A leisurely drive through Cades Cove

A trip to the Great Smoky Mountains is not complete without a visit to Cades Cove. It has a sad history. Cades Cove, noticeably flat in the middle of the mountains, was a viable farm community since who knows when. Then we decided to create a new national park during the Depression, and these folks were told to go live somewhere else. Anyone born there could still be buried in one of the three cemeteries. They could be dead there but not live there.
You can take the one-lane road around the perimeter, visit three old churches, hike five miles to Abrams Falls, inspect a museum of how life used to be and maybe even spot a family of deer or bears. For your own safety you shouldn’t try to get out of your car to take close up photos of the animals or try to feed them. The speed limit is only 10 or so miles an hour. If you’re in a hurry stay on the Interstate highways and out of the park.
My son and I found ourselves behind a van with a retractable roof and four little girls. No one minded the stop and go traffic moving like molasses because, after all, this was Cades Cove. It was our first visit since my wife Janet died. But if she had been there she would have had a conniption fit.
Three of the little girls in front of us stood up through the sunroof, danced around and waved their arms like they were in a photo shoot for deodorant. What would have upset Janet was the thought that if the car had to stop abruptly or if it had hit a major pothole those little girls would have gone flying out of the sunroof like Peter Pan without the pixie dust. They could have busted their pretty little skulls or fractured their fragile spines. Then their happy memories would have been pre-empted by a dash to the closest hospital about thirty miles away.
When we thought it couldn’t get any worse, a slightly older girl slid her butt onto the open window and joined the joyous ballet of waving hands. If the door wasn’t locked she could have made a thrilling plunge into the majestic pastureland. And to top off the circus of fools, one of the smaller girls climbed out of the car window too.
This reminded me of the idiotic meme on Facebook about if you survived riding in the back of an open pickup truck in the fifties type in “It was fun!” and share. No one stops to think about the kids who fell out of pickups and died. They’re not here to share the meme on Facebook. I know the reply would be that they never heard of a child actually dying in the back of a pickup. That may well be true but we were children back then. We didn’t read newspapers and we didn’t listen to our parents whisper to each other about how terrible it was that the little Smith boy died. Just because our parents shielded us from bad things didn’t mean they didn’t happen.
And I could hear Janet complaining and cussing about this very topic as we watched the girls’ carelessly defying death as their parents giggled about how cute they looked. Thankfully by the time the van reached the regular two-lane road leading back to Gatlinburg, McDonald’s and Hillbilly Golf, the children returned to their seats and hopefully buckled up. Their adventure had come to a safe conclusion.
But Janet would have been cussing out the parents for another thirty minutes. Ah, the memories.