Wonderoom

This is what you see as you look across the Tuckaseegee River when you drive south on 19 towards Bryson City, North Carolina:

My first thought was that some locals had been using the river as a junk yard, but this is not the case.

The southern Appalachians around the Smokies can basically be considered a temperate rainforest. Not as much rain as the Amazon, but, still, quite a lot. Anytime you start removing the vegetation around a river in a rainforest, you are going to have a problem. Without vegetation the banks will wash away at an impressive rate. So…what to do?

About 50 years ago or so someone had a bright idea. Erosion was a serious problem on the Tuckaseegee River, and there were  an awful lot of old cars lying around. Two birds, one stone. Lets take the old cars and use them to shore up the banks of the river. Houses and businesses won’t wash away, and you get rid of the cars. Kind of.

It’s sort of hard to spin rusting hulks with the tourist trade, even if some of the cars are classics. And there’s the chemicals leaking directly into the river as the cars decompose. Devil’s in the details.

The world is strewn with bright ideas. In the 70’s someone thought old tires would make good artificial reefs. The creatures that were supposed to homestead on the tires didn’t, and the tires ended up drifting onto nearby beaches or damaging real reefs. Dang it.

And there’s always the old classics…tapeworms as a diet aid or cocaine as a cure-all. On a personal level I could contribute my entire love life to this list.

I grew up in a tourist town, so I had a early fascination with display.  Gatlinburg exists to distract.  To pull you this way and that, to relieve you of your money.  The older attractions drew on Appalachian cliches: bears in cages, rocking chairs of rough wood, grannie in her bonnet.  As time went on, however, there came the Space Needle, the House of Wax, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.  As a local, I could get into the Ripley’s museum for free.  Bring a textbook, show it to the bored teenager in the front, and wonder around the exhibits to my heart’s content.  Past the faucet hanging from the ceiling by a wire which poured forth a seemingly endless supply of water.  Past the stuffed goat with two heads and the minature log cabin made of 50,000 pennies.  The beginning of this mystery tour was bright and cheery, but it was the dark interior that drew me onwards.  On to the medieval torture instruments, and the insanely cruel.  And so an eight or nine year old kid stands in front of a narrow, female shaped coffin with spikes on the inside and tries to understand the nature of an iron maiden.  Trying to imagine how you could survive…how you could avoid the spikes.  And Vlad the impaler.  Where exactly did he impale?  What part of the body?

At the end of the dark and scary hallway of wax figure death was one of those revolving gates with interlacing bars.  I was more afraid of the gate than of the displays that preceeded them.  What if my foot got caught and then Vincent Price turned on a machine and bluntly mangled me to pieces?  It happens.

I always went through the gate quickly, emerging unharmed from my encounter with mortality and the darkest impulses of mankind into the omnipresent gift shop filled with small plastic bears, everlasting dipping birds and pet rocks.

What did Vlad do to distract himself?  I can’t imagine it was always impaling and screaming…he must have had something in lieu of Monday Night Football.  Hunting, eating, storytelling.  Would he have enjoyed Monday Night Football?  Would it have been too tame, too incomprehensible?  Could the right enthusiast have talked him into touchdowns instead of carnage?

The original Gatlinburg Ripley’s museum burned down in 1992.  Vlad, the maiden, the two headed goat…all destroyed.  Fire was probably hot enough to melt even the 50,000 pennies.  I was sad when I read that.  It was my original wonderoom.  My original cabinet of curiosities, filled with objects, real or not, that existed right on the edge of belief and reason.

About ten years ago, I could fit everything I owned into my Volkswagen micro bus. Everything. I had no boxes stored at anyone’s house. No furniture. Anything that survived that purging period of my life was guaranteed to either be very practical, or have some meaning, perhaps not clearly defined, but arresting. Meaning enough to stop me on my way to the garbage bin. Read more »