Chasing the Dragon

The Fugitive, Natural Bridge, and a lot of twists

The American obsession with cars caught me at an early age. My grandmother drove a green 1973 V8 Mustang with a vinyl top, and despite the ferocious ugliness of that road beast, I was enchanted. In the rain, we’d go driving in it to hear the rain patter on the roof, feel the roar of thunder and flinch at the flashing forks of lightning. On holidays, we’d go on rides in my great-uncle’s Ford Model A with a rumble seat. I drove a lot of Mustangs as a young fool, and later cut the curves in a Mini Cooper as an older fool. My first car was a wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides, and the car I drive now is one of the few wagons still made, a Subaru Outback.

I heard of the Tail of the Dragon when I owned the Mini, which was slower than my Mustangs but much more fun to drive. What it lacked in torque, it made up for with acceleration and handling on the concrete cloverleafs of the New Jersey urban wasteland, where onramps to highways are a luxury, and jughandles are what you get instead of a turn lane. The Tail of the Dragon is the name given to a stretch of Tennessee State Highway 129 along the North Carolina border, which boasts 318 curves in 11 miles. For Mini Cooper drivers, it was a destination vacation.

Unfortunately, my Mini was a lemon and I never took it on many road trips after the 36,000 mile warranty ran out. To attend a friend’s wedding, we drove to Lookout Mountain in Georgia, which touches the other end of Tenneessee near Chattanooga. The road up and down that mountain is sharp and curvy, and I managed pick up BBQ at the bottom and get it to our hotel room at the top while the brisket was still warm, without flinging sauce all over the interior. I also drove the car to West Virginia to see the Mothman Museum before it began suffering engine woes. I’ll never buy another BMW product again. It was fun to drive, but so are many Japanese cars, and I’ve had better luck with them.

I remembered the Tail of the Dragon when we planned our trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway, and noticed the proximity between 129 and the end of the BRP. When we finished the trip with time to spare—due to sore legs from climbing up and down to Crabtree Falls, which cut into the hikes I had planned—the trip veered toward Cherokee, North Carolina, where I’d learned there was a roadside attraction I just had to see.

The Fugitive is a favorite film of mine. Like Mad Max: Fury Road and WALL-E, it tells its story mostly visually, and moves at steady, almost frenetic pace. There isn’t a lot of dialogue until Tommy Lee Jones bursts onto the scene, in what is likely to be his best-remembered role. Harrison Ford, so gabby in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, is practically silent here, befitting a person who was seen his beloved spouse die, only to be accused and convicted of her murder. I could write for a long time about this movie, and I’ve watched it many times, but I will just recommend that you watch it again, rather than rehash its rather simple plot and recount its many small touches that make for a perfect thriller.

I will remind you that the film’s first gasp-inducing set piece is the train wreck that hits Doctor Richard Kimble’s prison bus, and sets Inspector Gerard on his trail for the next two hours. The effects—minus the glow around Kimble as he jumps—hold up really well, because they were practical. They crashed the train into the bus and derailed it for the stunt, and it remains impressive to watch:

It’s just one of many many memorable scenes, in a film blessed with good writing, where everybody—except maybe the Chicago police who refused to believe that a “One-Armed Man” killed Helen Kimble—is smart. The bad guys, the snitches, the aid-and-abettors, Gerard and his marshals, and Kimble himself, are all pretty sharp. At minimum, they do what we would do, so we’re never rolling our eyes at his dumb luck. He makes his own luck, and he’s up against a worthy opponent in Tommy Lee Jones and his motley crew.

If you love the film, you can walk around Chicago and stay for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, but if you want to see the biggest living relics, you’ll have to head to Sylva, North Carolina, where they filmed the train wreck. You can read about how some of the practical effects were done at this page. But you can’t legally explore the actual wreck. It’s owned by the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad, and they left the wreckage there to be an attraction on their train ride. But if you pull onto the grass at 973 Hawyood Road, you can peek down the hill and get what, in sixth grade, we called a freeshow:

The wrecked bus and train alongside the tracks of the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad

If you zoom in on the white bus in the far left center, you can read “Corrections” painted across the top. The Illinois Southern diesel engine is easily recognizable. From here, we stopped in Bryson City for lunch at the aptly named Bryson Outdoors, where you can buy Darn Tough socks and a cold craft beer, and eat lunch from a good Mexican food truck across the street. I could dig this North Carolina mountain bike life. They have some gnarly trails. It’s about halfway between my family in New Jersey and Sarah’s in Louisiana, so we shall see. The Tail of the Dragon was another hour or so away, but that’s also where you can visit Cheoah Dam, where Harrison Ford “does a Peter Pan” after Tommy Lee Jones tells him “I don’t care.”

I didn’t know this when we were there, but the best view is from stop on 129, and I neglected to ask Sarah to watch and take a photo. She was too busy clutching the Oh Shit handle. Driving the Tail of the Dragon in a lifted wagon with steel skid plates on the underbody and a mountain bike racked on the hitch isn’t ideal. The good part was that they were doing construction and had a single lane for the entrance, and we were first in line behind a dump truck full of asphalt. Once he pulled off to the site, we had the whole road to ourselves, and a large pickup truck behind us, so no Mini Coopers, motorcycles, or Porsches were riding my ass while I took the curves.

A Subaru Outback is still a Subaru, and while I didn’t so anything that would make a rally driver smile, I enjoyed the road and Sarah didn’t want to kill me. On the way to the Dragon, a few Mini Coopers behind us encouraged me push the car a little bit, and I was surprised at how well it handled. There were photographers stationed along the road with banners advertising the website where you can find pictures of your car, and I chose the best one. They were all taken at a high shutter speed, so the car looks frozen on the road, but what can you do. If you stop at one of the biker lodges or tourist shops, many of them have dragon statues, one of which I immortalized in Vyx Starts the Mythpocalypse.

The Great Smoky Mountains were right there, and someday I will drive through them, to visit Cades Cove and other beautiful spots in the area. This day, we aimed the car homeward and stopped in Bristol, Virginia for a mess of fried catfish at Greene’s Seafood. The best I’ve had outside Louisiana, and some excellent fried clam strips, too. I wished we brought the travel fridge, I might have bought some of the smoked fish they had in the cooler. The next day, we made a short detour to Natural Bridge, because we’d passed it on a previous trip and decided not to stop, as rain threatened. We had good weather, so we paid the fee and walked down to the geological phenomenon that the state has turned into a tourist trap. I saw lights and speakers, and was glad they weren’t doing a laser show.

3 photos of Natural Bridge; some aged carvings of initials, including a dubious "GW" and a northern water snake swimming in the creek.

People have been carving their names into the rock here for hundreds of years, and someone carved “G.W.” and claimed it was George Washington. The Park Service is dubious. We saw a Northern Water Snake swimming in the creek under the bridge, and despite the gift shop’s poster which politely tells you that you have not seen a Copperhead, but a water snake or a juvenile Black Racer, a father told his kid that this was a Copperhead. At least they left the snake alone.

We made one more stop on our way home; due to traffic, we headed near Harper’s Ferry again, and pulled into their visitor’s center to get our National Parks passport stamped. I picked one up for Sarah along the BRP because she loves collecting badges, and every time I had to take a leak, I found a stop on the Parkway with a unique stamp. That will be my lure as I drag her around the country on more road trips. They have a stamp!