"The hour of the American barbarian is at hand. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder." — Aimé Césaire
The fire-service roads lead deep into the Nantahala National Forest northwest of Murphy, and this morning — with dew still on the grass and mist thick in the air — we followed one of those roads into the trees to a clearing where it eventually gave way to a game trail.
The Panther Top Fire Tower.
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Phoebe was on point, as she often is, with short-legged Hazel just behind, then me, then Poe ringing up the rear as he always does.
Apart from the occasional bird call, the woods were quiet.
The closest human was probably at least three miles away, maybe at the Panther Top Fire Tower — a popular local sight-seeing spot that provides some great views of the surrounding mountains. But I doubted it. That’s mostly an afternoon undertaking, and it was not yet quite 8 a.m.
So I was pretty sure the pups and I had the woods to ourselves apart, of course, from the deer, black bear, possum, raccoon, squirrel, bob cat, and all the other critters that make their homes here.
With September more than half over, there was a carpet of leaves covering much of the forest floor, but the dampness still made for relatively quiet walking. Even so, the four of us made a fair amount of noise that would have alerted any forest dwellers to scoot to deeper cover long before we actually arrived on the scene.
The Great Spangled Fritillary has been a frequent visitor these last few days to the butterfly bush growing beside the cabin, and they should be joined within days by the migrating Monarchs who’ll be making their annual trek through the North Carolina mountains, a journey that peaks for us in September or early October.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no lepidopterist, which should be obvious since I carelessly misclassified the two Great Spangled Fritillary in the photo below.
Great Spangled FritillaryGreat Spangled FritillaryMonarch (Google Photo)
The Fritillary are year round dwellers in the North Carolina mountains, unlike the migrating Monarchs.
The Monarchs will be coming through in droves later in the month on a journey of as much as 3,000 miles from Canada, Pennsylvania, or New York State, en route to Mexico, Panama, or some other Central- or South-American country.
I took the photos of the Great Spangled Frilliaries around 3 p.m. on Sept. 5, 2026. The image of the Monarch is a screen-grab from Goole images.
From my cabin to Cades Cove Loop in the Smoky Mountain National Park is a 270-mile round trip that takes you above the clouds, through lazy elk herds feeding on the roadside, and past more stunning views than a man can well comprehend in a single day-trip.
But if that’s what you’ve got, that’s what you make do with: A day trip, because Hazel, Phoebe and Poe would be waiting back home beside their dinner bowls.
SoI made it back to the cabin just before 1700 hours. The pups were disgusted with me but delighted to see that I survived yet another day.
I followed U.S. 74 East through Cherokee to U.S. 441 or Newfound Gap Road at the town of Cherokee. The highway runs through the Smoky Mountain National Park to Gatlinburg, but I turned west about two miles south of that tourist enclave and headed for the 11-mile one-lane drive known as Cades Cove Loop.
The loop takes you through flatter country, cleared and farmed by early settlers to the region. The area has several old homesteads, and at least three churches, an abundance of wildflowers, wetlands, pasturelands, and nice views of the landscape — but no elk, at least not on my day of touring.
At a visitor center, three women touring together from Georgia asked me to take their photo. I did. I passed one group of bikers and several lone riders, but it was mostly cars and the occasional recreational vehicle on this Tuesday. Traffic in the much-visited park is much lighter in September than in the summer months.
I went back home via Marysville and Tellico Plains, Tennessee, which made a nice loop itself.
I sat down inside a Chick-fil-A for a meal of chicken strips, where a photo on the wall caught my eye. It celebrated the eatery’s founding in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967, and shoed three smiling young cafe workers — two white and one black.
Nope, I thought. Not in 1967, Not in Atlanta, Georgia, would there be a young black man working alongside two young whites — not likely in the year of the Dixie Hill Riots, the year visiting jazz musician Les McCann sparked riots and mass protests when he was denied entry to the downtown YMCA even though he was a member. He just wasn’t the right color for Atlanta and the South in that year of racial turmoil — the year of school integration protests; the year Julian Bond, with the help of federal courts, finally gained a seat in the state’s General Assembly to which he’d been elected two years earlier.
Ah, well, I thought, what’s a little whitewashed history when the chicken is over-fried and over salty, the soft drinks are syrupey, and the skies outside are as blue as the dreams of the young, and the sun is shinning to beat the band.
