Blue Ridge Parkway (Appalachians) from Cherokee, North Carolina, to Front Royal, Virginia, with a side trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. God is dead.
The Institute has just reached the end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs from Cherokee in North Carolina to Front Royal in Virginia. Eight hundred kilometers all up. Before we ‘did the Parkway’, we took the only road through the Smoky Mountains (a sort of geological side street of the Appalachian Mountains, along which the Parkway runs) from Cherokee to Gatlinburg in Tennessee.
When planning the trip back at the Institute, we had envisaged rough road surfaces, the odd roadside settlement of inbreds who had not seen strangers for months, tumbleweeds and mountain winds whistling ominously, Pale Rider style.
Gatlinburg? The name said it all. Sawdust on the saloon floor, horses hitched to hitching posts and, again, mountain winds whistling ominously.
But the road across the Smoky Mountains proved to be bitumen and as well-maintained as it was well-traveled. Gatlinburg was a bustling tourist town
The Smokies are beautiful. The Blue Ridge Parkway is also beautiful, but utterly deserted in a freshly built housing estate sort of way. The road is great. The lookouts are great. The views are great, but in the words of Mrs Henry, “Everything is great but as boring as bat shit after ten minutes.”
The Blue Ridge Parkway was built during the Great Depression as a work creation scheme prompted by the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes, who famously said that, to stimulate a national economy, the government could well bury money in the ground and then pay someone for digging it up again.
The Parkway connected nothing that was not already connected more effectively. Its only purpose is therefore touristic, but that purpose is thwarted by National Parks, which takes a very austere, Sam-the-Eagle view of what tourism should be about. As a result, you have 800 kilometres of bring-your-own-sandwiches-for-lunch beauty. Not a Mr Whippy van in sight. No commemorative fridge magnets or T-shirts to be had. No ‘ye olde-fashioned antique shoppes’, Devonshire teas, fast food outlets, snow-domes, place-mats, teaspoons, stickers, or anything. In short, it lacks everything that makes tourism works.
That’s why the Parkway is deserted and the road through the Smokies, also a National Park, is busy: the views are great; it is mercifully short; and there are tourist traps at either end. What more could you want?
Mrs Henry and myself descended after about 100 kilometres of the Parkway and shadowed it for the rest of the way, through lush North Carolinian and Virginian landscapes, stopping off at every ‘thrift’ shop along the way. Mountains are more beautiful to look at than to be on.
Apart from thrift shops, we passed hundreds of churches of bewildering denomination. Brethren, Pentecostals, Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of this. Church of that. And it’s not obligation-free. One sign outside a roadside church said: “Visitors welcome. Members expected.” Another sign read: “Jesus is Lord of Haywood County”. This was a sign put up by a householder in their front yard, which is scarier than if it had been put up by a church in front of a church. At a campground ‘pot luck’ (where campers all cook a dish and share it with each other) Mrs Henry and I attended, the camp proprietor led the diners in prayer, no questions asked.
In North Carolina we visited a friend, who has lived in the US for close to thirty years. When a hurricane had felled trees in his street on every property except his, he went out of his way to point out to his neighbors that the only property in the street to have been spared belonged to an atheist.
It was an act of daring-do. Being a non-believer is something you may be able to get away with in certain parts of Manhattan, but not anywhere else. He tells his young children that God doesn’t exist. “God is your imaginary friend”, he tells them, but it’s clear that the theists are winning the propaganda war for now, going by the doubt in his kids’ eyes when he tells them.
So many people are telling them differently.
