Minutes later, everything is enveloped. I can't see a goddamn thing--there could be a 10-foot tall black bear dancing the Can-Can in the middle of the road for all I know. My bike must likewise be invisible to drivers coming up from behind. I can barely see the yellow line--soon I'll have to stick my foot out and feel for the road. Before long, though, the road winds back down, the fog dissipates, and the air warms up. Then I'm off the Parkway and fumbling through local streets with a map I printed from Mapquest.

It doesn't take long to find Karl's house, a nondescript structure inconspicuously tucked at the end of a long driveway on a back street. Karl is fiddling around in the garden when I pull up and he walks over to greet me. The first leg of my trip is over--I have arrived.

Karl is in his early forties, with a youngish face offset by a gray goatee. He has an easy grin which he flashes whenever something amuses him, which is quite often. He's also very bright, his gift and his curse. The inner conflict between his emotional needs and his perceived duty to be rational is the defining force of his life.

He's certainly not alone--it's a problem of our time. Modern Man cannot exist as such without the benefits which rationality provides, but at the same time, rationality excludes the fundamental, ecstatic experiences that make us human, because these experiences don't make "sense." But more and more people like Karl are beginning to suspect that, while there's nothing wrong with ecstasy, there's something very wrong with the "sense" that fails to grasp the obvious.

"Protestantism is about dogma," says Karl, who grew up Presbyterian. "Catholicism is about rules. Judaism is about culture. Paganism is about experience. I've been going to a lot of pagan festivals lately. I won't tell you that I fit in perfectly, but it's an environment where it's okay not to fit in."

Of astrology, Karl says, "Whenever I throw runes, the rational part of my mind screams 'bullshit!' Of course, I don't say that to the people I'm with because that would alienate them. And maybe it is bullshit, but if it helps you feel more spiritually connected, what's wrong with it?"

What, indeed? Maybe we could all use a break from rationality--from living in our heads. There's no logical reason to go zipping around the country on a two-wheeled suicide machine, either.

When Karl's girlfriend Sherri gets home, we drive into Asheville to see what's going on. Swannanoa, where Karl and Sherri live, is midway between Asheville and Black Mountain, two arty towns with plenty of music, art, and dance festivals. When we arrive in town, we can hear the sound of drums beating in the distance. This turns out to be a pagan drum circle in full swing, right in the center of town. A ring of tattooed, dreadlocked, nose-ringed revelers beats African drums while others loop and whirl inside the circle. Some people are dancing with their eyes closed, lost in ecstasy. A few policemen look on, not interfering, no desire to make trouble where none exists.

A woman whom Sherri knows says, "Asheville is a little bit different from the rest of the country." This is certainly true; people here are friendlier, more open--none of that sullen hostility which pervades the northeast.

We walk around, digging the scene. By 1:00 AM, the party's over, and we all want to get some sleep anyway.

The next day, the rains move in. According to weather.com, they will stick around all weekend. This prediction proves correct; we spend a Zen weekend doing very little, just sitting on the porch talking and drinking tea. The meteorologists assure us that the rain will be gone by Monday, but the way it looks now, there ought to be an old Jew with a long white beard building a big wooden boat.

The rain dissipates on Monday morning as promised. On Karl's advice, I pack up and head south on Route 9 toward Lake Lure/Chimney Rock, a small tourist-town which is popular among bikers.

The main drag is a narrow street lined on both sides with shops and restaurants. The entrance to Chimney Rock Park is right in the middle of the main drag; the park is a natural area with hiking trails which wind upward into the craggy rock formations, towering over the forest below. At the end of the main drag is Lake Lure, unremarkable except for the mountains that surround it.

I get back on the Parkway around noon and head north. Some part of me which still craves safety and security wants to go home, but I know that as soon as I get there, I'll be restless to begin the next trip. This is foolish, I tell myself. There's nothing at home which is any better than it is right here. So I turn the bike around and head south instead, toward the Smoky Mountains.

The Blue Ridge Parkway continues for less than 100 miles, then it dumps me off onto Route 441, which goes through Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. 441 begins as an ordinary two-laner which follows a small creek, but then the Smokies open up, and the road rises above great gorges and valleys, lined with trees like green carpet. Then the road plunges down to meet them.

By 5:30 PM, I'm in Gatlinburg, a honky-tonk tourist trap town which is too crowded for my liking. I stop at a motel for the night--tomorrow I'll retrace my steps back to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The next two days are gray and misty as I head north; I can hardly make out the mountains in the distance. At gas stops, I exchange intelligence with bikers who are headed the opposite way, and get the same report from all of them: ugly sky, but no rain.

It's only 4:00 in the afternoon when I arrive at the last campsite on the Parkway, and I'm not ready to quit for the day, so I decide to continue onto the Skyline Drive despite my earlier objections, at least to camp for the night. Besides, after 10 days in biker heaven, I'm not quite ready to face Interstate 81. Just the thought is unspeakably horrific.

When I wake up at 8:00 AM the next morning, the road is shrouded in the same impenetrable fog that I saw on the Blue Ridge, so I break camp and ride down the hill to a roadside way-station where I can get breakfast and wait for the fog to clear.

I get there with a few minutes to kill before the kitchen opens. A hiker materializes out of the fog; he's small and lean with bushy brown hair and a full beard, a real road person. His pack looks like it weighs 35 or 40 pounds.

"Hope the food's good," he says. "I just hiked eight miles to get here."

"Eight miles before breakfast?" I say. "That's pretty hardcore."

"Not really," he replies. "I do around twenty-six miles a day."

"How many days in a row can you keep that up?"

"Five or six," he says. "Then I do a few lighter days."

A lady comes to unlock the door. The hiker leaves his pack outside, then we both go to the counter and order breakfast.

"That your bike out front?" the hiker asks.

"Yeah," I reply. "I've been on the road ten days. I started in Pennsylvania, rode down to see the Smokies, and now I'm on my way back home."

"I've been hiking for five months," he says. He mumbles and looks down when he talks, so it's hard to tell whether he's talking to me or to himself. "I started in Maine. See how far I get by October."

Breakfast arrives. The hiker opens little packets of butter, one after the other, smearing some on his pancakes, eating some right off the end of the knife. At 26 miles per day, he has to eat anything he can that's loaded with calories.

"I'm glad to see that not everybody is stuck in the corporate ant farm," I say. "I've seen a lot of people out here in the middle of the week."

"I'm from the Hamptons," the hiker says. "Most materialistic fuckin place you ever saw. I've lived all over--never seen anything like it. I paint houses in the winter, but in the summer it gets real expensive to live there, so I hit the road till the prices go back to normal in the fall. One year I lived in a tent for a month cause I wasn't gonna pay twelve hundred bucks for an eight hundred dollar apartment. If the yuppies I work for knew that, they'd feel sorry for me. Funny thing is, I feel sorry for them cause they're so fuckin miserable all the time."

We talk for a while longer, then the fog starts to clear and we're both eager to get going. We wish each other luck, but neither of us has asked for the other's name. What for? What difference does it make if his name is Bob or Larry or Steve? You are who you are, and that's all.

I get back on the Skyline, but the fog returns almost immediately, so I get off onto Route 33, which takes me down into Elkton, below the fog, and onto 340. Route 340 turns out to be a very pleasant alternative to I-81--it's a pleasant little road that winds through farms and small towns. One gas station I stop at has hunting supplies for sale, and a CD on the counter with guys in hokey cowboy getups, titled Saddle Pals with Jesus. Ah, God! We're in the heartland now.

I finally get into 81 in Front Royal, Virginia, and it's a long, wet ride under overcast skies before I reach Pennsylvania. At one point, the water spray from the truck ahead of me causes my motor to misfire, so I pit-stop at a Harley dealership to buy a new set of plug wires, which I install in the parking lot. The boot on my rear wire must have been leaking, because the terminal underneath is a rotten lump of rust.

I get back home at 7:00 PM, ready for a shower and a warm bed. Not a bad ending to the last road-trip of the season before the long, dark winter closes in.