him through my car window and my car was too low for the jack to fit under it and I couldn’t get my spare out on my own and he seemed pretty exasperated with the whole situation.

“I just wanna get you out of here and get me out of the rain,” he said gruffly.

“I wanted to sleep in Virginia tonight. I don’t want to be here either,” I replied.

I guess he realized that we were in the same shitty, leaky boat, so he softened up after that.

The rain let up a little bit, and Cardin did too.

“Let me guess: You’re gonna want a cheap hotel that takes you and the dog.”

“Yeah, I thought I’d find a place on 77,” I replied.

“You want to stay at one of them tourist hotels, or you want a good deal?” he asked.

“I want a good deal.”

“Okay. You follow me. We’re going back to Statesville.”

I followed him through the rain, which was coming down again, and we headed back to Statesville. He called me again and again on my cell phone as he arranged a hotel for me and asked me how I would like my tire to be fixed. He offered to call a friend and have him open up his tire shop to get me in and out with a new tire so I could be back on the road that same night, or he could get me that cheap hotel room and arrange to have my tire replaced the next morning. I chose the latter.

I followed him to the Masters Inn in Statesville. He’d had his wife call ahead to get me a good deal, and sure enough, I got a bargain on a room for me and Blake. The woman behind the counter was sweet, and at the end, she said, “Do me a favor – take these and read them.” She handed me Awake, the Jehovah’s Witnesses publication. Will-do, I said.

At this point, it was raining. And I’m not talking spittin. It was pouring. But of course the trunk of my car was all disheveled because I’d had to dig through it to find my spare, so I had to bring a whole bunch of bags into the hotel room to reorganize them. Sure enough, by the time I had all five or seven or however many bags in the room that I needed, I actually had to wrap my hair in a towel, it was so wet.

Once I got into the room, life was generally uneventful. I wrote my last blog post, I organized my stuff, I took the band-aid off my toe and snapped some really gnarly pictures.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Woe is Toe).

All I could do all day yesterday was smile. Even this morning, when it turned out that even my spare was flat, all I could do was smile. Even when some chick started screaming obscenities at 8:30 am and, consequently, some dude in a doo-rag smashed a bottle of malt liquor outside my hotel room door and two cop cars later showed up, it was all I could do but smile.

I’m not worried. I’m not stressed. I have good karma. I have a good life. Traveling is great. I am in this sultry weather, I have the best dog in the world, my new tire was put on my car in less than a half hour and I was able to go take pictures of piles and piles of honeysuckle growing behind the Statesville Walmart.

Today was fine – uneventful, all things considered. I drove another chunk of so miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway, explored an abandoned house along the way, and tonight I write this from a hotel room in Hagerstown, Maryland. Tomorrow I will be home.

Edit: See photos related to this part of this entry here (Pictures 10: Abandoned House on the Blue Ridge Parkway).

Tomorrow I will be home, and I’ll spend a little while there before heading back down to Knoxville to see Neil Young with Patrick. Then I will spend more time at home. I will think. I will think a lot. I’ll figure things out. But first, I have to get home.