All Day in the Car, Part III: Back Through the Years I Go Wandering Once Again

When I came out of the Trail of the Dragon onto Chilhowee Lake, things looked familiar. Suddenly I knew where I was!

I looked to my right for a sign, and there it was-- Happy Valley Road. The sign looked much the worse for wear.


Happy Valley  is sandwiched between Chilhowee Mountain and the Abrams Creek area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There are houses and farms sprinkled along its narrow width. Although it's less than ten miles from the small city of Maryville, inhabitants got electricity only in 1965.

Dave in 1973

My friend Dave Stonick lived in Memphis with his wife Pat. He had got it in his head that he wanted to live in the wilderness and took a correspondence course in forestry. Lynne and I were living in the little town of Rockford, about halfway between Knoxville and Maryville, and Dave, with Pat in tow, came to visit with an idea of finding a home in the wilderness. I don't remember if we showed them Happy Valley or if they found it themselves, but Dave talked a local into renting them a shack and they moved in.

I remember walking with Dave out the back door of his cabin and up the flanks of Chilhowee Mountain to check on the cabin's gravity-fed spring water line. I asked him, "Dave, why are you carrying that .22 rifle?"

He looked at me as if I were crazy and said, "We might run into a bear."

I laughed and said, "Dave, if you shoot a bear with that thing you're just going to piss him off."

I told him I had been running around in the woods all my life unarmed, but, city boy that he was, he didn't believe me.

Due to his training as a forester, Dave had notions that every tree had to be nourished and cared for, lest it die. He didn't believe me when I told him the best thing for the trees would be to leave them the hell alone. After all, HE had the forestry credential!

Two years later, Dave and Pat were back in Memphis. I wonder what became of them.

As I drove I kept a lookout for Dave's cabin, but didn't spot it. It was ramshackle then, and is doubtless long gone.

The wonderful thing about Happy Valley Road is it turns at the head of the valley and winds to the top of Chilhowee Mountain. All the way up you can see the Great Smokies, range upon range, in all their splendor.

Then the road passes under Foothills Parkway, which follows the mountain top, and the view suddenly changes. The Great Smoky Mountains are gone, replaced by several lines of foothills and then the 50-mile span of the Tennessee River Valley. On a good day it's possible to see the Cumberland Mountains in the distance.

Or at least it once was. The earthen space at which I had once stopped was overgrown with kudzu. I could see only a small part of the valley below.

After the road reaches the valley floor it continues through a town called Six Mile (six miles from Maryville, I suppose) to Maryville itself. The once rural road was filled with houses and crossroads now, and when I reached Maryville I got lost.

I finally found the road, I thought, that led to Hickory Hill Trailer Park, where we had once lived; the GPS confirmed it.

Maryville extended almost all the way to the turnoff that led to our mobile home park. The sprawl ended at the Rockford City Limits sign-- and there was our road, unchanged.

Three miles out I found the trailer park. It had changed little in 35 years.

Well, maybe it wasn't QUITE so run down in the mid-70s...

... and I DEFINITELY didn't remember any trailers with trees trisecting them!

I found our old lot and for a moment thought our trailer was still there (it had been when I last checked, in the late '80s).

But as you could see, our mobile home was much classier.

The nostalgia part of my day mostly concluded, I made my way back to Maryville and down U.S. 321 to Townsend, where I had lunch.

All Day in the Car, Part IV: We Drove the Dragon When the Dragon Wasn't Cool!