Hey Phil!

While you were trying to persuade those big lower A-arm bolts to leave, I was, heh, heh -- dare I tell you? -- doing the dance of the two-lane on what has to be one of the nation's very best, no-shit really Best Little Roads!

In the Asheville paper was this four paragraph article the other day about a mass Miata-grope near here. Some 300 M&Ms and 500 people who love them fetched up in a little burg called Robbinsville, North Carolina, which is where graham crackers were invented. It's also over there where mad bomber Eric Rudolph is supposed to be hunkered in the hills. And, it's a spit-'n'-a-chew from Nantahala Gorge, whitewater Mecca on this side of the nation. Talk about contrasts! Anyway, the highlight of the Miata meet, the paper said, was a run over US Highway 129, from Robbinsville to the Tennessee line, "a famously favorite road for sportscars and motorcycles, US 129 has 318 curves in eleven miles..."

Imagine! And I'd never heard of this road. "Hmmm," said I to the dog upon reading the article on Tuesday, "If I finish the brick patio and get the steps up to the deck built today and tomorrow, I could maybe take a guilt-free day off on Thursday." I was done with a string of writing deadlines, and what better way to celebrate? Worked my butt off and got the bricks laid and stairs built, went to bed and got up early.

It's 97 miles from here to Robbinsville -- a game of big-rig dodge 'em for 30 miles on I-40, then a long stretch of fast curvy Smokey Mountain four-lane -- plenty of time for sipping coffee and banana eating with NPR and then Willie Nelson on the stereo. When the sign said 28 miles to go to Robbinsville, the road turned to a twisty two-lane, too heavily traveled for a lot of fun, but just as the gut said it's breakfast time, up ahead on the right was a tall rusting sign with big red letters -- "EAT" and below it was "Tootsie's Roadhouse and Bluegrass," and it was open. Hot-damned, boy, time for a grease fix! I pulled my shiny ES in 'twixt a pair of dusty pickit-up trucks and eased on in to a red naugahide booth to be served by none other than Tootsie herownself. Tootsie, if you can imagine, puts Daisy Mae to shame. It was difficult not to stare, particularly when she was going the other way (Hi Marsha!).

Two eggs, grits and three patties of spicy sausage later and I paid up -- $2.78 including orange juice -- and headed out past the stage and signs for this weekend's bluegrass festival -- The Smokey Mountain Boys, Lost Hills Ramblers and I don't know who all -- and eased on out of there. A few minutes later, I was entering Robbinsville, flashing past the sign about graham crackers, and at the light I hung a right onto US 129. "Yessir!" said I, feeling that little tingle in the gut one gets before a good ride out near the ragged edge.

First, though came the routine: I pulled off into a vacant parking lot and got out. With engine off, I pushed the car forward, then back and listened. No noises from bearings, U-joints, nothing. It rolled easily. I grabbed the top of each front wheel and vigorously wonked 'em back and forth sideways. No bearing play there. I'd checked the tire pressures when they were cold first thing this morning and they looked and felt fine. Oil was fine. The rest I knew was good. On the passenger's side, I opened the door and reclined the seatback up against the lowered rear seat-back, thereby locking it down over the tool box. Don't want no heavy box of tools flying around should the unspeakable happen and she go shiny side down.

"Arright!" said I, as they say in Santa Cruz when the surf's up. After a few toe-touches and windmill exercises and a quick adjust of the ol' Levis, if you know what I mean, I slipped back in, cranked the seat wings in close to my ribs, dialed up the right amount of rake and recline, adjusted the lumbar flat, snapped the belt home and eased her on outta there.

Whazzis? US 129 seemed like all the other mountain roads around here. It had some curves but nothing special, and strip malls and Baptist churches flanked it on both sides for a couple of miles. After a couple more, I got to thinking: I'd seen a road sign back there on the edge of town that said "Old US 129." I hung a U and got on that one. It was a dandy little road, all right, but it was lined with whitetrash housing -- tarpaper shacks, single wide trailers, rusted out school buses, '49 Chevys, '51 Fords with kudzu growing through them. Every house had eight dogs living under the porch and if they wuz anybody, the old washing machine was up on the front porch to show the world they had one.

About the time I'd decided this whole deal was a bust, Old US 129 broke out on new US 129. "OK, we'll give the new one a little more time, a few more miles," I told the car. I gave her dash a love pat and gunned her west toward Tennessee. The road stayed the same -- your basic two-lane with trucks and farmer's cars. It split pastures and tobacco fields, the curves OK, but nothing special. Then all of a sudden, like somebody turned the page when I wasn't looking, the traffic was gone, the road began to climb; it got tighter curves and they were banked! And THERE WAS NOBODY ELSE ON THE ROAD!

It took a mile or so to get into the terrain and into the road engineer's head and I decided I really, really like that guy. It was a predictable two-lane. Like a lot of old road-rippers, I've developed a second sense of what a road's going to do even if I can't see around a bend -- subtleties tell it, I guess: The way the mountains fold, where the power lines go, how the gaps in the trees lay. It's not conscious, but suprises are rare on a good twisty highway. This one was very well banked and the degree of banking up ahead also gave clues. It was very nicely paved -- not tire-shredding rough, not too slick. Mostly it ran along the sides of steep mountains, which meant you could see through half the curves, and tall trees were far enough apart you could tell if somebody was coming the other way with plenty of warning.

As the feel for US 129 developed, the pace of the ol' ES streaking through the sun-dappled Smokies increased, the G-loads built, the rear end was given the freedom to step out; brakes were used harder and the revs climbed higher and shifts got crisper. "Jesus, look at that!" said I, peering down through a set of a dozen rights and lefts, the road banking this way and that, and I booted her through transition after transition after transition after transition, the nose pointing right, then left and back and forth again and again, the car banking like a plane, clipping apex after apex, using the whole road whooping up and over the crown between curves, my rump growing alternately heavy and light in the seat.

"Yah-Hooo!" I yelled, and the transitions gave way to a carousel, a looong left steady-radius, third-gear banked curve where swooping down to a late apex was like coming off the banking at Daytona, then climbing back up to the rail as the car drifts out and skyward all at the same time; then the road crested and dropped through multiple chicanes allowing a brisk shift to fourth at redline to let her wail on for a second before braking hard for a steeply banked right kink, grab second gear and power up around and over a rise to plunge through another good sightline series of third gear S-curves and out onto a near-straightaway along a rippling whitewater river. Ease her into fourth and then overdrive at 85 and cruise a minute -- it hit me that this is indeed one of the all-time great highways!

And it goes on and on and on like that through Deal's Gap. Somewhere near the middle of the gap is the Deal's Gap Motorcycle Motel and Deli. No kidding. This place caters to the bikers who take over this road weekends -- like the bikers haul up California's Highway One north of San Francisco early every Sunday morning, only here, they have to come from Atlanta or somewhere else not real close, so they have a motel. You can buy chain lube or several kinds of rear view mirrors and duct tape in the deli while the woman makes your ham & cheese on rye. I suspect the motel management supplies rubber runners to protect the rugs when you bring your Ducati inside for the night. Maybe there are Snap-On tool boxes in the rooms instead of chests of drawers, swivel-head ratchets instead of Gideon Bibles. I didn't look, but I wouldn't be surprised. Nice folks there, and 93 octane at the gas pumps out front.

I hung there long enough to stretch, unwind and walk around and ogle a cherry mid-'60s Triumph Bonneville while a bunch of crotch-rocket riders ogled the Volvo. All was right with the world, we decided, and I headed out -- with a few extra revs in each gear and some pretty snappy shifts for their benefit, of course, and immediately I was back in the heat of this automotive love fest on asphault. That highway engineer had not lost his touch. The road continued up and over the mountains and down well into Tennessee, and all its goodness continued all the way down to a large lake. A quick plunge in the water felt really good while the Volvo ticked and stunk as its fever subsided.

Of course, being over there in Tennessee, I had to go back over US 129 to get home. Well, there was nothing to do but to Do It! Nothing like a good ol' hillclimb, the rear end slung out on second-gear hairpins, to get the juices flowing again. By the time I'd dropped back into the suburban splatter of Robbinsville, I was plumb tuckered out from all that exertion and focusing. By extending the run down into Tennessee and back, it was more like 44 miles of twisting two-lane I'd run, and more like 1,200 curves. I wondered what the tires looked like. At the Nantahala Outdoor Center cafe, I looked. The H-rated Dunlop 195/60-15s were fine. You wouldn't guess they'd just been flogged like that.

It took two pieces of hot pecan pie with chocolate ice cream and three cups of coffee and a wade in the river to recover enough for the 90-something mile drive home. Somehow, when I got home, I'd driven 296 miles. Not bad for a short day's run. I believe I'll do it again in a week or two.

And that's my report for today. From way down here in Dixie, south of the Smith & Wesson Line where murder and mayhem are misdemeanors and littering's a popular hobby, I'm...

Yerz,
    Brooks

PS -- Sure hope you got those bolts out! And sure, you can print this if you see fit.

Photos by Brooks Townes (although not of this particular day...)