Kissing the Dragon Tree
Off the Blue Ridge Parkway, across from Looking Glass Overlook is a trail that leads to Skinny Dip Falls and is part of the Mountains to Sea Trail. The MST trail runs more than a thousand miles across the state of North Carolina from the Outer Banks along North Carolina’s shoreline, to its end point at Kuwohi in the Great Smoky Mountains. Skinny Dip Falls itself is an interesting spot on the map. It is a waterfall that was irrevocably changed by Tropical Storm Fred in 2021. The bridge was washed away, and the once deep swimming hole is now partially filled with rocks and much shallower. All these facts I would learn after some time, when I became a hiker and a camper and followed my dreams of chasing waterfalls.
But in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was in the midst of a divorce the was partially delayed by the COVID shutdown of courts, and my now ex’s refusal to accept that our marriage was over. Stuck at home during the lockdown with kids doing school via Zoom and a spouse who I had already completed divorce mediation with, I started joining hiking groups on Facebook. I bought myself a pair of sneakers as a birthday gift. Overweight and physically sick from the stress of an ever-increasing oppressive home environment, combined with the pandemic and the depression of ending a 20-year marriage, I dreamed of going out into the woods one day. I started bookmarking places I wanted to see on these Facebook pages. One of those places was the Dragon Tree. The Dragon tree is a tree off the Blue Ridge Parkway, on the trail to Skinny Dip Falls, and people say it is shaped like a mythical dragon. It was just one of many places that captured my imagination in those heavy days.
The problem was that I barely drove on the highway. My ex-husband had convinced me years ago that I was a bad driver and I had not really driven on a major highway in 15 years. I had serious anxiety about driving on busy roads. How would I ever get to see places like the Dragon Tree? It didn’t matter. I still bookmarked the posts on Facebook, put on my sneakers, and started walking slowly on nearby park trails where I could meet people and still social distance.
By 2023 I was driving everywhere. Forest service roads, across state lines, and a little bit into the city of Atlanta, but not much (if you live near Atlanta or any big city, you know how daunting that can be). I was checking off items on my new Bucket List. My divorced, single-mom-of-three, slightly overweight, and out of shape college professor Bucket List. I had learned to drive on highways, hike and camp, and even backpack overnight. I had acquired real hiking shoes and trekking poles. Camp stoves and tents. A sleeping bag and a mat. And I was seeing places I had barely hoped to see in my ‘before life’.
I made a plan to visit my brother in Virginia in the Summer of 2023 – via a drive up the Blue Ridge Parkways, and along Skyline Drive before descending from the upper elevations to the sprawling suburbia west of Washington, D.C. I carefully mapped out my planned route and booked a campsite on the Parkway and one in Shenandoah National Park on the way. This was going to be my first really long drive by myself. It was the end of June and a few days before the Eid-ul-Adha holiday, when Muslims celebrate the willingness of Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son and many Muslim complete the annual pilgrimage to Makkah in Saudi Arabia, to circumambulate the Kaaba, a square building purported to be the first house of worship built by Abraham to worship one God. In a way, I would be making my own solitary pilgrimage, driving and camping along one of the most beautiful roads in America, stopping to pay my respects to elderly trees and sacred waterfalls along the way, including finding the Dragon Tree.
The drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway is slow and winding. Cell phone service is scattered and there are only so many places to enter and exit to find food or gas. You want to have plenty of both and a car that is in decent shape. There also aren’t many bathrooms. That is something you will have to figure out for yourself. The views are plentiful and so are the hikes. I pulled the minivan off at so many overlooks I lost count, taking photos of each sign with the elevation marked on it, documenting every step of my pilgrimage. Of course, I had my list of planned stops carefully typed out on my phone.
I pulled into the Looking Glass overlook around mid-afternoon, crossed the road and found the trailhead. Immediately the foliage enveloped me, and the shade of the forest blocked out most of the sunlight. The Dragon Tree is not terribly far down the trail at all. Like Forrest Fenn’s hidden treasure in the Rockies, it is less than 500 feet from the busy parkway. The tree is bent, curving into a V-shape with two branches, then rising upward. The V-shape forms the “head” of the dragon, and the branches are horns. Some people believe that the Dragon tree may be a trail-marker tree created by Native Americans to mark the presence of a nearby water source. Others think it is too young to have been shaped by indigenous people and it probably just naturally occurring.
It doesn’t really matter. I did it. I made it to the Dragon Tree and gave it a big hug and a kiss. And I made it to the Skinny Dip Falls, and many other waterfalls. I camped by myself, setting up at dusk in Crabtree campground with deer looking on with bemusement. I drove onward the next day to Shenandoah, setting up camp in Big Meadows. I helped two recent college grads from near my childhood hometown in New Jersey start their campfire and hiked the next morning to Dark Hollow Falls before making my way to my brother’s house.
When I arrived, it was before he and his wife were off from work and picked up the kids. It was Eid Day. I treated myself to chai and Halwa Puri at Desi Breakfast Club. Being at a camp site by myself doesn’t really garner that much attention. But being in a restaurant by yourself as a middle-aged woman does. In the South Asian community in particular, one will get looks. The biggest lesson from my solo road trip was getting truly comfortable with solitude. A friend commented to me on my return: “Oh, I could never do that – be with myself and my own thoughts for that many days.”
My first thought was, how sad that you do not love yourself enough to sit with you in all your glory and despair. Everyone should take time to sit with their own thoughts and memories without feeling the need to flee.
Driving the Parkway and kissing the Dragon Tree was one of many parts of my journey to unlearn years and years of cultural and social conditioning that kept me from leaving my marriage and rediscovering myself, the person I had buried in an attempt to keep the peace for nearly two decades, while working and raising kids, and taking care of in-laws. Driving the parkway was the ultimate freedom to just be. It was about the slow-paced journey and the endless pullovers to gasp at the view. The journey was an outward, physical manifestation of the inward journey I had been on for the past few years, trying to rediscover who I was before I became a bride at 19 and a mom at 23. My father asked me a year ago if I always wanted to be out in nature. Yes, I said. Always. I just set aside things I really wanted to do, for a really long time, except for short summer vacations with the kids here and there.
Sitting with my chai at the Desi Breakfast Club on Eid day, I was a bit of a pariah. A divorced Muslim woman out on the vast roadways of America camping and hiking by herself. I was finally fully content and accepting of my pariah status that summer. I was no longer terrified of being alone. I stopped looking for someone else to please and take care of and started to fully create my own happiness, one bookmarked location at a time. Every Eid, I try to celebrate with a little bit of time spent in the woods, immersed in the sounds and smells of nature. I continue to kiss trees and marvel at mushrooms, returning to the state of childlike wonder that none of us should lose but is often wrung out of us by societal expectations and the pressures of being successful, whatever that means.
In the Fall of 2024, Hurricane Helene made its way to North Carolina, devastating many towns and causing extensive damage to the Parkway. The Dragon Tree remains. I hope one day you are able to take the slow drive and visit the Dragon Tree, letting your own thoughts come and go, and breathe sweet mountain air, unlearning and unraveling social conditioning that has kept you stuck in some way as well. If you see the Dragon Tree, give her a kiss for me.
Anisah Bagasra Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Science at Kennesaw State University who specializes in behavioral health research in the Muslim American and African American faith communities. She teaches a wide range of psychology courses and mentors students engaged in undergraduate research with a focus on culturally competent research in minority communities. When not teaching and conducting research, she hikes, writes poetry, paints, and makes jewelry. Her landscape paintings are inspired by her explorations of nature in the Southeastern United States, and her interior paintings are inspired by Mughal and Persian miniatures, Orientalist art, and the experiences of being a mixed-race woman.