We see a stand of trees that look like a type of juniper. On closer inspection, we see that they actually are junipers, or what is called here eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana. There is no true cedar in the Western Hemisphere, the botanists assure us. But I’m thinking of an old song I heard somewhere:

You just lay there by the juniper

When the moon is shining bright,

And watch them jugs a-fillin’

In the pale moonlight…

Clair de lune. Pommes de terre. One thinks of Debussy and his big hit. Of white lightning, lead poisoning and rusty-red radiators. Shine on, harvest moon.

And then we come to the main highway.

The Failure Of Capitalism

Here we are, me and Judy and Suzie,^* trying to get to the national park, and what happens, we have to run a gauntlet of raw capitalism.

We’d forgotten what Industrial Tourism is like. Having got lost about fifty miles ago, on purpose, staying off the Superstate Interstate so far as possible, we were happily following this narrow winding rural road that led us up hill and down dale, through farmyards and mountain meadows, through potato field, woodlot and corn patch.

We were out in the country, out there where the people used to live. Picnic country, good place to throw beer cans, out there among the forgotten general stores and the deconsecrated churches. Hysterical hens tearing across the path of the car, hogs rooting in the oak groves, an old horse resting his chin in the crotch of a butternut tree and watching life pass him by. We saw hand-built WPA bridges arching polluted but pretty streams where great old leprous-skinned sycamores lean above the water. We passed slightly crumpled farmhouses with swings hanging by chains on their front porches (for the old folks and for lovers), and the frontyards where threadbare auto tires hang on ropes from the boughs of sugar maples (for the kids to swing on). We saw an antique John Deere tractor, the kind with iron lugs instead of rubber on the wheels, and a flatbed Ford truck with two flat tires, and recently completed autumn plowing on the tilted hillside and cornfields with the fodder still in the shock. Yes—scenes of melancholy beauty and bucolic melancholy, under the ivory, pearl-gray sky of December, where Jefferson’s agrarian America makes its final stand. In the pastures of remembrance.

And then, following this road, at a safe and sane distance behind some reckless rustic who was tooling his Plymouth into eternity at thirty mph, we come barreling round a turn into the Knoxville-Gatlinburg highway and the mainstream of the way things are. By this I mean Sevierville, Tennessee, and the Little Pigeon River, full of filth, and the walls of billboards on either side of the pavement, busy selling something fake:

GOLDRUSH JUNCTION—Cowboys, Indians & Outlaws: Gunfights Every Day

FORT APACHE—Gunfights Hourly—Live Saloon Shows

FRONTIERLAND [illustrated with a picture of a Sioux Indian in full ceremonial regalia]—Cherokee, N.C.

Don’t Miss the New WAX MUSEUM—See Alan Shepard, Sgt. York real-as-life