When your heart feels pounding and palpating, you know it must be something truly great. (This applies to books and scientific writings too.) The Great Smoky Mountains are great, and here you can always count on nature to make wonders.
It could be a sunny warm space that suddenly opens up while hiking down into the mountains on a cold morning.
It could be a waterfall surprisingly tall and beautiful a few stairs up after driving by a campground and a small pond crowded with fishing rods, or shrouded in green at an abrupt turn (not even a hint) after walking through a sugar maple forest filled with morning light and then climbing over a hill of “ghost” trees with a panorama view of a flammant mountain, or flowing down from one side of a creek while you are looking for it somewhere down stream.
Stepping carefully on the footbridges back and forth a singing stream several times to a shelter in the mountains, you cannot help pressing on. The mountain path narrows and turns, spiraling up. You listen to tree leaves falling in a little rain and try to figure out fall’s color palette: golden tulip, black birch, yellow birch, American beech, mockernut hickory, sugar maple, red maple, scarlet oak, witch hobble, sourwood, dogwood, sassafras, sweetgum, and black gum; all of a sudden you find yourself among treetops and colors, and you have the whole mountain to yourself. But how could you take a picture of a whole mountain from within?
To be honest, I was not completely at ease when I set out on this trip to a part of the country I was not familiar with – I had some concern over white superiorists and far-right extremists. That’s also why I wanted to go and find it out. While it did make me nervous to see motorcycle parades with loud flags occasionally, everybody I met on the trail or in the southern towns was very friendly. So, the common people in the country are good, and in this I find it hopeful.
I was really glad to see ordinary families coming out to enjoy nature and fall colors. No matter thin or fat, people all made it to the mountain top with persistence. Yes. Hillbillies too. And I have seen the most beautiful children and youth here; they are all good and intelligent. It makes me wonder how we grow old ugly not just in appearance but also with the mind. It must be schooling, formal or in society, that has failed our children and youth.
