Above the Pandemic
It was an apocalyptic kind of springtime. Winter’s retreat would normally signal the advance of tourist season, but in 2020, stores and restaurants were closed, downtown deserted.
My husband and I had taken to walking in the middle of the street while out with our dog, just because we could. We could easily hear the occasional car coming from what seemed like miles away, echoing along the empty streets.
Even our local stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway was closed—to vehicles at least—well into May, a month that would otherwise draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to ogle the freshly greened mountains.
Pandemic season had been full of once-in-a-lifetime moments of the most unpleasant sort, but the Parkway’s closure offered the chance to seize a joyful one. The road was closed to cars, but not to hikers or cyclists. So, on a sunny Thursday afternoon—the last day before our local section of the Parkway was set to reopen—we took advantage of the fact that the pandemic had severely cut into our paid working hours and headed to the mountains with a pair of borrowed electric bikes in tow.
Anyone who has experienced the Parkway in Western North Carolina knows that it’s not exactly a gentle uphill. We parked at Soco Gap, the saddle between Maggie Valley and Cherokee where U.S. 19 and the Blue Ridge Parkway meet. The gap sits at 4,340 feet, winding nearly straight upward for the next five miles to the Waterrock Knob Visitor Center, at 5,820 feet. That’s 1,480 feet of elevation gain in just under five miles.
Which seems like a good place to reiterate that we had electric bikes, and electric bikes are amazing.
An electric bike is not a motorcycle—rather, it’s a regular old bicycle with a battery-powered motor attached that requires you to pedal before the assist kicks in. Depending which power level you choose, that assist comes in the form of either a helping hand that still requires you to do the lion’s share of the work or of a supercharged kick that will basically climb the mountain for you. One drains the battery a lot more than the other, though, so we set our bikes on the lowest power level and started pedaling.
It quickly became apparent that all electric bikes are not created equal. The lowest setting on my husband’s bike evidently provided significantly more power than mine did, while my second setting was too powerful, an exponential increase in assistance over the first.
So we settled into a routine. We’d start out side-by-side, his bike would creep ahead, and then I’d bike solo for a while, breathing in the blue-skied views and fixating on the sparklingly wet greenery attached to roadside rock faces. Eventually, my husband would stop and wait for me, and we’d do it all over again.
It took about an hour to make it up to the Waterrock Knob parking lot, usually a dependably busy place any time the road is open. Several popular hikes start there, and if you don’t feel like walking, the parking lot itself offers the most epic sunrise/sunset experience around.
Today, though, it was empty. Not a single car, not a single person. We leaned our bikes against a tree and walked the exceedingly popular half-mile trail up to the knob, which overlooks Maggie Valley. The trail normally receives tens of thousands of visitors each year, but today, we heard no human voices but our own.
It felt like a moment to hold on to, one of those rare times when it’s almost possible to imagine how these now-iconic—and often crowded—places must have appeared to the first visitors making their way through the wilds. Eventually, though, it was time. We took some pictures to prove that it hadn’t been a dream, retrieved our bikes and set off for the downhill trek.
In one of my former lives, I used two wheels to go to class, work, the grocery store—anywhere, really—and would easily pedal 10 miles just going through my everyday routine. My bike felt like an extension of my own body.
These days, though, I rarely find myself atop a bicycle, and I have to admit I’d forgotten how purely thrilling it is to speed downhill, clear, half-chilled air whipping past your face, flashes of beauty reeling by as the wheels turn and the air moves and the corners of your face curve up, unbidden, a necessary expression of the joy that organically rises inside you as long as those tires keep spinning.
On the way down, there were no stops, no pedaling—just a smooth, fantastical 5-mile ride that ended back at the car after only 11 minutes.
When we returned home that day, the restaurants were still closed, the roads were still empty, and everybody was still trying to convince each other that virtual events are fun. But somehow, that reality felt different—more bearable—because we’d just had an adventure. I slept easy that night, dreaming of the view from Waterrock with eyes fixed forward, now able to believe that the next adventure really might be just around the corner.