Great Smoky Mountains (i): Gatlinburg, Charlie, & Rocks

This has become kind of my de-stress formula: drive somewhere alone, hike, listen to a lot of This American Life. I've found its effectiveness lies in exhaustion and diversion. Long drives and strenuous hikes are draining to the point where my ability to concentrate is reduced to single subjects - staying awake at the wheel or my next step. During stretches of drives without the threat of spontaneous naps, TAL is so thoroughly immersive that my own thoughts and feelings are replaced by those of the people in each episode. In recent years, it's become a good way to clear my head. I've been in need of some decompression, so I undertook a quick and dirty road trip this weekend. The first for my new car, perhaps of many.



On Friday night, I took a nap for a few hours after work and left my house at around 1am. I was heading to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. I drove through the night and arrived at the outskirts of the park just before noon. Before I go into anything else, I need to point out that Gatlinburg (the town just outside one of the main entrances to the park) is utterly repulsive. Imagine a trashy beach boardwalk mixed with a county fair and spread it out over a 10 mile stretch of road and you'll have an idea of what this town is like. Kitschy amusements and rides, arcades, novelty attractions, souvenir shops, untold numbers of KFCs, every manner of mini-golf courses - all rendered in oppressively bright, garish primary colors. I couldn't fathom what the hordes of tank-top clad, overweight white families were doing in this nightmare of uncultured consumer purgatory right in the shadow of the Smokies. The only redeeming thing about this place was the abundance of Chik-fil-As.

When I finally passed through Gatlinburg and entered the park, the byways were still pretty clogged with families milling about. It wasn't until I got to the section of the Appalachian Trail that I was headed to that the crowds thinned. I was hiking a 10 mile section to a place called Charlie's Bunion. So named for some historical guy and a foot injury or something. The bunion in question is a rocky outcropping along a high headland a couple of miles off from the AT. This section runs along the peaks such that it feels like walking atop the spine of the Appalachians at around 5-6000 feet and there are views of both sides of the range. Like I mentioned before, part of what I enjoy about hiking is the opportunity to tire myself out to the point of no longer thinking about everything. The other part is the sheer silence and solitude one can achieve sometimes. Nothing but the sound of gravel crunching underfoot, the Doppler buzzing of flying insects, the twittering of birds, the glug-glug of the water in my backpack, my labored breathing. Only the occasional and faint echo of voices of fellow hikers to dispel the illusion of isolation.



I'm not sure if this is unusual or not, but I really enjoy the sound of rocks against rocks. On particularly rocky portions of trails I'll deliberately drag my feet to push rocks into one another just to hear them clink and clack. There's just something so gratifyingly tactile about it. I guess it might be similar to how people love to pop bubble wrap, but less about the feel so much as the sound of it.



I'm going to leave the rest of this post for tomorrow. While my body has always proven to be extraordinarily resilient - in that I slept 3 hours Friday night, drove 9 hours, hiked for 7 hours, slept 2 hours, hiked again, then drove another 9 hours back home, all while eating only one real meal, and am still conscious - I'm reaching a point where I'm going to crash in spectacular fashion. I'm having trouble focusing my vision and my depth perception is getting very unreliable. Tomorrow will be tiring, but this weekend was a good opportunity to clear some cobwebs.

Monday awaits.