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I woke up early – one of the perks of camping – and hit the road immediately.  I wanted to visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  I was wary of paying in order to get my nature-fix, but I figured that the National Park designation meant that I would see real, undisturbed forest.  It was the right thing to do.  Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the great sights of North America.

Cades Cove, GSMNP.

It was easy to see how the mountains had gotten their name.  Clouds shrouded everything, and the forest had a pervasively madid atmosphere: everything was damp and dripping and alive.  It reminded me, quite stunningly, of Hawaii.  And the botanical richness of the park is not to be discounted: it is legitimately one of the best floral habitats in the world, perhaps the best in all the temperate zone.  More than 1500 vascular plant species have been recorded in the park, more than are indigenous to all Europe.

The first great sight for me was to see the magnolias in bloom – I nearly fainted at the sight of them, great Fraser magnolias that can be found almost nowhere else in the world (the park features all kind of unusual magnolias: Ashe, Fraser, Bigleaf (with leaves three feet long!), Umbrella, others I don’t know, as well as the pedestrian grandifloras and acuminatas).

Fraser Magnolia.

As it so happened, I got out of my car to ask information of a park ranger who happened to be the man responsible for gathering and compiling all the park’s information about wildflower blooms.  His name is Tom Harrington, and his updates can be found here.  He directed me to a trail called Little Greenbrier, where I could see the flame azalea in bloom, a plant I had never seen.  They were astonishing – like tongues of flame in the middle of the forest, as bright and showy as any blossoms can be.  I could not have timed my arrival any better.  In addition to them, I saw dozens more plants flowering in their proper native environments: Carolina Allspice, Virginia Sweetspire, trilliums, ladyslipper orchids, magnolias, Indian pinks, dogwoods, black cherry, drooping leucothoe, and dozens of others not in bloom, maidenhair ferns and giant rhododendrons and the like.  The mountain laurel was just starting.  I was one week ahead of mountain laurel season.  Very well.  I’ll see it in the Catskills.

Flame azaleas in bloom.

There really is no comparison between your average Eastern forest – disturbed, deer-blighted, repeatedly logged, and glaciated not that long ago to boot – with forest like this.  The ranger noted to me that within the park boundaries are climate zones that resemble Georgia, and others that resemble Canada, due to the change in elevation.  You could probably learn about almost all Eastern-North-American flora in this one park.  The only problem with it is that you want to visit it as I did, on a May weekday.  It is the most-visited National Park in North America, by a wide margin.

From there I went to the place that was “voted the best pizza in Sevier County,” Tennessee – Pizza Hut.  I ate quickly – I had spent the whole day in the park, until 4 p.m. – and I had 350 miles to go to make it to Charlottesville.  Virginia is a surprisingly large state!  I pulled in around 11 p.m., with the truck still running, in a state of pure bliss.

Half-Tennessee, half-Hawaii.

Mountain laurel, just in bloom.

I have made my way back to Charlottesville – one of the stops on the way down – after having seen, en route, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, and Chattanooga.  Highlights: Vulcan in the “Magic City,” doing the whole Selma-Montgomery highway, camping out in the Cherokee National Forest, hiking in Great Smoky National Park, seeing the minor league Birmingham Barons, and keeping the truck going.  More later.

A fair number of problems on the road.  The oil-pressure gauge started convulsing wildly while driving on I-12 not that far from Baton Rouge, and I pulled into a gas station and added four quarts of oil before I got a reading on the dipstick.  The oil started dripping out everywhere.  I went to a mechanic who said that the repair would involve removing the engine (and since it was a four-wheel-drive car, also the transfer case), which would cost several hundred dollars to start, but since the engine was an old Northern engine – i.e. rusted shut by years of snow and salt – he felt confident the engine would start to disintegrate once taken apart.  What’s more, it being a Thursday, he predicted that he would have to wait the whole weekend to get parts if things started breaking.

So I decided to keep on going as I had gone, and finish my errands – buying shoes in Baton Rouge, and then up to Angola prison to pick up a chair.  I arrived late at Angola, and they said they did not have the means at this time to transport the chair to the gate – I should come back tomorrow.  I realized this would be impossible – I didn’t want to spend the cost of the chair on a hotel room, nor did I want to camp with an extremely unreliable vehicle.

So I decided that I should get to Birmingham and get the car fixed where I could stay with a friend.  This ended up being a challenging drive.  Every twenty miles or so, I would run out of oil, and in the end it took me 20 quarts of oil in order to make it to Tuscaloosa by 2 A.M., where I crashed for the night at a Motel 6 for $43.

Tuscaloosa was close enough to Birmingham so my friend could pick me up if need be.  I went to a mechanic there, who played with a calculator for a little while and then said: “If I were in your position, I’d buy 60 quarts of oil and keep on doing what you done all the way to NEWyork.  That way you’re out $200, but you’ll be home with all your stuff.  I know these northern engines.  They’ll be all rusted up.  You got, what, 170,000 miles on this baby?  It don’t make no sense to spend a thousand dollars to fix it up nohow.”

Four more quarts got me to Birmingham, where I’m resting up with a friend, Jay Hoenemeyer.  Next stop should be Atlanta.  This type of driving – knowing that you’re right on the cusp at all times of complete engine failure – is insane but suitably Neal Cassadyesque.  The main thing I fear is the thing most to be feared – traffic.  The engine is like a broken hourglass filled with oil.  If it runs out completely, your engine locks up and you can’t move anymore.  How to get through Atlanta, D.C., and New York with this kind of limitation is quite tricky.

All that said, I’m in great spirits.  The weather is great, life is good, all that stuff.  Buying the next vehicle will constitute a major economic problem, but we’ll see what happens.

The car finally got a name after all this: Stepan Trofimovich.  I am now calling this trip “The Last Peregrination of Stepan Trofimovich.”