sometimes simultaneously." And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped
people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and
bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly
have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had
been torn down and replaced with something new--principally, mini-malls and shopping
courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of
shopping and eating opportunities.
In The Lost Continent I gave a specimen list of Gatlinburg's attractions as they were in
1987--the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, National Bible Museum, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax
Museum, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg
Space Needle, Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo's Police Museum,
Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center, Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and
Shopping Mall, a pair of haunted houses, and three miscellaneous attractions, Hillbilly
Village, Paradise Island, and World of Illusions. Of these fifteen diversions, just three
appeared to be still in existence nine years later. They had of course been replaced by
other things--a Mysterious Mansion, Hillbilly Golf, a Motion Master ride--and these in turn
will no doubt be gone in another nine years, for that is the way of America.
I know the world is ever in motion, but the speed of change in the United States is
simply dazzling. In 1951, the year I was born, Gatlinburg had just one retail business--a
general store called Ogle's. Then, as the postwar boom years quickened, people began
coming to the Smokies by car, and motels, restaurants, gas stations, and gift shops
popped up to serve them. By 1987, Gatlinburg had sixty motels and 200 gift shops. Today
it has 100 motels and 400 gift shops. And the remarkable thing is that there is nothing
remotely remarkable about that.
Consider this: Half of all the offices and malls standing in America today have been
built since 1980. Half of them. Eighty percent of all the housing stock in the country dates
from 1945. Of all the motel rooms in America, 230,000 have been built in the last fifteen
years. Just up the road from Gatlinburg is the town of Pigeon Forge, which twenty years
ago was a sleepy hamlet--nay, which aspired to be a sleepy hamlet--famous only as the
hometown of Dolly Parton. Then the estimable Ms. Parton built an amusement park called
Dollywood. Now Pigeon Forge has 200 outlet shops stretched along three miles of
highway. It is bigger and uglier than Gatlinburg, and has better parking, and so of course
gets more visitors.
Now compare all this with the Appalachian Trail. At the time of our hike, the
Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly
venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn't last as long. Route 66 didn't last as long.
The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life
to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as "America's
Main Street," didn't last as long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise
doesn't constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without
sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. And then
there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming,
splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite
moved on. It's a miracle really.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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