A lifetime ago, when we were about 20 or 21, a friend and I took a 3 week backpacking trip through the Smokies. We planned exactly what we would need, which was easy for two experienced hikers. We charted our trails, our vistas and waterfalls, our entrance and exit points from the National Park. We secured our back country camping permits. We bought food at a natural foods co-op before heading out, things like hard cheeses, powdered milk, grains and granola. We also carried dehydrated meals.
Traveled light, with everything on our backs.
After stocking our packs for however many days until we would next be near a town, we shipped what remained of our co-op food general delivery to the next exit point. I think our longest run was five or six days. We’d hike out, restock the packs, then ship the rest off again.
Which is how I ended up in Gatlinburg, TN with little money and nowhere to go.
Back country campsites aren’t campgrounds. They are places the National Park Service has deemed legal to camp, limited by how many permits they give out. Most can accommodate a couple of pup tents. At the end of a few day hike, we had a permit for a site about an hour's walk from the National Park campground in Gatlinburg, with the plan to hike into the town the next morning, find the post office, pick up our package and go back into the woods.
It was not to be.
We arrived at our site after a day of hiking, ready to pitch our tent and rehydrate one of our Mountain House meals over a backpacking burner, enjoying the woods. A summer evening after a day of hiking was wonderful. If the site was near a creek, a quick freezing bath refreshed you into a new person. If the water source was a spring or just a trickle, you could still wash up, refill the waterskins (we were carrying bodas), pitch the tent and relax, free of the modern world.
Only our site for that night was overrun by yellow jackets, and the spring that was supposed to be nearby had run dry. So we hoisted our packs and hiked the couple of miles out as evening approached. And found that we could not stay at the National Park campground.
We saw a line of RVs pulling in, people who had made reservations six months ago. All we needed was a patch of grass. They couldn’t let us do that, and told us we would have to go into town to find a commercial campground. So we hoisted our packs once more, and started walking towards the town, which was not close by. This is the kind of thing we would have known in the age of the internet. This wasn’t the age of the internet.
We tried to hitch. Nobody would pick us up. We had-full size packs, we’d been hiking for days. Clean enough for the trail, not clean in town and car terms. So we gave up and crossed the road, so we could walk against traffic. It was getting dark. We had miles to go.
Then a baby blue Buick heading the same way pulled off on the shoulder opposite us. An older man was driving (okay, when you’re young, most people are older) and asked if we needed a ride. I saw the clean pale blue plush seats and warned him the packs were dirty. He wasn’t worried about it, and told us to get in.
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