This past July, after my reading at Malaprop’s in Asheville, I decided to spend a few days in the Smoky Mountains. My trip to Great Smoky Mountain National Park was significant and memorable for a couple reasons. First, I got to spend time with my friend Tim, his wife Mindy, and their infant daughter. Tim was one of about a half-dozen people with whom I shared a double-wide trailer outside Kalispell, Montana, in 2002. Sometimes, I can’t believe that’s a sentence I can even type – I lived with seven other people in a double-wide trailer in Montana for a year when I was 24. That time seems long ago, and it was quite special to me to have Tim and Mindy there at my reading in Asheville. (Tim now works for the NPS in the Smokies.)
Also (and here’s the part you are not going to believe), my July trip to the Smokies was significant because I had never been to the Smokies before. If you’re growing up in Nashville and you want to go to the mountains, the Cumberland Plateau is the closest option. Plus, I’d always heard that Great Smoky Mountain National Park is crowded with tourists and traffic jams. No thanks, says I, I’ll just muck around on the Sewanee Perimeter Trail.
However, no one can deny that the Smokies have a powerful mystique about them. Plus, my latest project focuses on how Americans/Southerners view the wilderness – how we interact with it, fear it, commodify it, and ultimately love it (though our love often seems bizarre, elaborate, and more than a little dysfunctional). The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is pretty much the epicenter of bizarre human/wilderness interaction, so a visit was imperative.
I loved it. The weather was nice and cool. The people-watching was excellent and, once we got about a quarter mile in on any trail, we felt like we had this vast, breathing wilderness to ourselves.
Last night, late fall arrived in earnest. It is chilly and windy outside. The yellow leaves are bright against the backdrop of a stormy sky. I am reading Horace Kephart’s lost novel Smoky Mountain Magic and wishing I could wake up cocooned in a sleeping bag in one of the hollers Tim and I explored this summer. I keep thinking of the remnants of farms and foundations that we found there; graveyards where people who lived back in those mysterious mountains were buried long ago. But, I also think of RVs and leaf-peepers and winding highways. Thinking of that space where people converge with the wilderness or their idea of it, here are some shots of my trip to the Smokies in July.
Doubtful, but entirely possible since most park visitors never leave the road.
Remnants of a house with a dog trot, about 4 miles in on the Boogerman Trail
Tim and I sat alongside this burial plot far off the trail and ate a lunch of string cheese, fruit cups, and Gatorade. I wondered how long it had been since these bones had enjoyed company.
Clingman's Dome at dusk. We drove there.
Today's human settlements in the Smokies. Note odd juxtaposition of amenities.
Erin E. Tocknell 