A view from Great Smoky Mountains National Park

I spent a few days (mostly) off the grid and learned a few things.

I’m back from three days in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of my time wandering around the mountains of North Carolina between Brevard and Franklin in the southern part of the state, but not much time around the Smokies. It was a great experience, even if I was in Tennessee most of the time.

I just got back yesterday afternoon and I’m still not caught up on politics yet, so don’t expect much this morning. One of the great things about national parks is the lack of cell reception. Visiting them forces you to disconnect for a while. There are a few places in the park with cell reception and I admit to stopping by to check emails and make a few calls. Most of the time though, I was blissfully disconnected.

I stayed in a campground called Elkmont, adjacent to an old resort town of the same name. The park service has maintained a lodge and about a dozen or so houses that were built in the early 20th century. The town began as a logging camp with rail service to bring in the workers from Knoxville. After logging ended, wealthy families from the Knoxville area built homes or expanded the logging houses to escape the summer heat. Ruins of houses that weren’t saved line the Little River and Jake’s Creek that run through the encampment.

I needed to get away but also wanted to see the synchronous fireflies which are visible in the early part of June. They’re impressive. With little light pollution, the park is pitch dark. A single female firefly, usually near the ground, blinks and within a second a host of male flies responds simultaneously, then the area goes dark. A few seconds later, the female blinks again and the cycle continues.

I enjoy national park campgrounds. They are a great equalizer with people of all walks of life, but mostly pretty average Americans. Everybody uses the same public facilities and lives by the same rules, even if some folks sleep in tents and others in massive RVs. I almost always engage in interesting conversations.

This year, I met a woman who spends a lot of her time traveling around the country. She’s been on and off the road for the past seven years since she retired from teaching.

Somehow, we figured out that we were both Democrats and started talking a little politics. She’s originally from Louisiana and now lives in a small town in north Georgia. She said most of the people she knows are Trump supporters. In campgrounds, she feels them out by bringing up immigration. Depending on their response, she decides whether to bring up current events.

I think she’s right. Strip away everything else and immigration is the great divider both here and in Europe. To conservatives, immigrants are a symbol for everything that threatens their way of life. They are “others.” They bring new customs, languages, and religions. Those newcomers are replacing the people and businesses that are fleeing for more prosperous areas. Small town groceries are replaced with tiendas. Catholic churches are thriving while traditional protestant ones age and die.

In Europe, the right is emerging in response to the influx of immigrants and people of color. Right-wing parties won big in France and Germany in the European Parliament elections last week. In Sweden, where my daughter lives, the far-right has been rising for the past couple of years, even though they had their first setback in the EU election. Still, immigration seems to be the defining issue that drives people from center-right to far-right and even from centrist to center right.

But back to the park. While the traffic was a bit daunting at times, the sites are still spectacular. I saw bears, elk, herons, and a lot of wild turkeys. I took a five mile hike from the campground and saw almost nobody. A look at the map shows how remote the park can get. The interior is miles from the nearest road and the Appalachian Trail follows the boundary between Tennessee and North Carolina, following a ridge line that includes Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in the park.

Cades Cove is another community that has been partially preserved. The cove itself is gorgeous with acres of fields and flatlands surrounded my mountains. On Wednesday, the loop road is closed to vehicular traffic. The park rents bikes so I toured the cove and preserved churches and homesteads on two wheels. Descendants of the settlers are still being buried in cemeteries where the oldest graves date back to the early 1800s.

I left the park on Thursday, heading south from the Gatlinburg entrance to the one in Cherokee. I stopped for gas at the first station I saw on the right side of the road. Inside, a bulletin board was covered by dozens of decals with a sign that read, “Decals for sale at front.” Many were pro-Trump, some reading “Make America Safe Again,” a refrain I also saw on billboards. One had Trump as Rambo, carrying some sort of huge gun that read, “Trump: Taking our country back.” Another had an American flag that read, “If you hate this flag, I’ll help you pack.”

The whole scene left me dismayed. The decals described a country that only exists in the fevered minds of people living in fear of threats exploited by right-wing media and Republican politicians. The fact that the proprietor displayed the decals so prominently and proudly showed both that he’s not concerned about losing business over his extremist views and that they’ve become mainstreamed for too many Americans. After three days of relative calm and serenity, it was a rude reminder of our jolting reality.