To and Froward

As I drove away from the urban East Coast it didn’t take long for the Great Smoky Mountains to live up to their name:

I stopped in a grocery store for breakfast and it was immediately apparent that I was outsider. Maybe something to do with the dress and Air Jordans because I hadn’t spoken a word before the two boys working there asked me where I was from and started telling me about how they’re actually much older than they look. Lol. Back on the road I touched base with Sheridan Roberts, head of the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Smokies. She met me at the park entrance but not before I passed through the town of Gatlinburg:

WTF? Um, where am I? Who knew there was such a cross section of through-hikers and Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum goers? Gatlinburg is also the number one city in the country to get married, as it turns out. Take that Vegas!

Sheridan took me to my bungalow where I met my two of my neighbors, Shaniqua and Ben, and got settled in. In the course of giving the place a semi-thorough cleaning I came across two spiders that looked suspiciously like the Brown Recluse, a poisonous spider known to inhabit the GSMR buildings. I got one outside on a stick but the other one’s gone rogue, so, there’s that.

I also got a bit of schooling on the Smokies. Here are the highlights: 1) GSM is a rainforest! 2) Black Bears. Lots of ’em. But you only have to worry if they’re silent because that means they’re hunting you. 3) GSM is the most visited National Park in the country. The touristy drives are so popular that you could be waiting in a traffic jam of vista peepers for six hours on a five mile loop. I can’t help but think about Robert Moses with this one. Would the parks have figured out a better mass transit system if not for him? Some of the parks out west are train accessible but not the Smokies. 4) There are touristy towns at both the North and South entrances to the park. The Southern one is Cherokee themed. 5) People from all over the world come to GSM in early June for an event known as Synchronous Fireflies. Visitors have to enter a lottery system just to get into the park on evenings when the fireflies congregate. Perfect. Timing.