THE GREAT Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee contains some of the most spectacularly beautiful scenery you are ever likely to see. Unfortunately, to get to it, you have to pass through some of the most sustained and unremitting ugliness you are ever likely to come across. I ventured into Davy Crockett country hopin' to see me some pine trees, some cricks and a baar or two, or at the very least to have a Deliverance-style encounter with some sour-breathed, stubble-grizzled hillbillies. But did I witness ursine beasts swatting fish from streams with great hairy paws? Did I find any iodine-deficient inbreds waiting to compliment me on mah purty mouth? Did I hear the twang of duelling banjos echoing through the wilderness? Did I heck.
No. Oh no. I found mini-golf. I found Dollywood. I found enough pastel quickie wedding chapels to out-Vegas Las Vegas. I found chairlifts and Elvis impersonators. I found Elwood Smooch's Hillbilly Hoedown and the Sweet Fanny Adams Theatre and the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum. I found monuments to bad taste that made Graceland, way back west in Memphis, look like the very essence of aesthetic excellence. Then I found more mini-golf. And some more. And then some more. By the time I had run this gamut of the greedy, the gauche and the gross, I was too busy drooling and twitching to take much notice of the promised misty peaks, yawning gorges and crystal lakes. I'm sure there really were babbling brooks, but I was too busy babbling about the horrors I had just witnessed to take any notice.
Okay, I admit, trying to cram 2,000 square kilometres of national park into a day trip was probably a tad ambitious. But what the hell, I thought. This is America. And this is the greenest state in the land of the free. So let's go for it, goddammit. Cram it in. Feel the burn. The Smoky Mountains in a day. Why not? THE SMOKIES are about a three-hour drive from Nashville along the sort of smooth, fat four-lane highways that have fused Americans into flesh-and-cylinder-block cyborgs. The asphalt is dotted with roadkill; a technicolour assortment of splattered groundhogs, chipmunks, racoons and the odd dead skunk in the middle of the road. Hitting a skunk is the big no-no - the stink makes the Kai Tak Nullah seem like one of Chanel's finest scents and takes weeks to disappear from inside your vehicle. On the way, we pass through the state's capital, Knoxville, chiefly famous for making the visiting Duc d'Orleans (later King of France) throw himself into the Tennessee River after being attacked by a plague of bedbugs. That was in 1797. Nothing much has happened in Knoxville since then.
A guidebook, imaginatively titled The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, informs us that the national park is the most popular in America, straddling the eastern border of Tennessee and the western border of North Carolina. My sister, who lives in Nashville, tells me it is invaded by 12 million tourists a year. In a flash of insight, I reply that this would be the equivalent of everyone in Hong Kong going twice, before I was seized with visions of MTR-style queues for Dollyworld.
As the road narrows and begins a winding climb, we stop at a shabby roadhouse operated by the closest thing to a genuine hillbilly I am to see all day. He has the requisite stubble and stained blue overalls and embarks on a rambling monologue in a foreign language, which has something to do with the perils of growing 'taters'n'maters'. Potatoes and tomatoes, my sister translates.
Back in the car and back to the guidebook. Clingmans Dome, at 6,642 feet, is the highest peak in the park, gazing over a 'panorama of beauty . . . deep gorges, gentle slopes, rapid streams, clear pools, jagged rocks, great forests and rich meadows' (the author obviously passed Cliche 101 with flying colours in gaining his Bachelor of Brochurespeak). The park is home to 1,300 kinds of flowering shrubs and plants, 130 different kinds of trees, 30 varieties of orchids, and 5,689 kinds of mini-golf. An icy dread grips my bowels when I read about its profusion of rhododendron forests. The last time a guidebook promised me rhododendron forests was in Nepal - rhododendron being Nepalese for 'swarming with writhing, blood-hungry leeches'.