Somewhere in the Smoky Mountain Rain

Today I write from a coffee shop in Asheville, populated by blue-haired sippers of both camps: dye and age. I was told to expect the east coast’s answer to Portland, and that’s exactly what this town feels like — with an extra dose of pick-up trucks and the occasional southern twang.

I moved on yesterday from Gatlinburg, a town whose impeccable location and final, post-deluge apparition of crisp, sunny mornings were a bit tainted, I think, by the slew of kitschy attractions and storefronts with child-sized Confederate flag tee-shirts and moonshine bars looping “Beer for my Horses” even at 9 a.m. I’d originally planned to spend my time in the Smokies holed up in a cabin in the quieter Townsend, but all the Wildflower Pilgrimage events were based out of Sugarlands, so I found myself in touristville.

Of course, there’s a certain charm to a place like that, especially if you only spend a week there. Gatlinburg and neighboring Pigeon Forge are crowded with sky lifts and dinner shows and shops selling Christmas decorations or as-seen-on-TV stuff and so, so many pancake houses. One of the lodges nearby my apartment had a movie-theater-style sign announcing ALL YOU CAN PANCAKE, the other side mundanely including the EAT and S. But later, a caper (the same?) came and one-upped his message, transforming the original to ALL YOU CAN EAT CAK.

The Pilgrimage itself… was kind of a bust, and not just because those three days were cold and drizzly. Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly informative; I learned the inventive names of the flora that paves the park (“white man’s foot,” “dog hobble,” “New York fern” — so called because it tapers at either end, like a New Yorker’s dually-burning candle), heard about the fascinating convolutions plants send themselves into to avoid self-pollination. We even got to try our hand at fashioning a whistle out of an acorn cap, which exercise ended in most of us deciding we’d better carry actual plastic whistles if we ever planned on getting lost in the woods.

The attendants were kind, but mostly geriatric — and the sorts of people who already knew plants’ common names and usually the scientific ones, too. They’d gently prod the leaves and blooms with their walking sticks, seeing details that to me were lost in simple beauty and color. The led walks proceeded at less than a mile an hour, and I was antsy. I couldn’t take enough photos to make the time pass.

So I went on my own hikes, taking a local’s recommendation and summiting Mt Le Conte via Alum Cave Trail, an 11-mile round-trip trek boasting 2700 feet of elevation gain. It was early and cold and so overcast on the way up that I could hardly see anything off the side of the mountain, like walking through a wet, white tunnel. But then when I got to the top, the sun broke open, and the trails were lined with tiny evergreens — a whole world of miniature Christmas. There’s a lodge at the top where you can stay the night if you’re good enough at planning; they book out months ahead of time. While that wasn’t in my cards, I did wander in to sit for a moment by the heater, and to poke through the piles of books that had been lugged up there, undoubtedly, in some other hiker’s pack: Stephen King novels and Audubon Guides and collections of sheet music. Mine was the first name in the ledger for the day.

 

By the time Tennessee was done with me, my legs were jello and I was ready for a real city. So it’s good to be here in Asheville, a place I get to spread out in and call home for a while longer, a place with a solid oldies radio station and a gym with all the equipment I like. I’m excited to see some old friends in a few days and optimistic about making new ones, too. Though I have to admit, one of my first thoughts on arrival was finally back in the bubble — back in a place with all-gender restrooms and inclusion stickers and yards with Black Lives Matter banners, as opposed to the “Back the Blue” signs I’d been seeing throughout Georgia. I joked with a few folks that the guy whose apartment I’m subletting might just be my soulmate, stacked as the tiny space is with books like Infinite Jest and The Handmaid’s Tale and even — seriously — Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer. Then again, there’s also a jug of kombucha in his fridge and a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s in the shower, so maybe this is just Asheville.

But the wall of books and the fortuitous circumstances surrounding my scoring the rental in the first place — a replacement for the more-expensive, much-shorter Airbnb stay I’d originally planned, which my fickle freelance income won’t afford me — have amplified the feeling of serendipity, the sense that I’m in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Case in point: I also just signed a six-week lease for a beautiful house (with a home gym including a squat rack, for fuck’s sake) in the high desert of New Mexico, which is where my heart’s been calling me, inexplicably, for months now. Last night, while I was eating dinner, I picked up a few books that had fallen out one of my sublet landlord’s many strewn piles.

I looked down at the stack in my hands. The top volume? A visitor’s guide to Santa Fe.

Right place, right time.