The Lost Continent (14 page)

‘No thanks,’ we would reply. ‘We’re only going for two days.’

‘How about this combination flashlight/carving knife? You can run it off the car cigarette-lighter if you need to, and it doubles as a flashing siren if you get lost in the wilderness.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Well, at least take the battery-powered microwave.’

‘Really, we don’t want it.’

‘Then how the hell are you going to pop popcorn out there in the middle of nowhere? Have you thought about that?’

A whole industry (in which no doubt the Zwingle Company of New York is actively involved) has grown up to supply this market. You can see these people at campgrounds all over the country, standing around their vehicles comparing gadgets – methane-powered ice-cube makers, portable tennis-courts, anti-insect flame-throwers, inflatable lawns. They are strange and dangerous people and on no account should be approached.

At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and
suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America – a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature. The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste. It is the world capital of tat. It made Cherokee look decorous. There is not much more to it than a single mile-long main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter – the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, two haunted houses, the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusions, the Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo’s Police Museum (‘See “Walking Tall” Sheriff Buford Pusser’s Death Car!’), Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Centre and, not least, the Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall. In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk food stalls, ice-cream parlours, and gift shops of the sort that sell wanted posters with
YOUR NAME HERE
and baseball caps with droll embellishments, like a coil of realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim. Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the
street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously, and wearing baseball caps with plastic turds jauntily attached to the brim.

I loved it. When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an hour in such a place. He had just two criteria for gauging the worth of a holiday attraction: was it educational, and was it free? Gatlinburg was patently neither of these. His idea of holiday heaven was a museum without an admission charge. My Dad was the most honest man I ever met, but vacations blinded him to his principles. When I had pimples scattered across my face and stubble on my chin he was still swearing at ticket booths that I was eight years old. He was so cheap on vacations that it always surprised me he didn’t make us sift in litterbins for our lunch. So Gatlinburg to me was a heady experience. I felt like a priest let loose in Las Vegas with a sockful of quarters. All the noise and glitter, and above all the possibilities for running through irresponsible sums of money in a short period, made me giddy.

I wandered through the crowds, and hesitated at the entrance to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. I could sense my father, a thousand miles away, beginning to rotate slowly in his grave as I looked at the posters. They told me that inside I would see a man who could hold three billiard balls in his mouth at once, a two-headed calf, a human unicorn with a horn protruding from his forehead and hundreds of other riveting oddities from all over the globe collected by the tireless Robert Ripley and crated
back to Gatlinburg for the edification of discerning tourists such as myself. The admission fee was $5. The pace of my father’s rotating quickened as I looked into my wallet, and then sped to a whirring blur as I fished out a five-dollar bill and guiltily handed it to the unsmiling woman in the ticket booth. ‘What the hell,’ I thought as I went inside, ‘at least it will give the old man some exercise.’

Well, it was superb. I know $5 is a lot of money for a few minutes’ diversion. I could just see my father and me standing outside on the sidewalk bickering. My father would say, ‘No, it’s a big gyp. For that kind of money, you could buy something that would give you years of value.’

‘Like what – a box of carpet tiles?’ I would reply with practised sarcasm. ‘Oh, please, Dad, just this once don’t be cheap. There’s a two-headed calf in there.’

‘No, son, I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll be good forever. I’ll take out the garbage every day until I get married. Dad, there is a guy in there who can hold three billiard balls in his mouth at once. There is a
human unicorn
in there. Dad, we could be throwing away the chance of a lifetime here.’

But he would not be moved. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it. Now let’s all get in the car and drive 175 miles to the Molasses Point Historical Battlefield. You’ll learn lots of worthwhile things about the little-known American war with Ecuador of 1802 and it won’t cost me a penny.’

So I went through the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and I savoured every artefact and tasteless oddity. It was outstanding. I mean honestly, where else are you going to see a replica of Columbus’s flagship, the
Santa Maria
,
made entirely of chicken bones? And how can you possibly put a price on seeing an eight-foot-long model of the Circus Maximus constructed of sugar cubes, or the death-mask of John Dillinger, or a room made entirely of matchsticks by one Reg Polland of Manchester, England (well done, Reg; Britain is proud of you)? We are talking lasting memories here. I was pleased to note that England was further represented by, of all things, a chimney-pot, circa 1940. Believe it or not. It was all wonderful – clean, nicely presented, sometimes even believable – and I spent a happy hour there.

Afterwards, feeling highly content, I purchased an ice-cream cone the size of a baby’s head and wandered with it through the crowds of people in the afternoon sunshine. I went into a series of gift shops and tried on baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim, but the cheapest one I saw was $7.99 and I decided, out of deference to my father, that that would be just too much extravagance for one afternoon. If it came to it, I could always make my own, I thought as I returned to the car and headed for the dangerous hills of Appalachia.

IN 1587, A
group of 115 English settlers – men, women and children – sailed from Plymouth to set up the first colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Shortly after they arrived, a child named Virginia Dare was born and thus became the first white person to arrive in America head first. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to see how the settlers were getting on and to bring them their mail and tell them that the repairman from British Telecom had finally shown up and that sort of thing. But when the relief party arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There was no message of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a wall: ‘Croatoan’. This was the name of a nearby island where the Indians were known to be friendly, but a trip to the island showed that the settlers had never arrived there. So where did they go? Did they leave voluntarily or were they spirited off by Indians? This has long been one of the great mysteries of the colonial period.

I bring this up here because one theory is that the settlers pushed inland, up into the hills of Appalachia, and settled there. No-one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who
wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, ‘had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate.’

No-one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in north-eastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no-one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans – blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build – but a dark, almost Negroid skin colouring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names – Brogan, Collins, Mullins – but no-one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may
be
the lost settlers of Roanoke.

Peter Dunn, a colleague at
The Independent
in London, put me on to the Melungeon story when he heard that I was going to that part of the world, and kindly dug out an article he had done for the
Sunday Times Magazine
some years before. This was illustrated with remarkable photographs of Melungeons. It is impossible to describe them except to say that they were simply white people with black skin. Their appearance was, to say the least, striking. For this reason they have long been outcasts in their own county, consigned to shacks in the hills in an area called Snake Hollow. In Hancock County, ‘Melungeon’ is equivalent
to ‘Nigger’. The valley people – who are themselves generally poor and backward – regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely-spaced intervals to buy provisions. They don’t like outsiders. Neither do the valley people. Peter Dunn told me that he and the photographer who accompanied him were given a reception that ranged from mild hostility to outright intimidation. It was an uncomfortable assignment. A few months later a reporter from
Time Magazine
was actually shot near Sneedville for asking too many questions.

So you can perhaps imagine the sense of foreboding that seeped over me as I drove up Tennessee Highway 31 through a forgotten landscape of poor and scattered tobacco farms, through the valley of the twisting Clinch River,
en route
to Sneedville. This was the seventh poorest county in the nation and it looked it. Litter was adrift in the ditches and most of the farmhouses were small and unadorned. In every driveway there stood a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back window, and where there were people in the yards they stopped what they were doing to watch me as I passed. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, when I reached. Sneedville. Outside the Hancock County Courthouse a group of teenagers were perched on the fronts of pickup trucks, talking to each other, and they too stared at me as I passed. Sneedville is so far from anywhere, such an improbable destination, that a stranger’s car attracts notice. There wasn’t much to the town: the courthouse, a Baptist church, some box houses, a gas station. The gas station was still open, so I pulled in. I didn’t particularly need gas, but I wasn’t sure when I would find
another station. The guy who came out to pump the gas had an abundance of fleshy warts – a veritable crop – scattered across his face like button mushrooms. He looked like a genetic experiment that had gone horribly wrong. He didn’t speak except to establish what kind of gas I wanted and he didn’t remark on the fact that I was from out of state. This was the first time on the trip that a gas station attendant hadn’t said in an engaging manner, ‘You’re a long way from home, arentcha?’ or, ‘What brings you all the way here from I-o-way?’ or something like that. (I always told them that I was on my way east to have vital heart surgery, in the hope that they would give me extra Green Stamps.) I was very probably the first person from out of state this man had seen all year, yet he appeared resolutely uninterested in what I was doing there. It was odd. I said to him – blurted really – ‘Excuse me, but didn’t I read somewhere that some people called Melungeons live around here somewhere?’

He didn’t answer. He just watched the pump counter spin. I thought he hadn’t heard me, so I said, ‘I say, excuse me, but didn’t I hear that some people—’

‘Don’t know,’ he said abruptly without looking at me. Then he looked at me. ‘Don’t know nothin’ about that. You want your oil checked?’

I hesitated, surprised by the question. ‘No thank you.’

‘That’s eleven dollars.’ He took my money without thanks and went back inside. I was fairly dumb-founded. I don’t know quite why. Through the window I could see him pick up his telephone and make a call. He looked at me as he did it. Suddenly I felt alarmed. What if he was calling the police to tell them to come out and shoot me? I laid a small patch of rubber on his driveway as I departed –
something you don’t often see achieved with a Chevette – and made the pistons sing as I floored the accelerator and hurtled out of town at a breakneck twenty-seven miles an hour. But a mile or so later I slowed down. Partly this was because I was going up an almost vertical hill and the car wouldn’t go any faster – for one breathless moment I thought it might actually start rolling backwards – and partly because I told myself not to be so jumpy. The guy was probably just calling his wife to remind her to buy more wart lotion. Even if he was calling the police to report an outsider asking impertinent questions, what could they do to me? It was a free country. I hadn’t broken any laws. I had asked an innocent question, and asked it politely. How could anyone take offence at that? Clearly I was being silly to feel any sense of menace. Even so, I found myself glancing frequently into the rear-view mirror and half expecting to see the hill behind me crawling with flashing squad cars and posses of volunteer vigilantes in pickup trucks coming after me. Judiciously, I stepped up my speed from eleven to thirteen miles a hour.