Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Well, at least take the battery-powered microwave.” “Really, we don't want it.”
“Thenhowthehellareyougoingtopoppopcornouttnereinthemiddleofnowhere?Have
you thought about that?”
A whole industry (in which no doubt the Zwingle Company of New York is actively in-
volved) has grown up to supply this market. You can see these people at campgrounds
all over the country, standing around their vehicles comparing gadgets—methane-powered
ice-cube makers, portable tennis courts, antiinsect flame throwers, inflatable lawns. They
are strange and dangerous people and on no account should be approached.
At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once
more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America-a belief that no
commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained devel-
opment outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has
never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't
have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.
The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had
evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad
taste. It is the world capital of tat. It made Cherokee look decorous. There is not much
more to it than a single milelong main street, but it was packed from end to end with the
most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter-the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Stars Over Gat-
linburg Wax Museum, two haunted houses, the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village,
Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg
Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusions,
the Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo's Police Museum (“See 'Walking
Tall' Sheriff Buford Pusser's Death Car!”), Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center
and, not least, the Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall. In between
this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants,
junk-food stalls, ice cream parlors and gift shops of the sort that sell “wanted” posters with
YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps with droll embellishments, like a coil of
realistic-looking plastic turdonthebrim.Walkinginanunhurriedfashionupanddownthe
street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras boun-
cing ontheir bellies, consuming ice creams, cotton candy and corn dogs,sometimes simul-
taneously, and wearing baseball caps with plastic turds jauntily attached to the brim.
I loved it. When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father
would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an
