The Do-Over

May 17, 2021

The Grandview Lodge is tucked away on a quiet road that leads from Waynesville, N.C., up steeply onto the eastern edge of the Great Smokies. Across the road, a fast-moving stream rushes down the mountain. The walls and floors have been finished with a deep dark stain. The walls are decorated with fading decades-old black-and-white portraits of local folks. The lobby was furnished—littered—with odd antique household items. Classic hit tunes echoed faintly from an old stereo. A stack of dog-eared novels that were popular ten or twenty years ago sat on the front desk next to a sign that reads, “Forget your book? Read one of ours.”

We got to the lodge a week ago Friday, making several wrong turns, it’s well off the beaten track. The place is run by a husband and wife, who live with their children on the property. It was quiet when we arrived in early afternoon. The husband showed us the spacious dining area and a wide porch, furnished with old rocking chairs, that wraps around the house and looks out at the road. He named several local restaurants. The wife, in blue-jean overalls, showed us our room, more dark wood, austere but comfortable. I asked about morning coffee since we weren’t staying for breakfast.

When we returned in early evening I drove past the lodge and continued a couple of miles up the road, which twists higher and steeper. We both got nervous as the grade grew sharper. Looking back, the Smokies rose in the north just beyond town. The peaks are green only as high as spring has crept, then winter-brown to their summits.  As night fell they glimmered faintly blue-purple as a gentle mist engulfed them.  

Back at the lodge we saw a few more guests, but the place still was peaceful. We walked out to the porch and tried the rocking chairs. A chill was moving in, we didn’t stay long.

The lodge summoned for me images from odd bits of history I’ve read about those parts. Generations had passed since the place was built, likely as a stout bulwark against Cherokee and Choctaw war parties. Two centuries ago western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee was a violent wilderness. Scottish and Irish farmers, traders, and down-and-outers poured over the Appalachians to fill in the rough boundaries of the Mountain South.

We were there partly to reprise our ambitions for our 2018 road trip along old U.S. 66 halfway across America. As in this rustic spot, at all our stops we wondered what happened before we arrived. Our thinking, our priorities, our plans have changed, turned upside down since then. Sickness, the pandemic, and our move South have done that. But we still feel the spark.

But the reminiscing was a distraction. The main event of this two-day junket was my Black Rock mulligan, my do-over of the mountain climb (March 29 post) that I attempted with old friends, mostly other former Virginians. I fell short on that chilly mid-March Saturday.

We rose as dawn broke and drove west to the trailhead near Sylva, 20 miles past Waynesville. There I met up with a new friend, Mike, who gave up his competitive position in the Black Rock field that day to help as I turned hypothermic. He drove out from his home near Asheville for what for him was a conditioning climb he really didn’t need. I was counting on him to bail me out of my failure to achieve something I knew I could achieve.   

We scrambled forward up over the first climb, kicking rocks, then up a long straightaway. We slogged onto the switchbacks, up, up, then farther up, as the peaks to the west fell away below. We felt faint sunshine as the trail wrapped the mountain’s south side, then a bracing chill when we turned north. In just over three miles, at nearly 3,000 feet of elevation, we reached the break in the underbrush that opened to the final one-third-mile-long single-track chute trail, 650 feet of climb to the base of the summit. Mike pointed to the turn, which winds up nearly out of sight.

We pushed into the chute, searching for footing with each step, grabbing for roots, branches, rocks, finally stepping out to the highest point I had reached that March day. The rest is pure climbing. We tiptoed up and around and over house-sized boulders until we could slither onto the final not-quite flat surface of the top of the mountain.

We sat at the top for 30 minutes, stunned at the vastness of the green-blue peaks surrounding us that stretch across parts of three states. Far below us, eagles glided on updrafts. The air was still and silent, not a branch stirred. We picked out the specks of buildings bunched together in Sylva, five miles away. We bumped fists. Then we slid off the rock and down through the chute. I checked the Black Rock box.

As we drove home that afternoon I wondered why I bothered. Why does anyone, after missing the brass ring, reach for it again? In my memory the mountain stared at me. Wat does failure mean? Who wants to live with it? Mike and Sandy were willing. With a few tweaks I could climb Black Rock. I missed it once. So I went back.