A peaceful roadside break at the edge of a hairpin intersection somewhere on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina can go sideways fast. It’s a vulnerable position to be in. Your car is stull running. The door is hanging open. The dome light is on and the thing is dinging, or buzzing, or whatever noise it makes to let you know what you’re doing is temporary. You’ll be right back. No. Big. Deal.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE ROAD, BOY.”
My head snapped around to see a grimy Mercury Monterey minivan. A thought ghosted into my brain and phased right past my fight or flight response. The dirty van was an absolute affront to Monterey itself, and the man, hanging out of the window with all his weight on the straining sideview mirror, was not helping the image.
This was not the southern hospitality you hear about. The guy wasn’t keen on rocking chairs, bringing anyone pie, or quilting. It was clear his pastime was plain and simple drugs and unhinged rage.
“What!?”
“You heard me.”
I did. I had, and it took every bit of self-control not to tell this bloodshot, torn flannel, patchy haired, saucer-eyed fellow to stick it where the sun don’t shine. It took a second to reframe the entire scene from my perspective to a general one. What exactly was going on? Two guys were watering some plants on the side of the road at an intersection in rural southeastern Tennessee. There shouldn't really be anyone around, thus, the very orange 1973 Volvo 142 with Yankee plates shouldn’t have been in anyone's way.
A shallow month or so earlier, Facebook Marketplace gave up an option for scouting the Appalachian Overcrest Rally. The price seemed okay and it was orange on orange. A Volvo. A new experience, the best kind. Novel, unique, and, in this case, and in the end, wildly more expensive than it ever should have been. A good friend blitzed over to check it out. It drove okay. Slow, as expected. Reasonable cash was exchanged and there was a new owner for a very handsome 142... With... a blown engine. It’s not too often that I lose buying an old car. Buying an old Volvo is a fun hobby, not a necessity. The old car community is pretty solid, and people take care of each other. I believe that what goes around comes around. Not in a universe is the great equalizer karma sense, but, in a if you treat people right, they treat you right kinda way. This guy, however, wasn’t of the same philosophical cloth. He took no ownership of the issue despite unequivocal proof he hid everything. "Yep that's my oil stabilizer buried in the trunk. What of it. It's a used car bro. Bye." It’s just the way it goes sometimes, and he'll get his. Someday.
Getting anything done with competency in the car world costs money. Getting it done fast costs personal capital as well. You have to call in favors and lean on the pure generosity of friends and strangers alike. The Overcrest community has become a boon to everyone in it. It’s family, and in the case of the blown-up 142 that I was supposed to scout the rally with momentarily after purchase, I would need it. The saviors would come in a pair this time around: John Harbinson and Humberto Figueroa.
“It was a miracle it was even running.”
John sounded oddly positive on the phone. It’s just how he is. Larger than life and the hub of many friends from many different spheres, he travels through it all with a positive attitude, giving generously the most valuable resources of all. Self and time. He and Humberto were setting themselves up for a herculean lift. They would have the car running in two weeks. Optimism from John. Hopeful skepticism for me. If they were able to get it done, there would be just enough time for me to fly out and scout for the rally just before the cutoff deadline of announcing where and when it would be.
Somehow, by some miracle, they did it. They rustled an engine up eight hours away, procured it, and got it to the black hole of any engine build: the machine shop. From there, after some bribes to the black hole and a slew of late nights under the spells of Humberto, one of the most intuitive mechanics I've ever met, the Volvo ran again. I was far poorer, and desperately underwater, but the car was far better-er than when I bought it. We had high hopes it would take us the lion's share through our adventure. After all, the legend has the 140 chassis as basically a tractor.
I had been warned about Tennessee by an open-shirted man with a copper belly and white beard and a Klondike bar. He sat under photos, medals, and commendations from a recent war. In them were images of a young man, the son of the woman who stood behind the counter of the convenience store we were all in. It was a clutter-filled place, as most of these old, very rural stores were. A little of this, a little of that. Just enough to keep the locals alive in between the long trips to hardware stores or journeys to fill their chest freezers from the Walmart in town. A stop in for water had stretched into homemade bbq sandwiches and then the dessert he held in his hand.
My co-driver, Jasin, and I talked with them about the hurricane, the flooding, and how I’d bent the law, slipping past heavy equipment on a few closed roads just to make it there. Things were still in sad shape. We far too often heard the same stories: how the media was underrepresenting fatalities and property damage, and that FEMA wasn’t helping. We just listened. Entire neighborhoods were gone; the only evidence of their existence were gas lines and other utilities sticking out of the ground like survey-placed toothpicks. These sad, storied roads did not make the route.
“You’re fine here in North Carolina. But be careful if you end up in Tennessee. Them’s boys crazy.”
“We’re not going to Tennessee.”
He shrugged, twisted his beard a little in his hand, and told us he wrote a book about his life. The guy was cherry, so I bought a copy. He told me not to show the last page of the book to my wife. It was a picture of his butt.
A few miles later, and against previous advice, we found ourselves frozen in place in Tennessee staring down the angriest minivan driving redneck in the world. For once in my life, I shut my trap and decided I better just get the fuck out of the road. Boy. We pirouetted the Volvo awkwardly off the intersection onto the gravel shoulder next to a small castle-rook-looking road marker thing. The Monterey steamed by. Angry guy’s entire family was with him. He didn’t even look at us. He just stared forward, leaning over fat meaty hands that gripped the steering wheel to death. It’s like he was driving in a storm, and he couldn’t see anything in front of him. I remember thinking his ears looked really big. In the rearview mirror, his taillights disappeared into a fog of dust.
It was a grim reminder that humanity is what it is. Onwards.
Despite the run in, curiosity still ruled. When we saw an old Volvo and an old Benz S class sitting in the grass, we tested the Volvo's brakes and turned around and began crunching up the gravel driveway slowly.
A stone two car garage stood off the house. It was two stories tall, covered in vines, and overlooked a vast valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The name is apt. The haze of a damp and dreary morning rose off the valley, casting their visual wares in a faded blueness.
The gravel crunched as we pulled up and shut the car off. A man was in the second stall at one of those white metal outdoor tables. He had a notepad, some paper, and his laptop. He looked up and smiled at us before getting up and beckoning us in. He was tall, lean, and looked like loved being outside, especially if the outside was somewhere new. His hair was gray, his beard was white, and his eyes were filled with invitation. He stood up, walked out and enthusiastically beckoned us in out of the rain.
"Can I offer the two of you some tea?"
A Citroën sat beside him in the garage, gold and clean, its paint catching what little light broke through the clouds. It wasn’t restored, just cared for. It was the kind of care that happens slowly over years. He told us the car wasn’t supposed to be his. A friend had borrowed money, left the Citroën as collateral, and never came back. When he realized what had happened, he said he couldn’t be angry. The car had grown on him. He called it temperamental, elegant, a little absurd. Said it reminded him that not everything worth keeping has to make sense. I need a Citroën SM.
He asked what we were doing, and when I told him we were scouting roads for a rally, he nodded like he already understood. We must look and sound like travelers. He said he traveled too, sometimes for work, sometimes just to walk. Before we left, he brought out a business card. The thing looked like a life experience chart crammed onto one side, words so small they almost blurred together. The other side features books he had written. It seemed like he facilitated business between our side of the earth, and the other side. The man was well traveled, and well educated. Near the bottom, in the smallest font of all, it said “Walking Man.” Brilliant.
The highway is never the first choice, but it’s often the only choice. We’d hopped on to skirt around an area with some roads that were impassable by car. We were rewarded for our transgression with construction and traffic. A few miles into our lashing, we came upon a man. It was high noon at the peak of summer, and he was slowly plodding along like he felt it. The heat from the pavement shimmered in the distance and radiated up into the car. The man's gait was slow, hampered by flip-flops and what looked like a pack that was either heavy or had become heavy over the course of morning’s change to afternoon. Traffic agonized along, and we were barely catching up to him.
“J, when was the last exit?”
“I don’t know, maybe nine miles ago.”
I yelled through Jasin’s open window.
“Hey! Dude! You want a ride?”
I don’t remember what he said, but it was a short reply that led to him crawling over the tipped-forward front seat into the back of the car. His name was Nathan, and he’d been walking since morning. Maybe twenty-five or thirty miles on the interstate. No one had stopped to help him, and he hadn’t stuck his thumb out to solicit any. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular and hadn’t been anywhere in particular either. There was neither sadness nor happiness in his demeanor. He just was. He asked where we were going. I lied and told him we were headed to the next town up. We took him there, gave him some water, dropped him off in the underpass, then circled back to continue scouting our way out of Tennessee.
As often happens when scouting we were still way off our planned route. Every road on the Overcrest Rally is found the old-fashioned way. Maps and 10 hours a day behind the wheel. Scrawled all over them are notes from ahead of time and knowledge collected locally from people like the copper-shaded old man. Knowledge like staying out of certain areas, what roads are twisty, and what roads aren't worth the effort. Jasin, the ever-trusted navigator, recommended we leave Tennessee and head southeast back into North Carolina. The map, as it so often does, tells only a partial story. Roads are sometimes twistier than they seem, but usually never the other way around. The real mystery is always the surface. Sometimes you get roads like Rainbow Valley Rd or Grapevine Rd, two of the best roads I’ve ever discovered. Sometimes you drive down a fantastic road that looks like it’s going through on the other side. You need gas, but... it goes through. It’ll be fine. You’ll just snake through here, zip there, and bam. Great road discovered, time saved, gasoline found.
A lifted Toyota 4Runner that looked like it was straight off an overlander’s Instagram feed turned around in front of us to head back 30 miles the way we’d just come. Thirty miles of tight, twisty, epic, low-speed utterly fantastic gravel road. Thirty miles that took well over an hour to run. As the Toyota rolled by, it revealed a sign behind it: BRIDGE OUT.
We’d seen the sign before. With the hurricane, they were everywhere in North Carolina. At some point, we just started to ignore them, as they were more often than not wrong. The bridges were repaired, but the bridge-out pickup the sign guy was on vacation. This bridge, however, was definitely out and had been for a long time. We were out too. Of gas. On the other side of the bridge was salvation. Just a quick nine miles up the road to gas, snacks, and caffeine. We had maybe an eighth of a tank of fuel. It was enough by far if the bridge was there, but not enough by miles if we had to turn around.
The sun was getting lazy, and it was entirely possible that no one was going to come down that road again. It was a rural dead end, 30 miles to nothing. The only people stupid enough to go down it were just those curious enough to have a go. No one with good intentions is that curious after dark.
The bridge sat high above a 50-foot-wide riverbed. The water wallowed by neither impatient nor patient. The bed was filled with large, flat, slippery rocks. It was clear that it had been forded before, but maybe a long time ago. There was a slight ramp down to the water and a path leading out on the other side. Downstream, the water got angry, but here, under the bridge itself, it was just... indifferent.
I walked to the deepest point in between the two shores. It was about a foot deep in most places, and I was in the pool deep in one spot, right in the middle. Jasin and I stood together in the middle of the river.
“I don’t know, J.”
“We can make it.”
“...”
We threw rocks into the big hole, flipping them over so the slick side would lie on the riverbed. We planned a path and talked it over. I squished my way across the gravel road to the car and stood next to it. The water line on my pants was at the top of the engine grille. Not good. The snorkel for the air intake pointed down, below the headlight. We popped the hood, unscrewed it, and flipped it upside down. It now sat a couple of inches above the hood itself. There was only one thing left to do. My first true send it.
The precipice of personal glory stood just a few feet in front of the 142. I’d read about and interviewed people who had done many cool, heroic things in the Darién Gap, on the Pamir Highway, or any other numerous desolate roads. I too wanted to be cool and heroic, so I rolled onto the gas and lunged into the river. The nose of the car dove into the water first. The water was way deeper than expected. The Volvo lived up to its cultural nickname: a brick. Not accounted for in my pants-based waterline-to-car measuring device was a little something called physics.
Water surged higher than the river naturally flowed as the car pushed the water to the side, displacing it. The water was just shy of the snorkel, lapping at it. It didn’t register in my mind. All the things that could go wrong were not occurring to me. All I could think about was that I just needed to keep going. About halfway through, the car started to misfire, but it pushed on. On the riverbank, on the other side, as I screamed like someone who’d just won a war, the car died.
Jasin and I stood on the riverbank just a few feet off the waterline staring at the drenched engine. We’d managed to ford the river, but water had poured through the front grille. The car was now dead, and the battery was getting close. A flashlight into the snorkel told us that we didn't have water in the engine, which left just one thing: spark. A little brake cleaner on the cap, rotor, and points, and the car fired back to life. More celebrating, albeit slightly more cautious and reserved.
The Volvo climbed over a few downed trees that hadn’t made it very far in life, up the riverbank, and around a bend. Freedom. Until it wasn’t. The Volvo, Jasin, myself, and our hopes of gasoline and simple dreams of a dew and some beef sticks were immediately imprisoned.
“What the hell are we going to do about that?”
“...”
“...”
The physical manifestation of out of the frying pan and into the fire lay in front of us in the form of a closed, locked, and impenetrable problem. From the backside, we could see that the forestry gate had a sign. It likely read BRIDGE OUT or DO NOT FEED THE ZOO ANIMALS. The disbelief was defined by silence. I got out, walked up to the gate, and surveyed the situation. There was no way around either side. Not even if we had a truck. The bank flanking the T intersection that led to gasoline was steeply down on one side and up on the other. Going back through the river, while possible, would just put us back in the same situation we were in before. There was only forward. Either on wheels or by foot.
Standing in North Carolina with 30 miles and a river crossing one way and a locked forestry gate the other was not ideal, but, ever the optimist in rough situations, I remembered an experience I’d had a few years ago. I had visited my friend Michael in Ventura, California. We’d hopped in his 912 and went on a search for some dirt roads to film something, but I really think the real reason was no reason at all. Countless side roads that started out promising ended up at locked gates. They all had fantastical lock systems that allowed each individual person that needed access to the road to have their own gate. A simple combination lock wouldn't do the trick. We bobbled along one of our last-ditch efforts, the 4-cylinder, air-cooled engine clattering behind us. The view from where we ended up was stunning, a solid elevation climb. Ventura lay below us.
But there was a gate behind us. Beyond it, the road squiggled and looked like it did all the things you wanted to do. The padlock that locked the gate was one of those four-digit things. It was old and had been there a really long time. If I knew anything about humanity, it’s that it’s lazy. Even something as simple as putting four numbers into a padlock was work. I moved the first number one way and pulled. Nothing. I moved it back two and pulled. Freedom.
The North Carolina padlock did not have a code. It was a simple, heavy, thick-boy padlock. Its clasp was long and hooked through two eyelets and the edge of the gate. My hand reached out in slow motion while my brain told me, “There’s no way.” The Ventura memory was enough to make me try.
The Volvo was not great at drifting, but it drifted out and past that open forestry gate with the best rev limiter-bouncing clutch kick I could manage. It could have been bad, but only bad in the “you’re in America, how bad could it really be?” category. It’s a long walk to the gas station, but not insurmountable. Had it all gone horribly wrong, it just would have cost more time and a few miles off the soles of our shoes. A come-along could get the car out of the water had we stopped in the river. My greatest fear had been hydrolocking the engine, and it got close. But colloquially, close only counts in grenades and horseshoes. The car didn’t die, the gate wasn’t locked, the river wasn’t too deep. Luck had favored the bold, and we continued on.
The rest of the scouting mission was fun but uneventful and was capped off with a hot, sweaty, painful 12-hour drive to Missouri. The glory of your feats fades fast when it’s 95 degrees of southern humidity, the radio only works sometimes, and whoever bought the car originally got plaid instead of overdrive. It’s the worst kind of driving. The fun is usually all behind you. For scouting, there exists a silver lining. Everything you’ve found, everyone you meet, every double back to check out that thing, pays off when everyone gets to come drive it. It’s what makes the Overcrest Rally special. It’s found, discovered, and given back to the community to experience. It’s what matters most to me, that everyone has their own adventure. The best kind. A novel one.
Cheers and gratitude go to Jasin. A funny, endlessly optimistic, and reliable codriver. Thank you.
