As the train picks up speed, the view from the window seat hardly blurs, the brillianthues of autumn lazily parading by in a slow ride to nowhere in particular. The Great Smoky Mountain railroad is a tourist trap, and a damn good one. Vacationers are enticed by the “old-timey”-ness of taking a train. The mountains make people want to get closer to nature, and trains are one step down from too-real cars. We can imagine the steam and coal coursing through the veins of this primordial metal beast, but in reality it’s run by far more modern means. The train’s open-air cars let in a cool breeze, occasionally misted by fog banks. There are no seat belts, just guardrails to keep passengers from falling off a bridge or from tumbling down a mountainside.
For just over $50, you too can experience the slowest train ride ever through the most beautiful forested mountain land that American can offer. Leisurely country train rides cost more monetarily than city subways but save you in sanity. Stepping off the train after two hundred and ten minutes and fifty three miles is stepping back into the real world.
The Text of Roland Barthes’ “From Work to Text” is an entity that exists to be consumed, to be reveled in, and to be learned from. Travel, as an abstract, serves a very similar purpose as the Text. We travel for the sake of journey, for the experiences and lessons to be found along the way. We travel for the fun of it, for the pleasure of new vistas and faces. It costs money to travel; no matter how far you go, you will pay a fee, grand or small, for this multifaceted and beneficial undertaking.
Journeys can be read like texts, both in the present and looking back, heady with hindsight and newly created and stored information. We can read the landscapes - the land, the buildings, the weather - everything silent can say just as much or even more about the places than anything clamorous. The people will tell you their part of the story, and so will the food, the clothes, etcetera, but nature shaped those things into existence before those stories could be crafted. Coal mines, creek baptisms, and bluegrass all play into popular culture with their roots deeply buried in the land.
Home is a tricky thing to define. It's where you live, but it's more than just your physical location. It's not only a place for your body to rest, but it's a place for your mind to be set at ease and for your heart to be filled. The Smokies have always felt like my home away from home, even though I only get to see them once every few years at most. I can imagine myself physically living there for the rest of my life - but only if I have people with me that ease my mind and fill my heart. "Home" requires complex ingredients.
The mountains have long been a place that people sought solace in. Higher to heaven, closer to nature and clean air. If one meditated long enough there, could you begin to strip away the more complicated trappings of "home"? Could you get down to the bare basics, and simply enjoy the place you are in? We tend to construct our own ideal versions of things, and let that perfection get in the way of appreciating what is real. But what if you're unsatisfied with that reality, what if you have a Nadja moment? When the closer you look at what you do have, the more you come to dislike it.
While the seasons are gradually shifting in the mountains, there is one element that is in constant motion despite what the leaves look like around it. Water. It is constantly flowing through mountain country; waterfalls appear wherever mountains can be found.
The Smokies' rushing waters fuels the greenery, fuels the wildlife, and fuels the communities all the way to the Atlantic. The changing elevations allow the liquid life to trickle and tumble down, always going, never staying. Like the seasons here, the elements, too, are never stationary for long.
Water spends much of its time on its journey down a mountainside in creeks, or "cricks." Pull off any winding road and take a step into the forested hills beside you. Open your ears, open your eyes. Listen for the rush, look for the moss. Within minutes, you will find a crick. It may be just a trickle inching its way between green stones, or you may find a huge stream pushing through massive boulders and rushing over cliffs in miniature falls. Dip your fingers into the liquid and feel the definition of crisp. The higher you go on the mountain, the fresher the water. This is the stuff that companies try to sell you in plastic bottles, but nothing compares to the real thing.
The season is in the air. The formidable heat of summer is closing in for one last strike at our skin and lungs. Autumn is on its way, traveling on winds from the frozen north down through America, arriving on Floridian soil a bit too late for my taste. But it's coming, eventually. But Florida is not where this season shines. You have to go farther north to truly appreciate all that the fall provides. You have to go where the land begins to swell and rise, buckled from massive plates beneath the earth's surface, where the land is crumpled like a sheet of notebook paper after a frustrated scribbler has given up on their prose.
In these hills and valleys the weather is real and alive; there are actual seasons that come around like clockwork, predictable and variable. The spring is warm, the summer is hot, the fall is chilly, the winter is cold. Degrees matter. It shows on the flora, most vividly in the fall. The leaves give up on life for the year and decay on their stem, scenting the air with that unmistakable smell of autumn. Orange, yellow, brown, red, and every other shade of dying in between gets sprawled across the mountainsides, drenching the land with more than just green. The mountains are where you can breath in the scent of death and still be completely and totally at peace with the world.
"...a walk among the mountains [is] the equivalent of churchgoing." - Aldous Huxley
