The mountains here are ancient. Once, millions of years ago, they stretched snow capped peaks as high as the Rockies. Time, and the water and wind that it carried, has dulled their sharp peaks into gentle, rolling earth. Now, well-worn and wrinkled, they descend back into the folds of the earth.

These mountains are the deepest blue, a color of shadows, and bear the name of their color. As they undulate towards the horizon, their deep blue fades so the furthest mountains are almost the same shade as the overcast sky. Like an unmade bed, their wrinkles and folds are soft, cradling one of the most biodiverse regions in the temperate world. When glaciers retreated at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, they left the vestiges of a much colder climate in the spruce-fir forests that now blanket only the mountaintops. The widely variable elevation of these mountains supports the growth of forests that are usually restricted to northern climates as well as one of the richest concentrations of salamander biodiversity on Earth.

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, I feel the magnitude of the mountains as the road traces their contours. I am on a large scale now, observing passing mountains and counting time by the wooden signs that mark each passing mile. Ahead, the road is blocked because of snow and I continue on foot.  

There is the chatter of a stream alongside the road, swollen from winter melt. If you were to sit along its banks, you would be hidden from the road, sheltered within the arms of drooping rhododendron and the trunks of young trees. I descend towards it and sit in a hollow within the roots of an oak, the pull of the water an inch from my feet.

From a car traversing the Parkway, you see only bare trees and thin, spreading grass that clings tightly to the earth, ducked beneath oncoming wind. But there is so much more to see. It is winter, and most living things have retreated from the cold; it is still apart from the water, the rush of life slowed, its colors muted. There is a skeleton of Queen Anne’s Lace here, a cluster of stonecrop cascading towards the stream bank, sumac holding only a bundle of drupes and, beneath it all, a blanket of last fall’s leaves. Most of the green is from ferns that line the water and rhododendrons crowded above them.

But the plants whisper of spring. I can smell their murmurs as the soil thaws, a yawn of life stretching from slumber. Just beneath the leaves is the growth of new ferns. They are curled into themselves, yearning and impatient as if within a moment, their coils could spring open to unravel skyward. But for now, they wait until spring brings warmer days.

Back along the road, there is more water, locked into crystalline ice as it cascaded down a rock face. Even this ice speaks of spring; as I walk closer I can hear the rapid drip of water released from its tips. Beneath the ice, melting water mimics the flow tadpoles, rushing across the rocks and into the soil below. Clouds are gathering overhead and across the mountains; they will release more water tomorrow. I feel the mountains opening in anticipation of rain, readying themselves for water that will flow through their veins to feed the growth of spring.

The Blue Ridge Parkway grew from the need to employ workers during the Depression mixed with rising rates of automobile ownership among American families. Stories like Kerouac’s On the Road and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance speak to the way that road travel is embedded in the American imagination; in a road trip, the road is as much a destination as the journey itself.

The roadway of the Blue Ridge Parkway, situated within a narrow corridor of National Park land, offers travelers a scripted view of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains within a frame of a car window. There is inherent duality in that interaction, where the “nature” exists on the other side of the glass. To leave your car is to become part of the narrative of a changing landscape where time is measured by seasons, the thawing of ice, the ebb and flow of mountains.