Chasing the Dragon

By J. Trace Kirkwood

Day One, May 23, 2008

It's been a long time since I posted on Crossroads. In the winter, I was busy with my basketball website -- on the flip side of this one -- called Pennyrile Pick and Roll. Plus, I've written several articles for a couple of sports magazines in recent months, and that has kept me busy. Those stories have to be accurate, truthful, and non-libelous, which are three things that make me work very hard. I just can't throw words out on the page and expect everybody to be hunky-dory with them.

Also, I endured one of the worst illness of my life starting late in April, and it kept me down for nearly a month. I started passing a kidney stone, which got stuck three centimeters from my bladder. Surgery, infection, a blood/tissue clot amplified the pain and misery. If I described much more the men reading the column would break out into cold sweats, cringe, and stop and click back to their favorite sports website (hopefully the Pick and Roll).

I spent nine days in that condition. It weakened me to the point that I was collapsed in a lawn chair in my driveway, sweating painkillers and anesthesia through my pale, clammy skin. I was so tired that I could just barely move, but doctor's orders dictated that I should be walking to keep my body from shutting down. As I sat in that chair it felt like a thousand pounds of pressure was pushing me to the ground. It would've been easy to go into the house, crawl into bed, and leave my fate to death or luck.

So, when we started on a family vacation on May 23rd, I wasn't sure if I was up to the travel or the activity. We were supposed to go to Colorado this summer for two weeks, but fuel prices forced us to scale the trip back to a quick drive down to the North Carolina mountains.

I had some sense of disappointment as we trucked east and south out of Bowling Green instead of west. I was disappointed until I met The Dragon. I've always associated the term "The Dragon" or "chasing the dragon" with heroin or the use of that drug until I met the dragon that straddles the mountains along the Tennessee-North Carolina state line.

The Dragon is U.S. 129 between Tallassee, Tennessee, and Topton, North Carolina. Motorcyclists and sports car enthusiasts have popularized the nickname of the road, and it is aptly named. The stretch crossing the mountain that forms the state line has 318 curves in 11 miles. It's a road in the sense that it is asphalt and has yellow and white lines, which are used to settle disputes among insurance companies, but it is a trail in the sense that engineers hitched a paver to a team of crazed mules and ran them through the mountains.

I met the dragon at 11:15 p.m. on the night of May 23rd. I had no idea what I was getting into, and for several minutes I was convinced that I made a horrible mistake. About halfway up the mountain I found myself wishing that I was chasing some other dragon, except I did not know of the road's infamous reputation and colorful nickname. Outside of several expletives I called the road, I arrived on "The Vomit Comet" because my kids were in the backseat pleading for me to stop and let them puke at the side of the road. There was no place to stop, so I told them to hang their heads out the window. They didn't and, thankfully, they held their suppers.

Worrying that I was lost, I breathed a sigh of relief when I found North Carolina Highway 28 in the darkness of midnight and towering hardwoods. NC 28 was no better than U.S. 129, and I later discovered that same people who named the latter call the former "The Hellbender," which is a tip-of-the-hat to a salamander found in the mountain streams of the region. The Hellbender is as curvy as 129.

We had a cabin reserved at Fontana Village Resort, which is located near Fontana Dam on NC 28. When we finally got there I collapsed into bed. It was my longest drive since my ordeal earlier in the month, and the twisting turning of those two roads took the last of my energy. As I lay in bed drifting off to sleep, I felt the swaying of my vehicle as if I were still driving. I remember fishing off a floating dock when I was a little boy. I was on that thing all day, and when I laid down to sleep that night I could still feel the bobbing of that dock.

I flinched out of sleep several times that night turning the steering wheel of my vehicle in some tight turn on the Dragon or the Hellbender. I was chasing the dragon in my sleep and wondered if the painkiller tormented sleep from my illness had returned.