The Road to Nowhere

We bump over a route called Hazel Creek Trail, more than a footpath but not much more than a packed horse trail. Vance calls it "an old country road" and doesn't know whether it ever had a more specific name. "It used to be in much better condition," she says. The sound of tree branches clawing the bus's metal body pierces the air, and the bus lists over the steep creek bank; one passenger jokes that we should lean our weight to the opposite side. Vance shares a seat with Johnson, and they keep knocking shoulders when the bus goes over the ruts. Johnson turns to me and says, "You see now why we need a road."

You should have been with us before, Vance says. Until several years ago, she explains, the National Park Service hauled visitors up the mountain in cattle cars.

Soon we pass through the heart of what was Proctor. "There goes the ballfield," Vance says. I see some mountain laurel but no sign of a ballfield. She points to where the general store stood, to where a social hall stood, to where some neighbors lived. "Amazing how tall these trees have grown up in 60 years," Vance says.

Several miles later, we approach a pair of backpackers standing at the edge of the trail. They remind me of my own impending trek across this backcountry, where I have every expectation of finding utter solitude. These two hikers expected the same, I guess. Certainly they couldn't have foreseen crossing paths with a loaded school bus. They must have heard the diesel engine from a half-mile off, but when we finally pass by, their looks of astonishment remain. What roadless wilderness?

I DON'T WANT TO TELL VANCE why I dislike her dream of a North Shore road. In explaining my view, I'd sound embarrassingly selfish. It is not, ultimately, about saving the trees, the water, the air, the plants or the animals. It's about taking comfort in the possibility of escape. Maybe I'll never return to the North Shore or, for that matter, never visit America's other great roadless lands. But I take comfort just knowing they exist.

Vesna Plakanis and her husband, Erik, are naturalists who own a business leading hikers through the national park. They have actively opposed the North Shore road. "Every year we take hundreds of people to Clingman's Dome, the second-highest point in Eastern North America, whose vista overlooks the North Shore area," says Vesna. "We always share with our clients that they are looking down into the largest roadless area in the East. This elicits a true sense of awe and, often, quiet whistles and exclamations."

I first backpacked through the Smokies in North Carolina with some friends about two years ago. It was the end of a day of steep hiking, and dusk was near, when we came to a fire tower at the summit of Mount Sterling in the eastern section of the Park. I climbed to the top, where the wind scattered a haze of gnats that had been buzzing my head. At an altitude of almost 6,000 feet, I looked down on the old mountains. They seemed like giants sleeping under green blankets. I felt small, like a fleck of dust. But I also thought: I am alive.

After some time, I climbed down and joined my friends at our campsite. Our packs hung on a wire between two trees, safe from the bears. In truth, I saw the chipmunks as a greater threat. That morning I had put my pack down and walked off for a few minutes. I came back to find that my lunch had been stolen; there was a small hole in the side pouch. One friend laughed at me: Chipmunks in the Smokies, she said, are crafty little bastards.

That night we wasted a whole pack of matches trying to start a fire. I broke out a bottle of gin, which kept us warm until the flames finally took hold. We huddled there inside a fine ball of heat and light, outside of which the darkness seemed to go on forever.

BY THE TIME THE BUS GROANS TO A STOP in Bone Valley, the fog that shrouded the mountains has given way to a wash of sunlight. Vance and her sisters step from the bus onto a flat clearing surrounded by soaring oaks, maples and poplars. There must be 100 people already gathered on a flat patch of ground beneath the forest canopy. Vance says that a man named Ike Welch used to live here. She says he lived in a white house and that beyond the nearby bank a cornfield grew. She points to one tree, all crooked over and apparently half dead. She says she remembers how it used to grow in Welch's front yard. I say I am amazed at how thoroughly the forest has erased the evidence that people ever lived here.

Well, Mother Nature had some assistance, Vance says. In the early 1950s, the Park Service came in to burn or raze any structures on the North Shore that hadn't already been salvaged.

Now the former residents and their descendants unpack lunch coolers and baskets, spreading meals across a bank of picnic tables, while the sounds of four fiddlers fill the woods. Vance passes out hymnals, and soon we gather around Chris Chandler, a homicide detective and amateur preacher from Waynes-ville, N.C., whose grandmother was raised on the North Shore. He leads the congregation in prayer. "This is our heritage. It's where we come from," Chandler says. He makes no reference to the North Shore road--but he doesn't have to. It seems like the most fashionable articles of clothing are hats and T-shirts that simply read: "Build the Road."