“One of them hard surface roads like they have below the mountains? Why, Lord have mercy, nobody a-livin’ could put one of them through here.”
The Blue Ridge Parkway did something for my family that we could not reliably do for ourselves: it kept us quiet. During the North Carolina portion of my life, which ran from late 1989 until 2002, I came to think of those long drives as the only workable truce my parents ever managed. Everyone faced forward. The curves kept my bellicose father, who was driving, sufficiently occupied. The overlooks gave us sanctioned pauses, a reason to stop and take a leak without having to say why you needed to stop.1
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