The Road

Did you ever see so many handicapped parking spots filled at one time? Layne went in (masked) to get our food. “I was the kid at the eighty year old convention,” she said when she came out with our biscuits, reporting no one else was masked. Pushing a walker, sure, but not worried about Covid anymore. 

You live in a van you notice a different world around you. It just seems like you have the opportunity to see the world from an odd angle when you carry your home on your back. Right now Rusty and Layne are in the bed each snoring to the tempo of their own dreams and clashing, while outside commerce rushes by at 70 miles per hour, each 18 wheeler in a perfect synchrony  of beating engine and shining wheels all keeping the mythical supply chain stocked.

Sometimes when we are grinding our way to an appointment we stop in rest areas like this one which happens to be on I-40 in Tennesse, and when we do our van feels like a palace. We have a kitchen and our own toilet, we have our bed and a well insulated van that keeps out the noise and the cold. Compare that to the smoky breath of a car driver stamping back to his tiny glasshouse, engine running, windshield condensed with moisture, no room to stretch out or space to eat in civilized comfort. 

Then again they have homes to go to, vast spaces with endless hot running water and toilets that flush away that which we have to handle ourselves. They know their place, where they belong; they have a glib reply to the question: where are you from? 

A water faucet, off US 23 approaching the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, is a find. Our thirty gallon tank was down six gallons. I siphoned three buckets of “non potable” water into the tank after I walked Rusty while Layne was making grilled cheese sandwiches. The high of van life! A full water tank! Our Berkey filter makes possibly non potable water safe to drink.

The Smokey Mountains separating North Carolina from Tennessee were worth the drive. Google maps kept wanting to send us by the freeway to save a few minutes but I mapped our route town by town from Waynesville to Kodak and we got to ride through the forests on a smooth black ribbon of National Park tarmac, no commercial vehicles allowed.

It was beautiful and colorful and a spectacle of wilderness to remind you of the origins of these vast tracts  of forest that once were so thick they were considered a nuisance and an impediment to the March of Progress. 

We came down out of the mountains into a vast endless traffic jam. Dolly Parton has parlayed her breasts and her voice and her personality into a personal Disney world that speaks to her business acumen and the endless pursuit of wealth for the sake of it. 

We drove into it unknowing, puzzled by the inherent fakery of frontier papier maché buildings in the middle of Tennessee.  The penny soon dropped, Dollyworld this and that, water slides, casinos, neon and fun by the dollar. I nearly killed a motorcyclist and his passenger when the rider mistimed his exit onto the highway and fumbled a gear change and was saved from an air ambulance and a massive medical bill by my heavy foot perfectly willing to shift the contents of my house forward to save me the paperwork and him the pain. He rode away when he grabbed the right gear and I gripped the wheel filled with unhappy memories. 

Time, we decided, to try something new. We ordered meat and salad on the website and drove to the curbside pickup point. 

Cracker Barrel usually allows RVs to spent the night in the parking lot. We’d never done this but for some reason in Tennessee we figured yo give it a go. We weren’t alone:

The rattle of the generator went on all night. I only heard it when I walked Rusty. With the door closed against a forty degree night we heard nothing and slept soundly.  

I prefer camping in the woods even where the Forest Service warns of potential  thieves picking through unoccupied camping sites. I don’t see urban thieves driving National Forests to rip off sleeping bags and gas stoves but who knows, stay fearful etc…

The Cracker Barrel manager gave us an awful warning too. We should be okay but watch out for crackheads. My wife the former attorney figured it was liability coverage. If “something” happened they did warn us…naturally we slept the sleep of the just and nothing happened. Stay afraid all the same. 

There is this sense of risk incurred simply  by being on the road. The joy of exploration, the fantasy of the road trip gets smothered by the fear of death or dismemberment by wicked highway robbers who lurk in the popular imagination. With one breath they say we are living the dream and in the next they look with pity on our lonely risky life far from the safety of a tract house.

One encounter generated the comment that we were lucky to be away while Hurricane Ian walked all over Florida. Not lucky I said, we always planned to be away in hurricane season. It’s safer. 

Appalachia In Pictures

Wandering the Blue Ridge Parkway, National Forest tracks, dispersed camping and so forth. 

Pisgah National Forest

I guess they have been paying attention to this fearsome mass produced Awful Warning. We saw almost no trash at all so the signs must work. A cyclist came by after we parked and told us we had the nicest camp spot in the national forest. Nicely nice for us nice people. 

We were about an hour southeast of Asheville not far from the Blue Ridge parkway so it certainly wasn’t as remote a spot as some we’ve enjoyed but the space was level and there were trails in several directions so Rusty was happy. Moses was shown the promised land from pisgah, the summit in Hebrew. Pisgah also means a distant, unobtainable objective. Yes I know it sounds like a Native American word and easily mispronounced but it comes from the story of Moses in the Bible. When I told Webb Chiles, the inveterate traveler where I was he challenged me to dig deeper, so I did and discovered the meaning behind the oddly named mountain forests. I hope you are impressed. 

The forest service allows fourteen camping days at any marked spot totally free and with no facilities aside from a fire ring and a grill. Our Promaster is designed for wild camping with lots of water and a big battery bank so we like these kinds of laid back forest spots. They make a change from moochdocking with family and friends which I find quite tiring as I attempt to be on my best behavior.  

It took some hunting to find this spot. iOverlander, the traveling app showed several dispersed camping sites here in the National Forest and we wondered how it was going to be on a Sunday in changing leaf season. “This looks like grand central station” Layne said as we crossed paths with our second Sprinter van. Just enough room and we got past each other on the narrow gravel track.  Van life is hip in Asheville a cosmic center of all things fashionable. My nephew a cycling fanatic rides a $15,000 electric mountain bike. You can imagine the gasps of admiration that elicits among the cognoscenti. I was stunned by the cost even though he has also ridden competitively. 

The first forest road was packed with parked trucks and SUVs, some day hiking and some parked next to their tents. We stopped to take a stroll and ponder our options. Hanging out here seemed either impossible or undesirable even if we found a legal spot. Time to move on. 

We drove past the vehicles parked in ditches and wide spots along the narrow gravel road until we found a wide spot and made a u-turn. Back to the highway to look elsewhere. 

Once on US Highway 276 we drove a couple of miles until I spotted an inconspicuous brown numbered road sign indicating a national forest dirt side road. That’s where the camp sites are so without much hope we drove up the pretty wooded road enjoying the forest not expecting to find an empty spot. We met a Sprinter van and stopped to talk to the solo driver (and his dog). He told us there were spaces to camp but the road just loops around till it gets back to the highway so keep trying. 

Compared to the national forests in the west there are far fewer dispersed camping possibilities here. You can only sleep at a spot marked with a tent symbol and they aren’t too generous with those. A few minutes after the Sprinter encounter we saw an unoccupied tent pad with room for our van alongside… We stopped and that was that. Soon thereafter a cyclist came by and asked if we were staying the night. Sure are! We settled in and I pulled out my camp chair and my book finally able to finish Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Meriwether Lewis, the huge paperback I bought at Pompey’s Pillar, the Lewis and Clark national monument in Montana. This is a different world from that open western prairie: 

The Lewis and Clarke story ended in Tennessee woodland much like this oddly enough. Lewis is buried near Nashville and I plan to go there later this week to see the monument. I closed the 484th page of the biography as Lewis the manic depressive alcoholic ends his brief life by shooting himself twice, once in the face and once in the body but refusing to die immediately. After a night of agony he finally staggered out of his room and lay down to wait for the dawn and die outside an inn on the Natchez Trace. I had no idea the great explorer ended miserably like that. Clark on the other hand lived on with a government job in St Louis as head of Indian affairs supported by a loving wife. That’s the explorer story I prefer. 

We had had our few days being sociable with my wife’s  family in Asheville; eating too much and tasting craft beers and enjoying the crisp Fall sunshine. We left with a full 30 gallon tank of water and empty trash cans and the memory of hot showers. It was good to get out into the woods. More friends to meet in Tennessee, a truck stop shower  I hope and then another zag south toward Key West. Meanwhile some time to read and reflect and watch rusty enjoy the forest. Layne cooked up a storm with half a duck on the menu with mashed potatoes and salad, a brilliant coconut cream sauce and a growler of brown ale. Life aboard  GANNET2 is not slumming. 

We have to be in Miami October 28th with lots to do and see in the next three weeks. For now some silence among the trees. Lovely.