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Al Aḩmadī We woke up in Sevierville and walked over to a pancake breakfast place. It was indicative of this area of Tennessee: the entire approach to Great Smoky Mountains National Park is lined with tourist-themed businesses, motels and restaurants and putt-putt golf places, in a profusion that I could hardly believe. Many people complain of the crowdedness of the National Parks, and if that is true anywhere, it is true here: more than nine million people visit the park each year, more than double the amount who visit any other national park. The area was crowded on a weekday morning in April: I can only imagine what it gets like during the summer. Much of the development, which was entirely car-driven (remember, we had tried to eat downtown the previous night, and found not a single option open at 8 p.m.), was big chain restaurants and hotels: you know the familiar signs by the roadside, Holiday Inn and Motel 6 and Wendy’s and Chili’s and all the rest (literally, all the rest). But a lot of places were local: this pancake house was not a chain, and it was made to look like a log cabin. Inside there was also a knick-knack shop, selling those souvenir license plates for people with names like “Jayden” and “Dylan” and “Dillon” and “Madison,” as well as teddy bears and keychains and wall hangings that said things like “Bringing your husband shopping is like going hunting with the game warden.”

where to buy stromectol online Dollywood is nearby, along this same stretch, which is the same phenomenon of a locally owned tourist development.

I admire local business, and I also kind of like how useless and dumb tourist shops are, but that will not change the fact that the worst thing about visiting the Smokies is having to run this gauntlet of stop-and-go tourist-drivel sprawl. An hour of driving in such conditions exhausts me; and we would end up spending all day in it. It is worth detouring to avoid this approach.

Back from breakfast, I spoke with the owner of our hotel, who said that yes her husband was a good mechanic, but he was working on a project on a deadline. His brother, though, ran a repair shop and was very good. “He’s a good man,” she said. “He’s honest. And I’m not just sayin’ that.”

And I believed her. She called to see if they could look at the truck immediately, and they said yes. I thanked her and off we went.

The place was Rick’s Repair Shop, like everything else just down the six-lane highway. The man at the counter had a blond mullet which looked like it had suffered no substantial modification – with the exception of a few gray hairs – since 1981 when his dream girl had told him that she thought Daryl Hall was really hot. (See the Hall and Oates “Method of Modern Love” video to see what I’m talking about, and just for fun sing “M-U-L-L-E-T-O-F-L-O-V-E.”) He said they were expecting us, but they would need to take out the transmission just to take a look, so this was going to take time. In fact, it would take just about all day.

They said maybe they could speak with the transmission place in Lexington, and payment could be arranged. I said I’d call myself.
When I reintroduced myself to Troy, he said, “Ah knew you’d be callin’ us this mornin. Ah jes knew it. When I got back home las’ nigh, I said to mahself, ‘Ah nayver shoulda let him lave with that vee-hickle. That thing shoulda been bled a lot mawur.”

“Well, all I know is that it ain’t fixed. I’m in Sevierville.”

“Ah got a guy in Pigeon Forge, maybe you can talk to him.”

“I’m already at a place here. I’ll have them talk to you when I know the cost.”

This was the botanizing I did. There was an erigeron blooming in the parking lot. This photo, by the way, does not want to be rotated for some reason.

Meanwhile, we were still trying to get into the mountains. We discussed our options. I knew that just above us, in those mountains, was one of the paradises of the world, a wonderland of God’s beauties, and delay had made desire turn to madness. We decided to rent a car. Catherine got online and found some amazing $12 a day deal for a car. I will never understand the internet, and how just a few clicks online – if they are the right clicks, of course – can cut costs on a project by seventy or eighty percent. I thought $50 a day for a car would have been a good price.

The car company said they would come pick us up. So we waited and chatted with the people. A woman told us how amazing this place was – “You came to the right place. They’re very honest.” An older man told us that he had been instrumental in establishing the first “Church of the Nazarene” in town.

“Do you know that church?”

“No. What’s different about the Church of the Nazarene as opposed to other churches?”

I was looking for doctrine, but he said, “Well, in 1907 Joseph So-and-so started a church, and he got Phineas So-and-so to collaborate with him, and they started in Texas, and then they spread to such-and-such a place, etc.” And perhaps this was actually the relevant information. I always looked for the ideas, but maybe it was mostly about the people.

“We always have some back-and-forths, you know, certain things, with the Baptists. Now you know the Baptists are named after John the Baptist.”

“Yes.”

“Well: I always say: ‘Your church is named after John the Baptist. Ours is named after his first cousin.’” And he gave me a sly look to see if I understood, which of course I did.

“I think you got the right cousin.”

Conversation stalled there, and he said, “But these guys here, they’re very good. Very fair. Once my car had…”

And as this tale was being told, of all the good work they had done, who walked in but Keith Langdon, national park biologist who has done extensive work on the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, which has been attempting to discover and catalog every living species in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. In fourteen years of work, they have doubled the number of species known to be in the park, from from 9,511 to 17,527.

Now I did not know this gentleman by name, but I knew he was a naturalist as soon as he walked in: tall, with a baseball cap, a gray beard, tan cargo shorts and a tan button-down shirt that made him look ready for safari, and he had an old hiker’s physique: there was a tummy but the legs and glutes thin, strong, and well-used.

“Here for the wildflower pilgrimage?”

He looked at me as if he were surprised that someone could have been able to tell such a thing about him.  Whereupon a conversation started and he gave me all kinds of useful information about the best places to see flowers in bloom right now. He rattled off species I had only the vaguest idea of – did I want to go see Phacelias or not? I wasn’t sure. He strongly recommended hiking down to White Oak Sinks. “And you may not see it, but there’s a Claytonia there with threadlike leaves, it’s very unusual.”

He was just there to drop his car off for an oil change. He lived in the area. “You came to the right place, I’ll tell you that. These guys… real honest.”

When he left I marveled at the coincidence. He was probably the single person in the whole area I most would have wanted to meet. And he had walked into a service station I never in a million years would have wanted to be stuck in. About an hour later he returned to pick up his car again. “You still here?” Our car-rental pick-up had been delayed. I asked him if he could take us himself, when – of course, my phone rang. They were here to pick us up. Keith took my email and said he’d send me some more hike ideas.

“Good luck,” he said. “Remember, White Oak Sinks.”

So we loaded up all our stuff into the rental car. We were considering leaving the truck here; we would rent the car, drive to Louisiana, then Catherine would drive back, drop off the rental car, pick up the truck, and head back to Kentucky. But it was Good Friday now; Sunday, when she would be returning, was Easter; everything would be closed; they didn’t allow cars to be dropped off. It all just seemed impossibly difficult. Really, we needed that truck.

The gentleman who picked us up from the car rental place was very nice, well-attired in pressed pants and an expensive shirt. Traffic was bad getting from place to place in town, so it took awhile to get to the rental agency, and then we spent another fifteen minutes or so at the counter as our data was punched into a computer – it amazes me how long all that takes – and at long last we had a car. It was on empty, of course, so before heading out of town we filled up the gas tank.

Just as we pulled out we got a call: the truck was fixed and ready to go.

So we doubled back to the mechanic’s, and were told that the problem was human error: the engine had been shaved down a bit to get the new clutch in, but there was some kind of pressure on it, which left a gap and hence the gears couldn’t quite mesh. I didn’t really understand that part, but I understood the next: “No charge.” I tried to pay, but when refused I thanked them profusely and left a tip for the person who had done the work.

There was only one problem. “Where’s the key?” I asked.

“It’s not on the clipboard?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Must have fallen off.”

Looking for the key under the hood.

He came back a few minutes later, a bit flustered. No key. The key had vanished. We went out to the truck. It wasn’t there. We opened up the trunk to see if it was under the hood. Nothing. We checked on top of the dashboard. Nope. I cleaned out the floor of the truck – no go. The whole place got into the search. Normally I don’t even need a key, but they had put the ignition onto “lock” and from there the key was absolutely necessary.

I couldn’t believe it. I laughed, but it was a desperate kind of laughter. I just couldn’t get any of this right. I just could not get into the mountains, no matter what I did.

After watching them all scurry around staring at the ground and looking under things, I put my hand into my pocket and pulled out the key. Both I and the mechanic had apparently forgotten that he had given it to me. I felt like an idiot. The whole place had been turned upside down in the past half-hour: the whole business had been embarrassed by what appeared to be their own incompetence, when in fact the incompetence had all been mine. When I sheepishly told everyone – and to be honest, I think I would have rather just crawled under the earth than tell them – they just laughed. “Well, we can’t fahnd the key if it’s in your pocket!”

Catherine asked if I knew the way to the rental car place. I said of course and off we went. Whereupon I got completely lost, leading us on a wild goose chase through the stoplights of exurbia. We finally got back to the rental agency, where we had to go through the standing at the computer all over again as all the computerwork got filled out. By the time that was done and we had retransferred all our stuff, we were starved, and so we ate a very late lunch in another non-chain restaurant in the middle of a parking lot by the highway. It was late afternoon – a drizzly late afternoon, foggy and gray just as the name of the mountain range would suggest – before we finally got to the Smokies. It had taken three and a half days. But once I got there, all the misery would vanish from my thoughts.  In fact, it was the beginning of an amazing series of peak experiences, from the Smokies down to the Gulf.