This weekend, Mark and I took a road trip to North Carolina.
There were several things on our agenda: colorful leaf viewing, a stay at Mac's Indian Village and what hatched the idea for the trip: the Maggie Valley Zoo. Mark had told me stories about his visit to this zoo a couple of years back and quite honestly, it sounded like a must-do for me as he told me about the animals there -not your ordinary run of the mill animals - but
these animals who each seemed to have their own set of issues. There were the monkeys who threw rocks at visitors....the tigers who could (and did) piss up to eight feet, hitting visitors...the spitting bears......the tour guide who stands in and agitates the gators and rattle snakes on purpose ....
Yes. I
know you can see my point here.
So, I quickly jumped online and found out that the zoo is only open until the end of October. I had to visit and fast! I also found out that close by there is a cabin camp there with teepee fronted rooms - ahh....Mac's Indian Village - started in 1934 and still standing! I had missed my yearly trek to Cave City and it's lovely stucco Wigwam Village. I hoped that this would fill the void. I wasn't disappointed! I'm still trying to wrap my journaling mind around this trip but here are some of the highlights:
Mac's Indian Village:
Drop what you are doing and make a reservation! (pun intended) This place rocked so hard that I still have the tune in my head.
First, let me say that after being trapped on curvy mountain roads for almost two hours behind the slowest creeping motor home (aptly named in big red letters "The Prowler") while watching the clock tick right on towards and
past our deadline check-in, we were fit to be tied. Okay.
I was fit to be tied. Mark mostly tried to calm me down in between my shrieks of profanities at the phantom driver of The Prowler. I sat upright in the seat beside him while feverishly dialing my cell phone over and over in a futile attempt to reach the hotel owner who had told me to be there "by five".
Each time, my cell phone flashed "Out of Coverage Area" before
I gasped in response, "Oh god. I overslept and now we are going to have to sleep in the car....or a MOTEL SIX!!!" I watched the digital car clock go towards five and then beyond. I slumped in my seat in defeat. Every so often, Mark would swerve past any dotted lines in an almost-attempt to pass The Prowler before I shrieked at him that he was going to kill us.
Up ahead: A mirage?: Upon finding a welcome center in the woods, we ran like crazy through the building and to the pay phone outside in a desperate attempt to reach the motel owner and perhaps beg of him to let us come late. We pounded quarters into the pay phone and dialed. Only a loud hum. Hit coin release. Dialed again. Looked at watch. 5:10. The loud hum again!! I leaned against the wall, closed my eyes for a second and then turned around. Mark was gone. I soon found him inside talking to the lady who worked behind the counter. He had breathlessly convinced her to let us use her phone.
After a couple of attempts, I reached the motel owner. I couldn't tell if he/she was a man or a woman but knew for sure that he/she did a
lot of chain smoking to pass the time. The owner said, "Oh hell....you're behind those drivers looking at those damn shit leaves !!" and then tried to give me directions, all the while giving landmarks like streams and trees when all I had seen for hours were
streams and trees. In my left ear, I could hear the welcome center ladies leading Mark through a map towards our destination. We were saved. I gasped to the motel owner that we would be there soon and he/she barked, "Well...come on...I'll wait for yer!"
Down the road marked "Teepee Drive": We soon arrived at the Indian Village and we smiled at each other while screaming, "Yes!!" A long line of rustic cabins sat before us in the trees, each with a twelve foot metal faux teepee nailed to the front and - get this - edged in glowing red, humming neon. I almost fainted. (If there is a Heaven, I am convinced that the gates are edged in red, humming neon.) The motel owner turned out to be a woman - she met us on the front porch of the office where she sat with a plate of slop and a skittering feral looking cat at her feet. She took us inside into an office the size of a bread box where the heat was on so high that I could feel my skin slowly falling away from bone like a Christmas goose. The counter sat in the middle of the small, stifling room like an island, surrounded by a thick jungle of potted plants. An obese shetland sheepdog lingered in the shadows at her feet behind the desk. She explained to us that he had been abandoned there and is afraid of men. He looked Mark and me over with big dish-pan eyes and I could tell that he believed us
both to be men. He stepped backwards as we tried to coax him fowards. We gave her fifty bucks and she gave us a skeleton key marked "Number 12" and a postcard from the 1970's. She pointed to our cabin.
"I feel like this is a super nice jail for old country women.": was how Mark described our single roomed cabin. I mostly agreed and said that it "smells like my great grandmother's house" (a mixture of sweet smelling pine cleaner and moth balls). The room was tiny with a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The rooms sloped in leaving Mark in a permanent hunch as not to hit his head. I would have advised him to stay towards the center of the room but quite frankly, the room was too small to
have a center. Against the wall sat a scratched wood four poster bed with rippled mattress. An old porcelain sink in the corner, a tiny desk with bible and a curious cylindrical hissing space heater rounded out the decor. The green 70's era linoleum cracked and shrank away from the baseboards. There were two tiny windows with little short, fiberglass drapes sewn to match. A bathroom the size of a postage stamp, with it's own bare bulb sat in the corner with curtains sewn from old, flowered bath towels. Someone had carved "T.C.B." beside the splintered toilet . The shower sat like a monster, edged in sheet metal casing as if to say, "You
will require stitches...mark my words...." We were as happy as pigs in slop. After a brief rest, we decided that we should get out and see the sights that are Cherokee. I hadn't been there since I was a child and only remembered wooden tomahawks made in China, plastic beaded Indian dolls and cruel games where barnyard animals played tic-tac-toe for food.
I was pretty darn close: We headed downtown and walked for a bit. Cherokee was just as sad as I remembered -a strange mixture of tourism - a legion of vendors monopolizing on an image of the Indian people who don't even benefit. And an addition since I was there as a child - the casinos. If I had to make an inventory list of what we saw in our time there in the downtown stretch of Cherokee, it would have to include the following:
The Indian man dressed in full costume inside of a teepee with large sign out front reading, "TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH A REAL INDIAN - $5.00"
Moccasins...moccasins...moccasins....
Attractions advertising black bear petting zoos and "animal attractions" (we did not go in since I am
still having flashbacks of childhood where I sadly watched rabbits in tiny cages do rudimentary math for food).
Cement pigs wearing skirts and head bows. I'm not sure what this was about. They were EVERYWHERE. Pigs with lipstick, skirts and large spidery eyelashes. It was as if a caravan of swine gypsy prostitutes had rode into town and meant to do business.
Native American looking mannequins (and some not quite as convincing) displaying rebel flag decorated clothing, cheap jewelry and leather biker accessories. The ceilings of each shop hung low with feathered dream catchers and wind chimes. The stench of low-priced leather goods and homemade fudge filled our nostrils like cheap whore's perfume. We reeled from sidewalk to sidewalk before stopping for a quick respite to watch a bunch of chubby country children take turns riding a mechanical bull while the elderly lady running the bull chided, "Do you want to go faster?" We then entered the arcade that time (and warranties forgot) and Mark sank dollars worth of change into games that didn't work but only blinked at us behind dimming lights. Somewhere an arcade owner grew richer.
"Ole Timey Photo" Booths. Good god, ya'll. The most bizarre thing about these were the walls outside decked in framed sepia toned photos of people who had been there before. We could wrap our heads around the photos of the people holding rifles and moonshine jugs. We could even understand why grown adults (men and women) would want to dress up as saloon girls and drape their fishnet stockinged legs over a bar covered in empty liquor bottles. It was the photos of children that stopped us dead in our tracks. These photos became our new morbid fascination. As we passed each photo shop, we would indeed find more photos of small children (sometimes even toddlers) dressed like bandits and saloon girls. They were truly disturbing. The children looked out at us from the photos, chubby baby fatted arms holding rifles and wearing the caps of Confederate soldiers or holding bottles of whiskey. Tiny little saloon girls with legs crossed seductively, lips painted up and feather boas wrapped around little porcelain shoulders. It made our skin crawl. The children in these photos never looked happy -only confused and bleary eyed. We wondered what the parents had been thinking. I
still wonder what they were thinking.
The Zoo:
First let me say that no animals threw anything at me or sprayed me or spit on me. And let me add that I was a little disappointed at first (always one out for the strange story)....before I realized that it was the
suspense that helped add to the glamour that
was this zoo. As the zoo keeper led us from animal to animal, I noticed two underlying themes there. First, she didn't think that the animals were very smart. She answered questions about the animals with answers like, "You have to remember that the brain of this snake/monkey/gator is only
this big..." before making a tiny little motion with her hands. Secondly, the majority of these animals had been abused and were confiscated in raids or abuse cases. The animals seemed ill at ease.
As we walked down the shady trail, she stopped us in front of each cage and told us about the animals who lived there. The trail was narrow and each cage was in touching distance to the visitors. The zoo was a strangely small menagerie.
At the monkey cage, she explained to us that Sammy, one of the three monkeys who lived there had been sent to "monkey jail" and now resided in the back of the park away from people. It seemed that this particular monkey loved to throw rocks and dung at visitors ( a lot) as well as grab the keeper by her hair and steal her glasses. The two remaining monkeys darted back and forth from limb to limb nervously as if they missed the excitement of their exiled ring leader. They looked constantly towards the back of the zoo and I imagined that somewhere in that direction, a dung and rock throwing monkey was about to pull off a jail break and then launch a primate revolution. If it could go down anywhere, THIS would be the place. I had the feeling that these animals had been planning some things.......and who could blame them?
At the gator cage, the keeper stood surrounded by alligators and explained to us that they wouldn't bite her because they were well fed. She then began to make a low growl to incite them so that we could hear what they would do if aggravated. A couple of the gators emitted a low rumbling hiss and bared their teeth at her. I hoped for some action but both the gators and the keeper seemed nonplussed and we moved down the line to the confines of the black jaguar named "Magic". As Magic slept in the shadows, we were told that she had been confiscated from someone who let dogs attack her every night for sport. She then told us that this was the first year that the cat hadn't freaked out at the sight of any large man, lunging towards the bars.
We moved on past Godfrey, "the aggressive emu" while she warned us that we should keep our distance as we passed because he tries to reach over and peck visitors. We then learned that Godfrey is a bit of a confused bird and sits each day on a pile of painted rocks which he believes are eggs. Fair enough. What could you expect? On to
more monkeys!
The next monkey cage held two monkeys - both of advanced age, who had arthritis in their tails. Their tails hung behind them like dead curled vine. One of the monkeys had a serious aggression problem and slammed all of the toys in his cage up against the bars while the keeper talked. The animal in the cage next to the monkeys (a massive tufted eared animal whose name or species I could not hear over the clanging of the mad monkey next door) curled up on a top branch and shivered from fright. The keeper tried to coax him down with grapes but he only cowered and eyed the monkey madness just feet away. My eyes welled up with tears a little as I imagined this poor creature's life beside the crazed senile monkey. But, no time to dwell on this particular sadness as we were off at break-neck speed to the bear cage! The
spitting bear cage!
Behind posts plastered with signs reading, "BEARS WILL SPIT" two black bears wrestled and showed their teeth. They stopped from time to time looking at the keeper and at the crowd while foaming at the mouth. The keeper kept saying to them, "Don't you spit!! Don't you spit!!" while the crowd stepped back further and further. She then filled us in on how she went home every day covered in animal urine, dung and spit and that the smell never really goes away. Beside her, the smallest of the bears foamed like a man lathered for razor shave. Small children had lost interest and were already up ahead at the white tiger cage shrieking, "A tiger!! A tiger!!"
We moved on and were told that this tiger could "spray eight to ten feet". Mark looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to say, "I told you so." The crowd, having become weary from too much worrying didn't budge a foot. I guess we had long since resolved ourselves to the fact that
somebody was going to get covered in
something or maimed by an escaped renegade animal before the tour was over. I eyed the kid who had loudly wrestled the video recorder the whole time and hoped that it would be him. But, no luck.....We moved on to our last leg of the journey. The snakes. Hiss, ya'll.
The keeper showed us six varieties of snakes from rat snake to huge python. The visitors stayed a good distance back except for Mark (who volunteered to wrap himself in each snake) and a little girl in pink winter coat who kept running up to pet them. A man in the group who never seemed to listen asked questions that had just been answered. The crowd slumped on wooden benches and eyed the gift shop door as the keeper explained how tiny snakes brains were and that yes, (for the umpteenth time) "they are more afraid of us than we are of them". After a brief visit to the cobra pit where we watched the keeper stand amongst rattle snakes and cobras with no excitement or injury, we left the tour (a little agitated) and went down to feed the spitting llama. We brushed past the family who stood far back from him as they muttered towards us and pointed at a sign, "It says he will spit on you..". We offered him some food and head rubs. As we left, the llama seemed a little annoyed and I told the family that he looked like he might be getting ready to spit. They huddled closer together and backed down the ramp. You'd have thought that someone had told them that llama spit is made of pure acid ....
We walked through the gift shop and out into the mountain morning air and began our journey home. We talked about evolution (the monkeys had us worried) , the power of collective energy, things that make us throw up (good to know) and exploitive sepia toned photos of children. I ate a poptart with hand that still smelled like llama. Mark maneuvered the curves with glee while at the same time video taping the changing leaves. At one point, we passed
Ghost Town in the Sky. When I was young, kids in my area were bombarded with commercials on Saturday morning for this place where gun fights happened in the streets and incline railroad took visitors high above the trees. I could still see the dancing girls and the shots of the pretend hangings. It now sat closed behind tall fence, the chair lifts hovering in air going nowhere now but towards rust. I tried to see the fabled ghost town at the top of the mountain but could not. I realized that I had missed my chance. I had read an article that Ghost Town might be bought by a religious group and turned into a Christian theme park. Looks like the deal had fallen through - there would be no
Holy Ghost Town either.
My friend, Niel told me about how as a kid, he and his friends feared trips to Maggie Valley and thought that if their parents took them there, it meant that they were getting a divorce. He said that two of the neighborhood kids had received the ' we're getting a divorce ' talk from their parents there and that the
mere mention of the place put fear in their hearts. As we drove away, headed back towards Nashville, I imagined what they felt like - those little dejected children sitting in back car seats with plastic indian tomahawks in their hands and the fresh knowledge that things wouldn't be the same when they got home. They would never forget their trip.
Behind us, recovering zoo animals paced nervously and "real live indians" made change for ten dollar bills. The driver of The Prowler remarked to his wife that they'd made good time. Neon hummed around autumn leaf flanked doorways while a traumatized dog paced back and forth always on the lookout for men. A stack of yellowing post cards sat wrapped in rotted rubber band under wooden front desk waiting to be handed out one by one. Men and women put on Old West costumes over their street clothes before buying turquoise jewelry, hand-made fudge and shot glasses. Rebel flags and feathered dream catchers shifted in the breeze. Black bears under tourist eyes rattled their chains and forgot the wooded hills where their kind roamed. The Cherokee people pulled on their uniforms and entered the casinos to prepare for another week, not so quick to forget.
