Recently the Indignant Citizen and his Smart & Beautiful Wife drove from Chicago to North Carolina for a family reunion of sorts. Four days behind the wheel took us through a varied landscape of cornfields, mountains and densely-wooded hill country. It also took us from the Loop through the ‘Villes–those being Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville and Asheville, N.C.–and every conceivable type of settlement in between. We were left with the following impression: Based on what one can see from the interstates, and from significant side roads, America as it is currently situated is fucked.
Not just politely "Oh I had a lovely time tonight would you like to come up for a nightcap" fucked. We’re talking Joliet fresh meat pound me in the ass prison fucked. Parts of the trip were jarring. Mostly we encountered the kind of America you’d expect to find along the interstates—sad collections of gas stations, fry pits and knickknack stores clustered around freeway interchanges. Their purpose is commerce, nothing else. These are not communities, and there has been no attempt made to build a "there" there. One looks pretty much like another, in fact many of the Shell stations where we stopped for gas were oriented identically to the interchanges. Heading south, they were just off the freeway and to the right, easily spotted by the giant Shell logo atop the standard interchange 100-foot-tall pole.
There wasn’t much difference between the collection of businesses from one exit to another, either. Get off in Lafayette, Indiana and you’ll find all the same major gas stations, the same sad collection of the same fast food enterprises, the same car wash sheds, the same crappy kitsch stores selling "Support the Troops" magnets and "These Colors Don’t Run" bumper stickers and the same sad locals who drove in from some trailer court a few miles down the road to work the same low-wage service jobs selling shit to people they’ll never see again that you’ll find in any roadside town in Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina.
These are communities of convenience, built of cheap materials and selling cheap goods to a perpetually transient clientele. They are nowhere, and yet everywhere. They are noplace and everyplace. They dull the senses. In a few years, when the price of gas has risen to the point where only the wealthy can afford to drive, they will for the most part wither and die. A few may manage to stay open and cater to the occasional passerby, but by and large these areas will fail. People in the towns a few miles away will forget about their existence once they have scavenged what useful materials they can find from the abandoned buildings. No one will even bother to pass an ordinance requiring that they be torn down, mainly because doing so will cost too much money.
If that sounds a little "Mad Max" to you, then you haven’t bothered to chart oil prices the past few years, or read the little that has been written about the oil reserves accounting scandals, or take time to understand the interplay between oil and financial markets. This is your problem. The Indignant Citizen cannot take the time now to explain it to you. Try turning off the TV and reading a fucking book or the Wall Street Journal, bitch.
Now, as mind bendingly banal as these interchange economic centers were, there was one point during the trip when the Indignant Citizen and his Smart & Beautiful Wife encountered a transition so jarring we have been talking about it for days. Leaving North Carolina, we decided to skip Interstate 40 and take the Great Smoky Mountains Scenic Byway instead. It heads southwest out of Asheville, N.C., and into the heart of the Smokys. The road winds along the edges of some of the oldest mountains in the country, and tops out at about 6,200 feet before dropping into Tennessee. This was high enough, apparently, to starve the Indignant Citizen’s otherwise sweet German-engineered automobile of oxygen and cause the "Check Engine Light" to blink on and stay on for the remainder of the trip. German-engineered, built in Mexico.
Anyway, the road drops out of the deep, deep mountains, through some wicked diminishing radius-turn switchbacks, across a couple of creeks and then … BLAMMO! … into a thistle-pricked whore of a place called Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The first sign of trouble was the stoplight we came upon in the woods. Right then we should have turned around and driven back through the mountains, back through the King Hell hailstorm, back through the fog and into the strip mall land along Hendersonville Road outside Asheville. We should have, but we didn’t.
We also should have taken the poorly-marked turn labeled "Gatlinburg By-Pass," but when we saw the sign we were still in the woods and we thought, "By-Pass? By-Pass what? It’s just fucking trees! Fuck it, we’re goin’ through." Bad move.
Gatlinburg probably was a quaint town in the foothills of the Smokys once upon a time. But, as with many things that once upon a time were quaint, commercialism and greed took hold and today Gatlinburg is an automobile-choked three mile-long stretch of commercial diarrhea. If Coney Island, the Vegas Strip and Winter Park, Colo., did a three-way and somehow a child resulted, that child would be Gatlinburg.
Populated by Southerners looking for a mountain vacation, Gatlinburg in the summertime features a frightening collection of haunted houses, greasy spoon restaurants, motels, bars, Nascar and WWF stores, boot warehouses and western wear outlets, and various other commercial establishments, all crammed along the sidewalks lining the main street through town. These sidewalks are themselves crammed with overweight pedestrians unused to walking anywhere and attempting to do so in Gatlinburg towing their six fat children and munching on something fried on a stick.
Prominent among the storefronts is an abundance of chain restaurants to provide comfort to those who like to travel but don’t enjoy being far from home.
To the left as we passed through town, we saw a lone ski lift running straight up a steep hill. During the summer it ferries folks to the top were they can look down into the garbage can that is Gatlinburg and presumably ponder their own sun belt existence in the waning days before the air conditioners kick off for good due to a power shortage.
Leaving Gatlinburg behind brings no relief, at least if you’re traveling north. What comes next is a desolate farce of commercial real estate that makes Schaumburg look like Midtown Manhattan in terms of density. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is Gatlinburg without the walkability. Nothing is closer than a tenth of a mile to anything else. The roadway is seven lanes wide, eight at the major intersections. On our way out of town, we passed a line of cars headed into Pigeon Forge from Interstate 40 that must have been five miles long. We were thankful to be headed the other direction. We wondered what those people were looking for, and how sad their lives must be to find it in either Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg.
Chicago has its problems—lord does it—but it looks like Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill compared to parts of America like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge and really just about anything we could see from the highways, which were nowhere for a long time and became somewhere only because of cheap oil. There is nowhere for places like that to go but down.
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