Blue Ridge Parkway Motorcycle Ride

Plot a trip from north to south, say from Virginia to Cherokee, North Carolina, using modern mapping applications, and you will be offered many options but rarely this one. I kept trying then reverted to the old accordion-fold map (printed in 1963) that is probably the one document I’d rescue if the house were on fire. It’s almost as if the Blue Ridge Parkway doesn’t exist—or not in this dimension, anyway.

In a way it doesn't. In memory, once its seductive 469 miles have passed under your wheels, it remains a strange mirage. It compels you to go again just to make sure it is real. I have some evidence that it is—in the photo stuck to the refrigerator's side, I turn forever and wave to the photographer who crept up in my lane to get the shot with a pre-digital camera in his left hand, the mountains we are about to ascend a green-blue wall in the background—but I still need to put that old map, edges worn now to velvet, in my tank bag every now and again. The Parkway is not just a road, for all that it appears on nearly every list of top-10 best rides. It is not a utility, a way from here to there. It is not a destination that can finally be reached or a goal to be permanently checked off. It is more like a song I can't help but keep singing, one whose lyrics don't emanate from the singer. This time, the road is the song. Like every true work of art, it keeps a small piece of you. You must go back to find the rest of yourself.

I first rode it in 1988, in October. I followed the white bike ahead of me, a bigger match of mine, not knowing what I was about to receive. Up through Virginia’s Rockfish Gap, and then we were there.

Serendipity, by its nature, cannot be expected. But as a select few know, travel by motorcycle comes with a key to the factory where they make kismet. For five days, heading south, discovery and even discomfort were unprecedentedly joyful. Padding oneself into ridiculousness with every stitch of warm clothing pulled out of the saddlebags by the roadside was as wondrous as the taste of syrup-drenched flapjacks made from meal ground in the immoderately picturesque mill a hundred yards away. The hasty departure from an ominously crumbling motel was as elating as opening the door onto a cozy room we could only dream of calling home. My introduction to this road had been a gift, one of those secret keys to yourself you are breathless to give in the throes of new love: the music that made you, the book that explains everything. Motorcyclists have another category. The road for which yearning will become permanent. A quarter of a century later, I turned around to give it again.

It elevates you slowly, regally, in the first 10 miles climbing 1,100 feet while you aren’t looking because you are marveling at the caress of the road itself. The pavement is an endless ribbon dropped gently on the grass, no barrier between it and the edge of a great world that existed before you were an amoebic idea and that will outlast the final syllable of humankind’s eulogy. No gravel shoulder, guard rails, stop signs. No neon come-ons or billboards. Just a sense that you are here by privilege: This truly belongs to the denizens of the woods, to the ancient mountain laurel with its tender blooms of inexplicably perfect geometry. Almost immediately you arrive at Raven’s Roost, one of the more than 200 overlooks that are this road’s peculiar beneficence; from there you survey infinity. It seems impossible. Then again, you have assumed a vantage above the clouds (occasionally within them). At times you ride a mere knife edge atop this Appalachian range. The mountains drop precipitously right from the ends of your handlebars.

Now as we proceed—“process” might be a better word, fittingly churchlike, suiting the stateliness of the Parkway’s 45-mph speed limit as well as its otherworldly situation—I imagine the exhilaration in the rider behind me. Just as I once felt behind another. We pull in at the turnout, and he takes off his helmet to follow me wordlessly out onto the rocks beyond which heaven and earth are spread. I know the road has gotten him.

I am simultaneously here and in my own past.

I am also deep inside a region’s rich history. Not only was the road conceived the better part of a century ago as an ever-changing temporal museum of dramatic and pastoral views, but it is also punctuated with actual museums devoted to geology, folk art, and the deeply twining roots of American music, with its improbable mash-up of Scotch-Irish and African traditions; it is still very much alive in these hills, proof offered by the fiddlers and banjoists gathered in the breezeway of the stunning Blue Ridge Music Center (milepost 213). It may also show up impromptu on the porch of the hotel in which you find yourself staying, as well as the sidewalks and general stores of small towns like Floyd and Galax, which, except for their nouveau cafés touting organic roasts, look exactly as they did in their sepia-toned past.

This is not the first time I have returned to the Parkway; I confess to having taken every bike I have ever owned, with private sentimentality offering it to each as if obliged to return at least a few heightened pleasures to what has given me so many. I have ridden it in seemingly every human state: joyous, lonely, tearful, and in perfect inner peace, together, alone, and with friends. I have ridden it in painful cold, impenetrable fog, under brilliant sun, in rain, after dark (inadvisable). It seems weirdly fine with them all.

Some of the Parkway’s supernatural powers will never be explained; they are personal, between you and it.

Some of them arise from the fact that the Blue Ridge stands well outside the typical thoroughfare’s evolution, from deer path to Indian trail to trace of settlers’ wagons to the ministrations of the paving crew. Indeed, the Parkway would hardly do for purposes of transit; no travelers, intent on a destination, would be so nonsensical as to elect passage atop a mountain range’s very crest. (One requiring 26 tunnels blasted through the more recalcitrant heights, to boot.) Although it is hard to believe it was not expressly built with the physics of two-wheel locomotion in mind—its continuous S-curves induce the rhythm of a foxtrot, generously offering the impression one is suddenly the world’s most elegant rider—it was conceived, in the words of landscape architect Stanley W. Abbott, “purely and wholeheartedly for the purposes of tourist recreation distinguished from the purposes of regional travel.”

It was also conceived to help winch us up out of the Great Depression. A brain-pounding puzzle is why socialism is not commonly used as a synonym for compassion, especially considering the unparalleled riches it left behind in the monuments of the Works Progress Administration. This particular largesse of the New Deal, America’s longest linear park, was begun in 1935, to link Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. It was finished only in 1987 with the completion of the Linn Cove Viaduct, a graceful piece of engineering that hangs the roadway off the side of Grandfather Mountain. And makes for another in our trip’s uncountable line of scenic windfalls.

I feel as pleased as if I had hand-made this gift and its wrapping paper too.

A safe distance separates us—his headlight is way back yet constant in my mirror, the way his presence in the world has become constant at the periphery of my every moment—just as we are separated from the noisy human reliance on words. As if those could communicate anything of this!

On separate vehicles we grow paradoxically closer: The same sensual charge goes through both riders in the same instant. We feel at once the descent into valley pastureland before we see it (perhaps even before realizing that Holstein grazing 5 feet off the left turn signal is experiencing the same unfettered freedom as us); the changing barometric pressure hits our bodies simultaneously as we climb to 6,684 feet by way of a long series of switchbacks. We share an anticipation of what we somehow know we will feel upon gaining Mount Mitchell’s strangely lonely peak, one that claimed the life of the man whose name it bears.

And so minutes flash by, melancholy and joyful, like single frames of a movie that will be ours alone. We are players in an eternal mystery. How does one rider know the other is going to head into this overlook but not that? How does he feel certain she is about to flick on the turn signal at the arrow to Blowing Rock, or to Fancy Gap, after bypassing 10 others? By chance—between us, there was a UN of possible choices—our machines are linked by a single heritage. Perhaps they silently converse in German.

We will of course have our own serendipitous moments: A fellow motorcyclist, known previously only at the remove of social media, becomes, in the second he’s sighted standing waiting for us beside his bike at a turnout, a lifelong friend—and it won’t really have all that much to do with the fact that he left us with a jar of moonshine. He must have known it would come in handy to toast that evening’s luck: The cabin, rented sight unseen, stood resplendent on a ridge over the Parkway; it was replete with porch swing, a sunset swiped from a postcard, and the ideal dinner spot a short walk down the sloping lawn. (Hence, beer!) The strains of live country music—songs of undying love and sometimes just dying—will follow us back up toward the Jacuzzi for a post-ride soak.

Another day we will turn off at Craggy Gardens after riding a few miles with a local pal and, like magnets, begin pulling passing motorcycles from the road one by one until there is a varicolored chorus line of more than a dozen cruisers and adventure dual-purpose, sportbikes, and full-dress tourers. We all stand before the expansive view wearing big, somewhat idiotic smiles. I mean, what else can we do?

Now, if including the Blue Ridge on those lists of great roads is a bit like putting Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in a collection of “nice songs,” it is true that any number of undeniably great motorcycling roads corkscrew down from it to the valleys below. They’re a dime a dozen here. I had my heart in my throat more than once when we ventured off the Parkway in search of gas, lodging, or a happy re-acquaintance with the general messiness of civilization. In one day I fulfilled half a year’s worth of a friend’s exhortation to “go get on your bike and scare yourself.” All you hope to find is a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The next thing you know you’re in Area 51 for ecstatically intense turns.

At one point as we ride into the embrace of another valley I find myself singing. “Oh Shenandoah” is a keening song full of longing, for place and for love and for return. I make a note to tell the rider behind that there’s only one song I’d like sung at my funeral, and it is this. Strange. The thought makes me happy.

I wonder when I should tell him. But there is only one real option now. Of course. When we return.