What’s the alternative to this comfortable mediocrity? A grand European-style luxury that most of us would not be able to afford? Or a return to the mode of a century ago, coming into a mountain village on horseback, having a cold supper by lamplight in the cabin-kitchen of some morose mountaineer, while savage coon dogs howl, slaver and snarl on the other side of the door, and going to sleep in the early dark on a cornshuck mattress, prey to a host of bloodsucking vermin?

Which would you really prefer? Which would I really prefer?

You won’t believe me but I’ll tell you: I fancy the latter, i.e., the horse, cabin, dogs and bugs.

Thus we see the secret failure of American capitalism. For all of its obvious successes and benefits (this book, for example, is being published by Jack Macrae, a maverick capitalist friend of mine), capitalism has failed to capture our hearts. Our souls, yes, but not our hearts.

So much for political economy. Walking at night through the quiet streets of Gatlinburg—where have all the tourists gone?—I look up, above the motel-hotel rooftops, and see the dark forms of the mountains bulking beyond, snow gleaming in the starlight.

Real mountains.

Appalachia, Good-bye

TIME TO CHECK out of the Bearskin Motel. Churlishly I refuse to pay the extra charge for use of firewood, implying that I think it immoral and unethical for a hotel, even a motel, to advertise as this one does—“YUP, REAL FIREPLACES”—and then penalize the unwary lodger for not bringing his own firewood. The clerk, an insouciant Southerner, smiles and graciously accepts my refusal. The Great Refusal.

Judy salvages our laundry from the Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs Washateria (free Baptist literature on the walls) and we are off, once more up the mountain to Newfound Gap and down the other side into North Carolina and the town of Cherokee, Cherokee Capital of the World.

More charming and picturesque philistinism: The Wigwam Motel, with wigwams made of steel and concrete (try dragging that down the Platte, Mrs. Crazy Horse); a green stegosaurus made of chicken wire and plaster, leering at the passing motorist from the doorway of a curio shop where authentic Indian spears, made in Hong Kong, are offered for sale; The Mystery House, Closed for the Season; Frontierland—20 Rides & Shows, One Price; Deadwood Gulch; Fort Cherokee; Redskin Motel—50 Ultra-Modern Units; Honest Injun Trading Post (behind a gateway of totem poles); and the Twin Tepee Craft Shop. Exhilarating.

From Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains (1970)

Accelerating, we come next to Sylva where I had lived the year before while teaching at the nearby University of Western Carolina.

Sylva must have once been a lovely town. Small, with a population of perhaps five thousand, nestled in the green hills below the Great Smokies, full of beautiful old houses, laved as they say by the sparkling waters of the Tuckasegee River, with the life of a market center and the dignity of county seat, Sylva must have been beautiful. Now it is something else, for the streets are grimy and noisy, jammed always with motor traffic, the river is a sewer, and the sky a pall of poisonous filth. The obvious villain in the picture is the local Mead’s Paper Mill, busily pumping its garbage into the air and into the river, but general traffic and growth must bear the rest of the blame.