The Barneses invited us to lunch. We sat at their picnic table, ate sandwiches with lunch meats and talked about God, their version. I did not grow up with lunch meats, courtesy of having a foreign-born mother. I never tried bologna and salami until I was ten, when my brother ate some at a friend's house and for whatever reason, liked them. Ten is too old to develop a taste for them, although he was thirteen then, so maybe not. For that matter, I never tried peanut butter until he started elementary school. Mom was open to American mainstream food, but it wasn't on her radar. Politeness was. I thanked them for the sandwich.
Rick had recently had a religious awakening, which was good. I stayed out of that conversation entirely, not being a Christian. Their world was foreign to me, the one where you can assume everyone is the same religion. They told us they had been camping for many years. I thought it funny they used the word camping to describe RVing. I had always thought of camping as sleeping in tents, or under a tarp. I wasn't judgmental about it, although we did have RV jokes in high school. The only one I remember was "How do you tell a male RVer from a female?" Answer: the male has a tanned left arm, while the female has a tanned right. And here I was sitting with these people eating bologna and white bread next to their RV, and they were very nice. They had been coming back to this same campground every year, starting with babies, then kids, and now it was just them. They were a Godsend to us, and I think maybe having two young folks at their picnic table was a treat for them too.
We hiked out that afternoon, and the woods embraced us like home. Although I have been to the Smokies since, including taking my own kids, I never went near Gatlinburg until a couple of weeks ago, when my musician husband played a gig there. No matter where we were, twenty one year old outsider backpacker me was there too. We drove in from Knoxville on a narrow twisty road in the pouring rain, with streams rushing across the road, and part of me was was hiking in that rain, feeling the wet poncho against the back of my legs, and snagging it back from the rhododendrons that tried to keep us in place. We passed craft studios aimed at the vacationers on this twisty road, and I thought about coming back, buying something. We had a car. Weight and space were not important. And paychecks.
And then we reached the strip. Kitsch on steroids.
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