There’s a tradition here, tucked into the folds of the Blue Ridge, older than pavement and older still than headlights. You won’t find it written down, but if you’ve ever lived in this part of North Carolina — really lived in it — you know what it is. It's the tradition of taking a date over the mountain, a ritual of ascent as old as young love itself.
Thomas Wolfe knew it. In Look Homeward, Angel, he and a girl walk over the mountain on foot, their boots crunching gravel and leaf litter, the town falling behind them like a childhood toy left out in the grass. The air cools with altitude. The moon catches in the pines. The whole scene feels half-remembered even as it’s lived. They don’t need a destination — the act of going upward together is enough.
Years later, the road gets paved, and the ritual finds a new shape. Boys with slicked hair and chrome-trimmed dashboards take their girls out after the drive-in, aiming their headlights up the slope of Town Mountain Road. The cars rumble and thrum — old Fords, Chevys with cut coils, Pontiacs with engines too big for their tires. These weren’t machines for subtlety. They climbed like thunder. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for in sheer presence. You didn’t whisper in a GTO — you shouted, you laughed, you grabbed third gear like it owed you money. And when you crested the ridge, when the view opened and the city lights scattered like fireflies beneath you, the noise faded. That’s when the windows came down, the voices softened, and hands found hands across the bench seat.
Then came the imports. The era of secondhand Hondas, zippy Datsuns, and five-speed Toyotas with nothing to prove. These were smaller, lighter, more precise — better suited for the switchbacks. Drivers learned to ride the torque curve, to downshift just before the bend, to let the car dance. You could hear the engine rise and fall like a voice trying to say something honest. Town Mountain became less about horsepower and more about timing. It wasn’t about showing off anymore. It was about feeling the road — and who was in the passenger seat — without anything getting in the way.
Somewhere in there, the ritual stopped being about any particular car. It didn’t matter if you were in a Civic or a Camaro. What mattered was the quiet tension of the climb, the closeness of two people moving upward together, the shared silence when you reached the overlook and didn’t quite know what to say.
And now? The future has arrived in silence. Electric cars glide up the mountain like ghosts — no revs, no shifting, just torque that pulls like a hand from the sky. The dash glows cool blue. The windshield reflects a face not so different from yours at seventeen. Maybe the car drives itself. Maybe the playlist is AI-curated. Maybe the date was set up by an algorithm. But still, they go up. Still, they pause. Still, there’s something ancient that hangs in the air just below the summit — something the mountain holds for anyone willing to rise above the town for a while and look back.
It doesn’t matter if you walked it, floored it, double-clutched it, or let the autopilot do the work. The shape of the ritual is the same. It's about that climb away from the ordinary, the hush that falls when the view opens, and the electric stillness — long before electric cars — of being with someone else in a moment that doesn’t need to be explained.
Some roads lead out. Some roads lead back. But this one — this one just leads up.