By Larry Floyd. The five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before. Well, at least we explored, sought out, and boldly went.
It was still mid-morning cool as we rolled around Johnson City, Tennessee. Jeff Ackerman, myself, and Dave Anderson had been on the road for two days already, having left the BMW Riders Association rally in Woodstock, Virginia, then meandered down Skyline Drive and the northern half of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were blissfully unaware of the black hole that lurked ahead.
Located in the center of the George Washington National Forest, and in the Shenandoah valley between the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Mountain ranges, Woodstock was an ideal place for motorcycle fun. Jeff and I visited the radio telescope facility at Green Bank, West Virginia on Friday, then hit some beautiful local roads on Saturday. Dave and Tracy Anderson spent the rally doing an off-road riding course which ended up with Tracy visiting the local Urgent Care with a broken arm. She fortunately still had a working thumb, and was able to get hitchhiker status with the Nomar Tire people who are conveniently based in Fenton and had vended enough tires at the rally to have room for both Tracy and her F650. That left Dave unattached and heading home on the same trajectory as Jeff and I. In spite of Tracy’s misfortune, all was being resolved in the best manner possible.
After two very slow days for the three of us riding Skyline Drive and then the Blue Ridge Parkway as far south as Blowing Rock, we decided to turn back to the Northwest in order to be home in two days. Had we stayed on the Parkway, it would have been a three day trip. That put us on course for the Black Hole.
“turn around,
I screwed the pooch”
Jeff is a great ride leader. He does excellent planning and very rarely takes a wrong turn. I, on the other hand, plan extensively, get flustered and almost inevitably end up getting off track. When leading, I often look in my rear view mirror at the riders behind me and feel the pangs of eye darts, whether real or imagined, coming from behind the dark glasses and helmet shields when I, as I so often do, put my left arm in the air and wave in a circle to signal, “turn around, I screwed the pooch” again. So, I defer ride leadership to the more competent and confident whenever possible, and then I get to fling eye daggers through my sunglasses and helmet shield rather than the other way around. At the next stop, I can smugly opine, “I would not have gone that way; but, since you are leading, I guess it was OK”, instead of “, Crap, man, I am so sorry I took us down that dry wash that ended at the gravel pit.”
Jeff has traditionally been the “I don’t need no stinking GPS, I’ve got a map” kind of a guy. I like my GPS; but, I believe it is very good at knowing where I am, and not good at all at knowing where I want to go. Jeff has a new Zumo GPS with all sorts of neat functions, including a motorcycle curvy road option. Mr. “I’ve got a map” now decides that this would be a great time to try the curvy road feature, and so the adventure begins.
“I don’t need
no stinking GPS,
I’ve got a map”
We rolled out of Blowing Rock North Carolina, a glitzy-quaint touristy spot where the boutiques sell stupid stuff you don’t need at a price you really can’t afford, and aimed toward Johnson City, Tennessee. I will admit, the roads picked by Jeff’s GPS were very nice although not exactly direct; however, this is a motorcycle ride, not just a trip, and graceful leaning and swooshing is much preferred over droning along to make time.
As we approached Johnson City, we skirted around to the East on an interstate and exited in the right direction to put us on line to pick up a connection to State Road 70 That would take us zip-a-dee-doo-dah right to Jonesville, Virginia, then some dynamite twisties into Kentucky where we could find an air conditioned motel room next to a Mexican restaurant with cold beer and tangy salsa before the afternoon sun knew we were there. At that time, I knew not of the black hole, and I still trusted Jeff.
After hopping off the interstate we started a curious pattern. We tended to turn left, then right, then left, then right and right again and right and so on. Jeff’s GPS was hunting for curvy roads. If there was a road with a turn or two that went generally off course, but then connected with a road with a turn or two that would go back toward our ultimate intended destination the illuminated course line would take it. As a result, we left Johnson City only to make a circle that drew us back in, then out again. Think of a tract heading generally toward the Northwest, but shaped like the spirals in a spring. We kept looping around, granted on some curvy roads, with minimal progress toward our ultimate objective. Even so, a spring eventually stretches out to reach a point. That point for us was a little town called Fall Branch. It should have been called Downfall Branch.
I did not realize it at the time but, Johnson City was the Black Hole, sucking us back in every time we tried to break free of its gravitational pull. We were almost free, though. Once headed out on SR70, we would escape into the rest of the motorcycle universe, we would accelerate to warp speed, time and space would again follow the predictable laws of physics. Well, poop to that.
As we approached Fall Branch, a large, triangular, yellow sign stated in huge letters, “ROAD CLOSED AHEAD”. We were faced with a choice. We could get out a map and look for a possible work around, or we could reverse course and aimlessly ride in the general direction we wanted to go in the hopes of getting lucky. Jeff chose the latter.
We rode back a short way to an intersection where we turned left on a county road. We wanted to go Northwest, so left, or North, would be a logical directional choice. Turning right would have pointed us back to Johnson City where the gravitational pull would doom us to darkness. Jeff continued to hit intersections, turning right or left, in a vain attempt to get us headed on the right direction and around the closed section of road that stopped us as dead in our track as surely as a Klingon warship. My GPS showed only a spider web of blue lines which formed, guess what, a spiral around Johnson City. If our motorcycles had been powered by dilithium crystals, they were weakening while the central core of the black hole seemed to strengthen its pull..
Essentially,
you can’t get there
from here.
Jeff was operating on the assumption that there actually was a road somewhere that would take us Northwest and eventually dump us out on a major artery. This would turn out to be a faulty assumption. Let me explain the topography around Johnson City. There are hills, mountains, ridges, and creeks that all run in a Northeasterly direction. There are very few pathways running North or Northwest, and those tend to follow natural gaps or valleys. None of these natural valleys or gaps are found in the area where we are now trapped. Essentially, you can’t get there from here.
Jeff finally abandoned GPS navigation and pulled over to look at a map. The state map of Tennessee – is there a way to put it politely? No, not really – is lousy. Very few county roads are included and our particular location showed up as just a large, empty spot adjacent to Johnson City, which we now know is a Black Hole. Fortunately, while unfolding a perfectly useless map, a local resident came out of his house and consulted with our leader. Bottom line? Go Southeast to Johnson City, or take a spider web of county roads Northeast to Kingsport. Northwest was off the table.
Our fear of getting sucked back into Johnson City left Kingsport as our most desirable of the undesirable options. Although we did have to do a turn around after taking the wrong blue line, we eventually surfaced at Kingsport. We recharged our dilithium crystals at a Citgo station and managed to find a Dairy Queen where we replotted our route for the rest of the day. The escape from the Black Hole was complete. Einstein was right, E=MC2 (Energy equals MotorCycle, squared).