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.