A Refuge in the Mountains

Great Smoky Mountain National Park creates space for wildness, adventure, and imagination

graphic depicting a hiker overlooking a valley

When I think of the Smoky Mountains, I think of refuge.

I grew up in the foothills, on a tributary of the French Broad River in Tennessee, in an old farming community. My great-grandmother grew up on the other side of the river a hundred years before me. It’s a fertile valley. Before her, the Cherokee farmed the river plains here, too — it has been a tamed and cultivated land far back into history. Though we had woods and wild critters and briars and space to roam, and the coyotes howled and owls hoo-hoo-ed at night, it was also a land of cleared fields and pastures, crops planted in rows. A land of fences, property lines, and NO TRESPASSING signs. A land of boundaries, barbed wire snagging the pants.

In the distance, the mountains stood. The sight of them snagged my mind. Blue, shrouded in the “smoky” mist that gives them their name; it was as if they were floating.

photo of Great Smoky Mountain National Parkphoto by Matthew PaulsonThe Smoky Mountains are named for the blue mist that often surrounds them.

Wholeness, no fences, stretching for a half million acres — as a child, I sensed that it would take a lifetime to walk those mountains, to get to know every nook and cranny, ridge and valley. The Smokies were a refuge for my dreams of freedom, of unimpeded rambling, adventure, and of the faraway that was contained within the nearby, a refuge for magic, for wildness, for the imagination.

Wilderness is like that. It seems to have more space and time within it, which means a different experience of being on Earth can be had. It opens up alternate realities. Early on, then, I understood the value and importance of our public lands: refuge for the wild inside us, for the possibility of remembering this planet’s essential nature, a reminder of how the time-space continuum could be bent, or occupied in other ways. A sanctuary for an against-the-grain narrative, some other story that doesn’t emphasize linear “progress” but rather circular time, continually transforming and transformative. The richness of quiet and rotting logs. Refuge for a different value system.

The Smokies also provide refuge for the ancient trees — the park contains the largest stand of old-growths east of the Mississippi and the largest block of virgin red spruce on earth. The mountains are home to the world’s greatest variety of salamanders, more than 1,500 species of flowering plants, more than 50 fern species, around 500 species of bryophytes, mosses, and liverworts (nearly 200 of them considered rare) and as many tree species as are found on the entire European continent. They house the densest black bear population in the East. Almost 3,000 miles of streams contain a varied abundance of fish and invertebrate aquatic life. Refuge for all these.

When I began my studies a few years ago to become a Southern Appalachian naturalist at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute, I learned of the even more ancient history of the mountains as refuge. During the Pleistocene glaciations — what is popularly known as the Ice Age — the Laurentide ice sheet advanced southward into the North American continent, but its long frozen fingers never reached this part of Southern Appalachia.

Not only did the Smokies retain the biodiversity that had been evolving in those mountains since their formation around 480 million years prior, they also became a biorefuge for the flora and fauna that were running from the glaciers, for Ice-Age refugees. It seems there was a place, in that heavily crenelated terrain and its wide variety of microhabitats, for almost every little thing to thrive. Spruce-fir forests took hold in the valleys. After the retreat of the glaciers, those unique forests, similar to the boreal ones of Canada, took refuge in the range’s high peaks, the highest in all of Appalachia, along with the endemic pygmy salamanders, tiny terrestrials that climb ferns and tree trunks at night in search of insects.

When I was young, my mother would take me to the mountains, to see the ancient trees. To get there we often went through the Tennessee tourist towns of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, with their busy spillage of putt-putt golf courses, go-cart tracks, bungee jumping, water parks, race tracks, theme parks, hillbilly-exploitation dinner shows, panning-for-gold roadside stops, and souvenir shops. And so the mountains were a refuge from all that, too.

Passing the Great Smoky Mountains National Park sign was like crossing a magical threshold. The first thing I always did was roll the windows down, take a deep breath — the air was suddenly fresh, pungent, different in my lungs. We had entered the trees. They towered above us, filtering the light in flashing shadows through their vivid green canopies.

In a region where mountains are blasted away for coal, are bulldozed and clearcut and stripped for timber, it felt like the national park provided a refuge for the mountains themselves. Inside the park’s boundaries, the mountains could just be. They could be as covey and craggy and rocky and mossy and mountain-y as they wanted. They could be boggy and seepy and swarmy and rough with rhododendron thickets. Inside the Park, mountains could gather and talk in a great hushed congregation at sunrise and grow shadowy and bent and old at sundown under an orange sky. There, the mountains were left to be, to erode and wash away at their own pace. They were allowed to take their time.

The creeks, too, were allowed to bend and flow and move through the mountains however they wanted to, by whatever route, free to express themselves however they wished, unconstricted. To moan and babble through the night however they pleased. In no small way, I believe that my own voice was shaped and empowered by listening to the expression of those wild creeks and playing along their banks. The mountains provided a refuge for the stories that were hiding in me.

I suspect there were many others who experienced the same. Though Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which extends along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, is the most visited in the United States, it seems to make room for the many who go to find their own moments and spaces of refuge there. It may be apparent, too, that where there is refuge, there is fleeing. More than 10 million people visited the park in 2014, looking for a quiet place, somewhere to get “away from it all.”

In the conservation movement, we have been learning that isolated islands of refuge such as the Smoky Mountains National Park alone are not enough amidst the sea of encroaching development. Pockets of wildness, even large pockets, require connections to other wild places, a vision of the land as whole garment. The migratory flyways of songbirds have shown us this: the importance of every piece, every stitch, of creating refuge anywhere we can, and extending the boundaries whenever possible.

As acid rain from air pollution (due to the park’s many visitors) accumulates and precipitates over the highest peaks of the Smokies, killing the life in the high-elevation streams and stunting the growth of the spruces, as the Fraser firs are decimated by the balsam woolly adelgid, insects that have proliferated successfully due to the warming of climate change, we are reminded, too, that there are no true islands. That wild places are impacted by what occurs both within and outside their bounds. The spruce-fir forests of the Smokies are the second most endangered habitat in the United States.

On our farmland growing up, at the edge of the hayfield, near the creek, my mother made a brush pile where we hauled and threw fallen limbs and debris. A place we didn’t mow or cultivate or use any chemicals in, we called it a “wilderness zone.” We tried to interfere as little as possible, but we would sometimes go and look, finding tracks from there to the creek bank that showed how many creatures and what kind took shelter there. Knowing that they lived there also made me feel safer, more at home. I would peer into the messy tangle of brush and my imagination would come alive.

When I looked out to the mountains, I got this same sense. It seemed as if their misty blue presence seeped out, as if they were sending their wild magic down to me, to us, across all the little valleys, over and through all the fences. No park boundary could stop them. I wondered what that magic had to do with our brush pile, the shelter my mother created on our land for any wild thing that wished to live there, including the coyotes. Looking out at the mountains now, that place of refuge, I see that the park offers a refuge not only within its borders, but that it can also be held as a guide, a vision, in our own homes and spaces, as we make an effort to create a refuge again of the whole planet.

I suspect that every National Park has this effect, radiating across the entire region as an example of refuge, a vision that we look to. When we visit, we gather that feeling inside and take it with us, so that we might work to create it elsewhere, anywhere.

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