We left Cumberland Falls State Park on Wednesday and, again on Susan’s advice, stopped at the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee. Basically, everyone should do whatever Susan says. The museum is a remarkable exhibit of artifacts and buildings collected by a man named John Rice Irwin over the course of 50 years. Irwin traveled Southern Appalachia extensively, talking to folks and collecting stories among other things. A goal of the museum is authenticity and, in fact, the buildings are not recreations; they have been moved from their original locations throughout Appalachia—some of them with the original furniture and tools and other artifacts of everyday life still in them. All of which you can see from the front door because these homesteads are tiny. There’s too much there to try to tell here, but there were notable exhibits… Six by nine foot free standing jail cells from Madisonville, Tennessee, made in 1874 and containing four steel bunks each… The enormous display of bluegrass and homemade instruments showing that people will make music no matter how little they have at their disposal to do so… The whole building dedicated to Harrison Mayes a crackpot Christian whose goal was to erect huge concrete crosses waxing poetic about Jesus all across this country and the rest of the world. He hoped to have his concrete crosses on each of the planets in our solar system by 2020… The man and woman playing guitar and mandolin on the porch of the Homestead Smokehouse who did a Carter Family tune for us at Chris' request... The peacocks and goats and chickens and horses milling about… Mark Twain’s family cabin which was brought to the museum from Possum Trot, Tennessee… There are 36 buildings on the property; it would take hours or days to go through them all attentively. We enjoyed what we had an opportunity to see.
We continued on to Smoky Mountain National Park, which is accessed by a drive through Pigeon Forge and then Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Take equal parts Wisconsin Dells and Nascar and Walmart on Christmas Eve; add volume, neon, ill-fitting outfits (many of which are animal print and made of lycra); stir in traffic and Confederate flags and cigarettes and that’s the tip of the iceberg in these towns. You can see the mountains. You can feel the elevation in your ears. But still you must inch past Cooter’s Dukes of Hazard Museum and Ripley’s and theaters advertising shows about the Hatfields and McCoys. Chris commented on the bizarre need to surround what little American wilderness we have left with grotesque symbols of American progress. Eventually, this tax gives way to the most beautiful place I’ve been in this country.
The park is enormous, and we camped on the North Carolina side, near Cherokee, NC, in Smokemont Campground. Those who are campers among you should know that the bathrooms are among the nicest I've ever seen: clean, flush toilets, large sinks, powerful air dryers. Those who are campers among you should know there are no showers in SMNP. None. So that may explain why we look the way we do in the pictures.
Our campsite was forested mountain on one side and babbling brook on the other, and while there were others in the campground, it was quiet and peaceful. I was able to read and Chris played his guitar by the fire night after night. Campers are friendly so we know there was a couple from Florida that was heading north in the direction from which we had come and another couple who had their grandson with them, although they forgot a second tent for him. Forgot? Chris and I worried that he had been kidnapped, but he was a teenager which made the tent thing weirder but the likelihood of his having been nabbed more remote. In any case, I was relieved when his parents showed up the next day with another tent. At one point, I was gathering kindling and looked up to realize that Chris had hung a shingle on a tree and was open for business. Some man from Peoria had sat down at our picnic table and was telling Chris that he hadn't seen his father in eight years. Fortunately for Chris, who doesn't like small talk let lone big talk, we had an appointment with some horses and had to leave.
This ride was an hour through the woods and up a mountain trail and, unlike our experience with Ray, we stayed together the whole time. It was fun to go up and down and we crossed the river on horseback. I expected this to be the place in our lives where our near death kayaking experience met our near death Mexican horseback riding experience and we would surely die but we didn't. Chris and I may be becoming better travelers.
There are elk. Their antlers are enormous and still covered in velvet and we had the good fortune and opportune timing to get close enough for some lovely pictures. They're a protected species and are carefully monitored by the Park Service. There are also deer and non-indigenous wild boar and coyote and wild turkeys. And there are bears and we saw them in a section of the park on the Tennessee side called Cades Cove. It is an 11 mile one way loop that maintains about 15 original structures from the mountain town that existed before the Park Service moved people off the land. A cove is a relatively flat area on a mountain top on which people can farm and live. People lived in Cades Cove until 1944, almost 10 years after the creation of the park. When Tennessee and North Carolina bought the land to give to the federal government, some people refused to sell. Eventually, the government was able to purchase their land and allowed people to remain in their homes until they died. Several private homes, churches and barns remain. One Methodist church was built with two doors, because it was built using the architectural designs for another Methodist church where men and women were so segregated that they filed into church through different doors. This church didn't follow the practice, but they did follow the architectural designs. There is a historic grist mill along the loop and I was brought to a distant memory of trip(s?) to the Mill Race Inn. But the memory is too vague; I remember only weeping willows and swans, nothing at all about what a mill is. So I re-learned. We did the loop of the cove twice because we had been told that the bears and elk graze in the early evening and we would know when someone saw one because there would be a bear jam. We saw in two separate spots an adult female bear with two or three cubs and were able to get out and move in relatively close to them. The cubs jump up into the trees and then slide right back down to the ground and tromp around behind their mother like all children do. The adult bears seem largely indifferent to the humans that surround them, although the notices throughout the park about it being bear habitat and how campers should respond if a bear becomes aggressive makes me think it is not always so. I had decided that I was going to be a good sport if we didn't see any bears. While I'm a little disappointed to not get to show just how sunshine-y I can be, I'm more happy that we saw them.
We're in Asheville now, staying at a bed and breakfast so named because there is a bed and we did have breakfast but it probably is not exactly what one pictures when they hear the term. More soon...
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