Elkmont and the Great Smoky Mountains
The road undulates through the darkness, over the long, arching tails of mountain ridges, where the eastern slopes of the Smokies taper off into the Tennessee River Valley. Divets between tiny the rolling hilltops form eerie microclimes of misty white clouds hugging the valleys and road like the fingers of some wispy white mountain ghosts snaking down from the peaks.
With the windows cracked it’s not hard to tell that the pockets of fog gather in the cold crevasses where the temperature drops noticeably along with the highway. From the top of every small hill, the headlights move like shiny ribbons though the knuckles of mountains. As the beams dive back down, the view from behind the windshield becomes a bath of smoky white light — a film noir scene brought to life. And then the car rushes up out of the chilly depths and into the clear night, atop another ridge where the remnants of wood plank fences line the road.
From a particularly high ridge the land is lit up by the rising moon and succession of foggy pockets and lumpy ridges between spreads out like cigarette smoke settling in the creases of some red vinyl cushions, tucked in the corner of an all night diner, straight out of the 1950s.
The Smoky Mountains are, as it turns out, well named.
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Luxagraf is an experiment in travel writing. It's subjective, meandering and probably more random than most travel writing — the unvarnished, sometimes ugly, truth of travel, told by someone just like you. 