I had done my homework on MapQuest and TerraServer. I knew where I was going and how to get there. In the latched saddlebag compartments I had annotated Internet maps, a sleeping bag, enough food—mostly beef jerky—to last a few days, water, a rain-resistant backpack and slicker, and well-worn hiking boots. I was headed to my past.
I reached the Nantahala National Forest before dark and took State Road 281 through the hills, the coiling blacktop like the ridges of a dragon’s back, the bike roaring up and down and around, my excitement growing with each turn. The cooler air dried my sweat-soaked skin. Shadows lengthened and the air darkened. On a hairpin turn, I spotted a sign that read WOLF MOUNTAIN ROAD. It was a narrow, blacktopped side road that curled up and out of sight around a fold of the mountain. Satisfied, I headed back into more commercial areas and a cheap hotel that catered to motorcyclists.
Bedding down, I lay staring at the ceiling. The sheets were older than I was. The room probably hadn’t been painted in decades. But the place was surface clean, and for what I wanted to pay, that was probably okay. Still, the carpet smelled of mold, stronger than the reek of the fresheners the housekeeping crew used, and I couldn’t turn off my nose or my reflexes. When I finally slept, it was only poorly. I was hyperalert on some deep level, a sensation that seemed to prowl around inside me like a nervous, edgy cat, feeling the excitement still gathering, pulsing through me.
I was up at five, pretty much the only person awake except a waitress/cook at a Huddle House knockoff joint. I was so excited I could hardly think, and the breakfast of eggs and bacon I scarfed stuck about midway down and stayed there.
By dawn, the August heat was already in the high eighties, and I was tooling up 281. The sun, hidden by low clouds, threw diffuse shadows across the blacktop. Morning-cool air raced beneath my riding leathers as I turned onto Wolf Mountain Road, a winding asphalt tertiary street that morphed quickly into an unmarked narrow paved strip, and then to a two-rutted trail. The track was ground down and sloppy with mud from the last rains, scored with tire tracks from four-wheelers and off-road motorbikes. It wasn’t something my street bike was built for, but the Yamaha was in a good mood, agreeable to my spirit quest, as Bobby had called it, and I made okay time.
Wolf Mountain’s highest peak was more than four thousand feet above sea level, and the trail wound up and down at sharp inclines. I skidded and threw dirt and stone as I alternately gunned and braked my bike, balancing with my feet on my climb to the crest. I passed no one, saw no one. I was alone on the mountain. Totally alone. Climbing hard. Following my nose and some instinct I couldn’t name.
Once, when I took a break, I touched the necklace, the gold nugget that was the only thing I still had from the forgotten life before I was twelve. Holding the gold, its rounded shape a perfect match for my palm, I opened my mouth and sucked in the morning air, heavy with promised rain, pulling the scents in over the roof of my mouth, tasting, smelling, feeling in the way that worked so well for me. It was a method that had resulted in the other kids laughing at me until I learned to sniff with my nose only, like they did.
Taking off again, I breathed deeply as I roared along the track, through a lowlying cloud heavy with rain. Mist draped the landscape, hiding and revealing boulders, ferns, green-laden trees. The place smelled familiar. Felt familiar. My excitement grew. In the back of my mind a strange thought whispered, The world of the white man falls away.
I reached the crest of the mountain after lunch, sweating in the August heat and humidity even at such a high elevation, with the misty clouds burned away. I keyed off the bike and sat, listening to the hot metal pinging, my booted feet on the stony earth, breathing in the mist, letting it fill my lungs, my heart fluttering like a bird caught in a too-tight fist. Letting memory and reality merge.
The air was noticeably thinner, and the smells of hemlock, pine, fir, maple, and oak were stronger than the lingering smell of bike exhaust. Clouds were thickening in the east, and I knew there would be rain soon.
I stepped off the bike, locked it to a tree with a length of chain, hid my helmet in a pile of bracken, and grabbed up my supplies, sliding them into the backpack. And I walked off the two-track trail to the top of Horseshoe Rock. Standing in the lowering clouds, their mist snaking over the ridge and down into the valley below, I looked out over the world.
Horseshoe Rock was bigger than I had expected. Too big to see its scale in photographs. Bigger than the grandstand in a coliseum. Bigger than Horseshoe Falls in Canada. Bigger than anything I could ever remember seeing. Yet it was familiar. I had been here before. Several . . . no. Many times.
The sensation of a pelt rubbing against my flesh and bones grew.