Smokey Mountains

Greetings from the Smokey Mountains.
Most people who know or follow me are accustomed to reading my posts and essays that originate in the Sonoran Desert or northern Rocky Mountains. For those of you unaware, Pamela came east (western Kentucky) to help with grandchildren and I came to meet her just in time to get caught here for the pandemic. I don’t like being east of the Mississippi. In fact, east of the Rockies is about as far east as I want to venture, but our family is here.

It isn’t that there is anything wrong with the east half of the continent. It has been magnificent country with the hardwood, disiduous forests giving way, as you move south, to the Loblolly pines of the deep south. There are just too many people, towns, farms and factories. It is definitely a reflection of human overpopulation. I can’t get away from the sighs and sounds of population. Evidently it doesn’t bother others. Right now there is a park employee using a gasoline trimmer along the road behind us and a seaplane is practicing touchdowns on the lake. I find this extremely annoying. I feel like I’ve been violated.

A few weeks ago we went to the far east point of Kentucky to a place in the Daniel Boone National Forest. It was a nice road trip. As is our usual practice, we avoided interstate highways and four-laners. Even then I was painfully aware of almost never being out of sight of some sign of the human infestation that has so damaged this beautiful country. We saw the scars of old mining operations and clearcutting. Even the magnificent gorge which was at the top of our “must see” list was marred by structures, roads and railroads.

On this trip we pushed further eastward through central Tennessee toward the Smokey Mountains where the states of Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia intersect. We spent almost all of the first day on interstates and four-lane roads, covering over two-hundred miles. We are traveling in our twenty-one foot 1996 Roadtrek, pulling a 5×8′ cargo trailer. The trailer is because we’re meeting family and hauling bicycles, kayaks and their camping gear. The wise person doesn’t go over 65 mph pulling a trailer because trailer tires aren’t made for higher speed and actually rated for 65 mph or less. That works for me because I’m just as happy tooling along a seldom used two-lane road going fifty or fifty-five. When she has good maps, Pamela is a whiz at finding country roads for us to travel. That first day, however, I was almost never out of sight of at least twenty to thirty other vehicles, a visual reminder of how overpopulated most of this world really is.

We passed through beautiful country. The Appalacian Mountains are low and tree covered, but they are gorgeous in their own special way. The highest point east of the Mississippi is Mt. Mitchell at 6,800. Back home in the Montana Rockies the Belton “hills” are 6,600 feet and they are near the lowest spot in the Rocky Mountains. The Appalacians are what the Rocky Mountains will be in a few million years.

The second day of travel was almost all off the interstate and much of it through national forest. Nevertheless it was sorely damaged. This was a major copper mining area with the last mine closing in the 1980s. Pamela tells of places just near a town through which we passed that was totally barren with all life and vegetation dead. The entire area is like the coat of an animal that has been torn and scratched from an encounter with barbed wire or a bird with patches of feathers missing. It makes you truly sad.

The weather was hot and muggy that first day. You could not do anything without sweating profusely. We were worried about sleeping, but that first night we stopped at a state park where we had “shore power.” That’s electricity from a commercial source. We have solar power in our rig but it won’t run an airconditioner. Having shore power meant we could use the airconditioner in our Roadtrek.

For the rest of the week our campsite is in a national recreation area known as Jackrabbit Mountain. There is no shore power or other amenities, but we’re not accustomed to them anyway. We spend most of our time off the grid; which is how I like it best. We often stay out in the wilderness for over two weeks before we must go to town to dump our holding tanks, take on water or do laundry.

Our campsite here is right on a beautiful lake, surrounded by the mountains. We are at 1940 feet in elevation. Our eldest daughter, her husband and son, have joined us and are in tents no more than fifteen feet from the water’s edge. There is a barrier of trees between us and our nearest neighbors. That’s really nice. The folks east of us have a generator, but they’ve been very cosiderate and only run it occasionally.

We had rain the first morning here, which brought the temperature down quite a bit. It has been quite comfortable, especially for August in North Carolina. If we get a bit warm, we just walk into the lake and cool off. The kayaks have seen a lot of use. They’re in the water most of the day. Our daughter and her son are doing a team triathelon later this fall which has kayaking instead of swimming, so they’ve put on a lot of miles. They’ve also been praciticing on the mountain bike trails.

As for me I’m happy sitting here looking at the lake with the occasional fishing venture onto the lake. I like to fly fish. Some really good sized sunfish – bluegill, redear, pumpkinseed, etc. – like my trout flies. I think it is because the fly I use is black with a small white tuft and looks a lot like the bugs that swim on the surface.

My grandson is into learning to live in the wilderness and backcountry. He wants me to teach him to fly and wants to catch and clean his own fish. His firemaking and camping skills are coming along well and he has the physical strength. I remember the first time he spent a month with us living in the wilderness of northwestern Montana when he was eleven.

Pamela and I are trying to maintain our nomadic life-style as much as possible while confined by the pandemic. We have spent hours in our four-wheel drive half-ton heavy truck driving dirt roads through federal forests looking for places in the east where we can live the simple, undisturbed, nomadic life we so love. Between the pandemic and our current social/political system, that life-style is more and more threatened. The social/political system wants us to conform. But that’s another blog; viz. conformity as the birth and death of humanity.

I’ll start working on that while I’m sitting here enjoying being as far away as I can get from anything human. I’ll try to approach the subject open-mindedly. That’s going to be the challenge.

Another promise I’ll make to my faithful followers is that I’ll do my best to get away from so much social/political. In the past few weeks it has been hard to think about anything else. We can’t deny, however, that what humans do socially and politically have a tremendous impact upon our natural environment. We can not talk about our beloved wilderness and not be aware of and/or address #45’s purposeful gutting of the Department of the Interior, the EPA and other political safeguards in place to keep us from destroying our very own source of life.

For now, farewell from the Smoky Mountains. They truly are a phenomenal treasure worthy of our protection.