Chapter 9

OLLOWING DINNER AT THE STEAK HOUSE, Carter, Sara, and Beth said their goodbyes to the Reagans and proceeded up the Gatlinburg Parkway to see the sights.  It was a warm Wednesday evening in April, perfect for a sweater or light jacket.  The streets and sidewalks were filled with tourists but, as Carter explained, the traffic would be much heavier during spring break next week and hardly tolerable during the summer tourist season.  The girls weren’t that interested in shopping, but peered inside some of the gift shops along the way.
       "Sheesh, you’d think this was T-shirts R Us," said Sara commenting on the number of shops selling, t-shirts, pullovers, and baseball caps, "I thought Gatlinburg was supposed to be kind of a crafters' market?"
       "It was,"” replied Carter apologetically, "we’ll find some nicer art and craft shops up the Parkway, and then there’s Glades Road where there’s a lot more."
       Beth was cold, however, and purchased a blue hooded shirt that had a picture of a black bear on it and the words "Great Smoky Mountains - Gatlinburg, Tennessee."  It was tastefully done and was fairly inexpensive, and she was tempted to buy another for her dad.
       "Do you think my dad would like one of these?" she asked.
       "Hey now, don’t get me into this shopping bit with you," said Sara, "You know how I hate shopping for myself or anyone else.'
       "Yeah, 'hit-and-run' Sara.  You should see this girl shop for Christmas gifts." Beth told Carter, "At the first store she finds something nice she buys all her friends and family exactly the same thing.  Then she marches over to the gift wrap area and has them all wrapped and carded on the spot."
       Sara laughed, "You know, I really don’t have time for all that crap, and besides I’m allergic to malls."
       "Carter, Sara’s idea of shopping is stopping by the grocery store for a bottle of wine and a frozen 'entree' and, when she does buy clothes for herself, she ends up with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t fit right or her standard blue jeans and sweater motif."
       "Hey, ya' know, I look good in sweaters."  And Carter silently agreed.  "Besides who needs to dress up nowadays anyway, it’s not like we wear suits to work."
       "It wouldn’t hurt your career if you did dress up occasionally," Beth sarcastically shot back.
       "Well, I don’t think the fish really care, do you?"
       "But if you think you’ll ever get into management at Sea World looking like a hippy, you’re crazy."
       "Oh yeah, and it’s really doing you a lot a good!"
       "Uh huh, but I don’t have the degree in marine biology either."
       Carter listened to the girls argue and identified with the dilemma.  Last year he’d applied for a promotion at the Park Service feeling his preformance was worthy of a better position, but lost it to another ranger with seniority and more savoir faire.
       "Hey, enough about work already," Carter stopped the girls.  "Let's go shoot some pool."
       "OK," said Sara, "I need to practice my bank shot."
       "Sure, I’m game," remarked Beth, "but let’s get back to the cabin a little earlier tonight, OK? We’re going to do some serious hiking tomorrow and we gotta' get up early."
       The trio doubled back to get their vehicles and Carter led them back to the White Oak Trading Station.  This time Sara strode into the bar liked she owned the place and slapped two quarters on the pool table to mark her turn.  Carter remembered that the Braves were off tonight and settled on a dart game with Beth while they waited on a open billiard table.
       Beth was a good sport he figured rightly, and knew it must be rough on the fifth wheel when there was something obviously "going on" with he and Sara.  Nevertheless, she didn’t seem to mind and was enjoying herself - even though she was a lousy dart player.
         Carter gave a her a few pointers, and the next thing he knew, she was clustering her shots.  Sara was playing pool trying to win the table and as far as Carter could tell was off in another world.  To help Beth shoot a little better, he worked on her aim by holding her throwing hand while standing behind her and giving her some tips on aiming.  Beth let loose of the feathered dart and it barely arced, landing smack dab in the center of the board.
       "Bull's-eye," Bath shrieked, and Carter gave her a "high five."  No sooner, however, did Beth go to count her shots, Sara grabbed Carter and asked him to finish up the pool game she was playing.
         "No, no," he insisted, "it’s your game."
       "But you play so much better," she moaned, "and besides, I’d rather play with you."
       Carter tingled and wondered what this was all about, her voice was throaty and she took on this helpless look with widened eyes and a provocative posture.  "Well, let me finish up this game with Beth."
       "Pleeeease, play this game so we can go home and play with each other."
       It was starting to get warm in the bar and Carter figured this was going to be another long night.  "Well, better make hay while the sun shines," he thought, and remembered that was one of his father’s favorite sayings.

       Carter raced down the highway trying to make up time.  He’d snuck out of the Sara’s cabin at 6 a.m. hoping to get back to his home before any of the other rangers showed up for work - he hadn’t been home for two days and nights and needed to clean up before they arrived.  Scheduled to do some maintenance work on some of the trails conjoining with the main Appalachian Trail, another ranger and a volunteer were to meet at the auxiliary station on the Trail at seven o’clock.
       Luckily, when he finally reached his destination, dawn was just breaking and there was no one in the driveway.  He hurriedly showered, had some cereal for breakfast and just finished ironing his uniform when a ranger arrived.
       "Hey Carter," Joe spoke.
       "Hey Joe, how’s it going?"
       "Pretty good, looks like rain though."
       Joe was 20 years Carter’s senior and had worked for the Park Service an eternity. Carter wondered if there was anything else he could do.  He was a nice enough man, but moved and spoke so slow, it was enough to make you wonder.  He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, just stuff like the weather, and what his wife had fixed for dinner, his hunting dogs - just good ol’ boy stuff like that.  He and a few others at the Park Service made Carter wonder what his destiny would be.  The job was okay for a young man, but he dreaded getting stuck in a rut.
       "Hey Joe, you want some coffee?"
       "Wellll," with three syllables, "don’t mind if I do."
       "Here you go," Carter said, and quickly laced up his hiking boots.
       Sara and Beth had planned on hiking a trail today and he’d recommended the Chimney Tops trailhead off Newfound Gap Road.  "That oughta' wind her," he chuckled, "we’ll see whose peppy tonight."

       Beth studied her map carefully and showed Sara the statistics.  The Chimney Tops were 4,750 feet above sea level and, from where they were standing, it was a four mile round trip hike, the only problem being the altitude and the elevation gain of 1,300 feet.
       "Hell, my grandmother could run this," Sara shouted, and briskly started the hike with Beth close behind.
       The Chimney Tops trail head was level and well groomed and they crossed two streams on footbridges.  At about a half a mile, they began the ascent and recrossed the second mountain stream.  Then, at about a mile, they veered to the right through thickets of rhododendron. As they hiked up the mountainside, the trail roughened, and they stopped for a breather beside a small stream snaking surreptitiously through the virgin forest.
         "How much farther?" Sara gasped.  She wiped her face with her bandana and wished she gotten to sleep a little earlier.
       "About a mile," Beth told her, and they picked themselves up and resumed their climb.  The path was rocky and broken up by tree roots which made the hike even harder, and another group of hikers passed them as they stopped to rest again.
       "Girl, are we out of shape or what?" Sara asked.
       "Must be all that clean living." Beth slyly retorted.
       "Well, it beats going to the mall. Let’s go. I’ll race you."
       "Bite me."
       When they reached the top, or what they thought was the top, both girls sat down on the ground to catch their breath which they could easily see in the cool air.  Another hiker passed them, forging on ahead.
       Coming around the bend, two tall and rocky pinnacles reached to the clouds, and they could see that other hikers were climbing to the top, with a few others sitting on the metamorphized rock pinnacles, taking in the view.
       "Did you bring your parachute?" Sara asked, and looked incredulously at Beth.
       "Shit, forget the parachute, did you bring the oxygen?"
       "Well, I didn’t come this far to be outdone by a bunch of tourists. Let’s go."
       The excitement of the final steep and rocky accent strangely exhilarated the girls and they weren’t as tired as they thought.  The view was magnificent and they had a complete 360 degree view of the park including several tall mountains.  There was a hole down through the top of one pinnacle and the girls figured that that was how the Chimney’s got their name.
       "I wished I brought my camera," Beth said.
       "Oh, you and your pictures.  Let's get off this rock and go find somewhere to eat."
       It was a quarter to one when the girls reached their rental and decide to continue up the Newfound Gap road to the top of the mountain. The road made a sharp and steep loop and then switchbacked quickly to the right.  A few miles further on, they reached the top of the mountain pass and, pulling in to a large parking lot, they walked over to see the view.  It was a crummy day and still a little cool, the sun blocked by clouds.  At the edge of the parking lot, on the Tennessee-North Carolina Boundry, a rock wall with a bronze plaque gave credit to the citizens of Tennessee and North Carolina and to the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.  It was dated September 2, 1940, and said that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over the ceremonies dedicating the National Park.
       "Hmmm," Sara quipped, "Cool."
       "Hey, you know," she added. "we’re not that far from Cherokee, North Carolina, and you know what that means don’t ya?"
       "GAMBLING!" they screamed, delighted with the prospect of some mischief that that might bring.

       With his jacket sleeve, Carter wiped at his brow and looked at his watch.  Noon. Surely Sara was at the base of the Chimney tops by now, and he wondered if the girls would climb to the top.  If not, they were going to miss one hell of a view.
       The cool spring air was perfect for the job at hand and he yanked on the chainsaw again.  Must be outta' gas.
       Checking, he saw the tank was empty and refilled it.  The three man crew had already put a dent into clearing the two mile section of trail from fallen trees and were now culling out some more dead wood from just inside the forest.  Careful not to disturb the older trees whose hollow cavities provided shelter for hibernating bears, owls, and raccoons, the rangers and a volunteer were only culling out the splintered second growth that had been damaged by an early February freeze.
       Of all the maintenance jobs that were a part of his duties, Carter enjoyed this the most.  The roar of chainsaws was not often heard inside the Park and they sounded a man-made, mechanical warning to nature. Many of the trails and roads through the Park were silent reminders of the logging industry that once flourished there and occasionally, Carter would stumble upon a piece of old rail line in the woods, marking where steam engines hauled flatcars of timber down the mountainside.  Timber cutters of yore (they called themselves "wood-hicks") would fell the giant yellow poplars, hemlock and chestnut oaks that flourished in the forest by hand. The trains, moving forward, then backward, and then forward again, following rail lines that switchbacked up the steep sides of the mountain, and hauled the logs back to a bandmill or a river nearby.
       Flatcars with steam-powered cranes rigged with cable and tongs were used to load the sixteen foot logs on up to eight cars and then left to wait for the next empty train.  The crane operator would fish a close stream while he waited, or shoot a squirrel if there were any trees left standing nearby.
       In the higher elevations, “skidders” were brought in by trains, suspended by cable and steam-winched up to the loggers.  Only the very upper reaches of the mountainside were left untouched by this modern day machinery.
       What did reach the trees without prejudice was fire.  Sometimes sparks from steel wheels on steel rails started them, other times a stray spark from a boiler would do the trick.  Logging-induced forest fires were common in the Smokies, and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land were destroyed in the two decades the logging flourished.
       In the days before trains, logs were hauled by mule or “ballhooted” end over end to the river.  Carter had seen pictures of water-filled, wooden flumes that transported the timber down to the Pigeon River pulp and paper mill managed by his great, great, grandfather.
       He wondered what ol’ Jake McGuire would have thought about corporate America today -- and they thought he was a robber baron -- well, he had no idea what could be destroyed if one really put his “team” behind it.

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