See GHOST TOWN, MAGGIE VALLEY, N.C.—Real Life Gun Battles!

FABULOUS FAIRYLAND—Exciting Fun Rides for All Ages

MYSTERY HILL—Amazing Force of Gravity

GHOST TOWN IN THE SKY—Realistic Indian Battles

HILLBILLY VILLAGE—Copter Rides, Flea Market, Souvenirs

CAR MUSEUM & KAMP GROUND

JUNGLE CARGO—Indian Mocassins, Ice Cold Cider, Thick Rich Malts

CHRISTUS GARDENS—Outstanding All-Year All-Weather Attraction

GATLINBURG SKY LIFT—Your Shortcut to Heavenly Delight

Oh, well, it’s only innocent fun. Like any fungus. No harm in it. We proceed past the motels, filling stations and Frigid Queen shake-and-burger joints—about ten miles of them—to the bright clean tourist town called Gatlinburg. The Gateway to the Park. Here we make camp for the night in a pleasant motel room with a wood fire burning in a genuine fireplace. (Small extra charge for use of firewood says a sneaky notice on the door.)

Tomorrow we shall conquer Clingman’s Dome. By Volkswagen. Looking up from the side of the motel swimming pool—water the color of antifreeze—through the chill pellucid air, we can see the Big Smokies all covered with snow. They look like real mountains.

In the meantime, however, we make a tour of Gatlinburg. The town looks so sharp and neat it’s obvious the inhabitants take great pride in the place. The motels and hotels are big, handsome, all new and all, no doubt, comfortable. (Extra charge for firewood?) Over the course of several evenings, we sample the food in various restaurants and find it uniformly good. I’m no gourmet—my favorite meal here is country-cured ham and red-eye gravy, with yams, black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes and a pitcher of Budweiser—but I do know the difference between honest food and thawed-out ersatz, no matter how hungry I get.

Gatlinburg lies in a dry county, so I suppose some might lament the lack of legal booze. But one can learn to live without it, at least for a few days at a time. In the wintertime, the off-season, with half the public places closed, there is no entertainment of any kind, not even a movie theater, but this too is an irrelevant concern. We’re here to see the Great Smokies not the films or cabarets. Newspapers are available, if you like to read newspapers. And there’s TV IN EVERY ROOM.

Also curio shops. Gas stations. Drugstores. Laundromats. Everything the heart desires. A discreet and limited use of neon tubing. No pig-iron mills rumbling night and day and belching garbage into the air. No roar of traffic, no thunder of jets, no machine-gun rattle of air hammers in the streets. Gatlinburg, at least in winter, is as tidy and efficient and quiet and sanitary as a Swiss ski village. The blatant and vulgar commercialism of Sevierville, only a few miles back the way we came, is not in evidence here.

The Compleat Tourist Town. In the restaurants blue gas fires burning under stacks of ceramic logs that look almost real until you get close. Omnipresent in the background that bland tapioca-like sound my wife calls “department-store music.” Decor by Holiday Inn—all the motel lobby furnishings, all the restaurant tables and chairs and lighting fixtures, look as though they came from the same factory somewhere in Southern California. Everything designed by a neurotic suffering from a severe case of social irrelevance.