Bears Discover Fire

It’s funny, the Appalachians are gone but their ghost is in the roads. The route over Flat Mountain is patched together out of the old highways which followed the valleys, running close enough to parallel to make a natural switchback. You back-and-forth your way up what used to be Pine Mountain, Crab Orchard Mountain, Black Mountain, Clinch Mountain—all humped together now into one gravelly slope, invisible in the permanent fog. Low-range fourth or high-range second gear all the way.

Twenty miles up and east of Hazard there’s a little snow belt, which in the winter extends all the way down to the roundabout and the town. This time of the year, though, it’s no sooner noticed than gone. Then it gets too high to snow and too high to breathe all at the same time. I came out of the clouds at 2:10 A.M. and it was almost dawn. “Dawn’s dawn,” Janet used to call it, back when she used to ride with me, before the girls were born. Above one hundred thousand feet the days are nineteen hours long in the summer.

I was tempted to wake up the kid. Behind me and below, in the big mirrors, a sea of clouds stretched two hundred miles. Ninety percent of the atmosphere was below us. You never actually see Kentucky and Tennessee from up here, only their permanent cloud roof. The clouds are pushed in from the west by the jet stream and they pile up like foam along the west front of Flat Mountain for two thousand miles, from Maine to Alabama. It’s as beautiful from the top as it is gloomy from the bottom. The clouds ate the whole city of Lexington, not to mention Pittsburgh, and Huntsville, and a hundred little country towns that nobody remembers anymore, north and south.

I let the kid sleep and popped in Loretta Lynn. For some reason I like girl singers better up on top.

A few more hours of driving and the clouds are hidden under the bulk of the mountain. There’s nothing in any direction but stone and sky, bone-white and blue-black. The stars look like chips of ice, too cold to twinkle. It’s a hundred below outside and you’re at 122,500. This is where if you’re looking for landlobsters you start finding them.

The kid woke and sat up, rubbing his eyes. He didn’t say anything for forty miles and I appreciated that, because when you’re looking at the high top of Flat Mountain there is truly nothing to say. It’s my favorite part of the route. It gets flatter and emptier the higher you go. I always imagine it’s like Creation must have looked before they got to the plants and animals, and how it’ll look when it’s all over.

Toward the very middle of the high top I always play Patsy Cline, and if you don’t know why, don’t ask.

There’s no longer a sign of Knoxville. No longer a sign of Asheville. During the eight years of the Uplift, the constant high-frequency vibration from the dome expanding turned the soil to jelly, and most of it ran into the cracks opening in the ground or ran off the mountain in sheets like slow-motion water taking the trees and what was left of the towns with it. All the way in Nashville, you could hear the mountain groan. The high top looks scoured, with every once in a while a long shallow ditch filled with logs and leftover trash. These ditches are all that’s left of mighty forests and cities and it can’t help but put your pride into perspective to look upon them.

The road across the top of Flat Mountain is straight and the slope is gentle, less than 3 percent, up for forty miles, then down for another forty. The road jogs between old 23 and Interstate 40. This is where Flat Toppers can gear up and roll out, to gain back the time they spent sniffing steam at the Blue Balls.

The log ditches are where you look for landlobsters.

“My dad sold one once,” the kid said. He was looking hard for one, maybe thinking I would stop to kill it. He didn’t know how hard they were to kill.

Your dad must have swapped or stole it off a Flat Topper, I thought to myself, since they never wander down as far as Hazard, though I didn’t say this.

“He got a hundred dollars. Said they were descended from other planets.”

Actually, the real truth is better. When the Appalachians uplifted, it either proved or disproved evolution, depending on who you’re talking to. One thing it proved was that it doesn’t take millions of years for a new species to evolve. The first landlobsters showed up less than six years after the Uplift started, although they weren’t nearly as big as the ones today.

“Do you sell them?” the kid asked.

“Used to.”

“Wonder what they eat,” the kid said.

“Wood and glass.” At least they say they eat glass. I’ve seen them eat logs. They won’t eat anything alive but if they get hold of a man they’ll drag him off until he dies and then gnaw him like a dog with a bone.

It’s not often you see one on the road. The kid was watching the log ditches off to the side so he didn’t see it. I was listening to Dolly sing “Blue Ridge Mountain Boy,” a song they don’t play much anymore, and I almost didn’t swerve in time to hit it.