Confession: I’ve never liked traveling on interstate highways. Not as a passenger, and especially not as a driver. And while I-40 isn’t the busiest east-west interstate in the nation (that distinction belongs to I-10), it’s the one I dislike most because it’s the one I travel most.
And while I hate being on I-40 anywhere near Memphis or Nashville or Knoxville, the section I do my best to avoid is the one that crosses the mountain to and from North Carolina.
Which is a problem, because my son James and his family live in Asheville.
I haven’t been to see them since Hurricane Helene devastated the region last September. You remember. Helene hit Florida first. It tore through Georgia and then unleashed its fury on east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Record amounts of rainfall caused rivers to overflow and destroyed roads, homes, farms and even entire towns. Utilities were shut down. Chunks of I-40 fell into the river. My preferred “backroads” route—Newport to Hot Springs to Marshall on Highway 25/70—was also impassable. More than a hundred people died because of that storm. It was a long, long time before the region became even marginally functional.
It may never be back to “normal.”
But traffic has been flowing across the mountain again for a while, with at least one lane each way open on damaged sections of the interstate. Word was that Hot Springs was rebuilding. The little town is beloved among outdoor enthusiasts and others partly because both the Appalachian Trail and the French Broad River run through it. Hot Springs was my favorite stretch-my-legs stop because its charming visitor center had clean restrooms and a friendly staff. I never heard whether that visitor center survived the storm.
But I was going to find out. I planned a five-day trip to Asheville for mid-June, looking especially forward to hanging out with my two granddaughters. I haven’t seen them since December when they visited Cookeville. We were going to have a grand time, hiking and biking and playing with the tiny kitten they’re fostering. He’s solid black and is named Tripod because he has only three legs. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
Hours before my departure, James and I discussed which route I should take. The idea of being wedged between eighteen-wheelers and massive construction equipment on I-40 made me uneasy, even with the 30 mile-per-hour speed limit. Should I consider going through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, from Townsend all the way to Cherokee? I’ve taken that lovely route several times, back long ago when I rode a motorcycle. But during the height of the tourist season, it would take a long, long time.
So Newport to Hot Springs to Marshall won out.
In late afternoon on June 18, I opened my phone to discover that a massive rockslide/ mudslide, brought on by torrential rains, had just closed I-40 from mile marker 450 in Tennessee to mile marker 20 in North Carolina. It was déjà vu all over again. Traffic was being rerouted onto I-81 all the way to Johnson City and then onto I-26 to Asheville. Those roads have been a bumper-to-bumper mess ever since Helene hit. The alternates to the interstates? Newport-Hot Springs-Marshall, of course. And Highway 441 through the Smoky Mountains.
There would be no visit to Asheville for me.
In tears, I suddenly and unexpectedly felt a kinship with grieving mothers who remained behind in the American colonies as their kids and grandkids followed Daniel Boone west through the Cumberland Gap on the Wilderness Trail, knowing they’d almost certainly never see them again. And, yeah, I know that’s overly dramatic. We have the postal service. We have the internet. We have cell phones and Facetime.
But I can’t quite get past the truth that the unforgiving mountain really does keep us from being together in real life.
(June 28, 2025)