Caaaamping in the Raaain

Hickory Nut Falls, North Carolina
This entry was written last night and posted this morning

I’m sitting sequestered in the van in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, trapped inside by a summer thunderstorm outside. There are worst places to be trapped, for sure; I’m sitting in a campsite overlooking a raging, boulder filled river, surrounded by dense forest and an even denser fog. It’s quite beautiful, and if it wasn’t raining, I’m sure I’d be getting some great pictures.

I’ve covered quite a bit of ground in the past few days, going from Alabama to Atlanta, Savannah, Myrtle Beach, Charlotte, and now here in North Western North Carolina. Atlanta was the only place I spent any decent amount of time, the rest of the places have just sort of been drive-bys. I’m kind of pressed for time, because I’m supposed to fly out of Philly to California for a wedding Friday morning, which means I need to get to, see, and leave D.C. by Thursday night. Ideally I’d get there Monday night and have three full days to see the city, but in all reality Tuesday morning is looking more likely. The bottom line is that I’m rushing through Georgia and the Carolinas at a pace at odds with the slow and easy speed with which these areas are meant to be seen, but I’m digging it all nonetheless.

In order to the see the sights in Atlanta, I put into effect a game plan quite different than the way I’ve been approaching most of this trip – I actually planned ahead. I dug out a guidebook I forgot I had, found four sights that looked interesting to me, and set about going to these place. I found this worked more effectively than just driving around the city and haphazardly spotting The Alamo. On the day’s docket was the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, The Coca-Cola factory, Underground Atlanta, and a tour of CNN.

Pulling into the parking lot of the MLK memorial, a big sign tells you to lock your car and hide your valuables or put them in the trunk. It’s a sad bit of irony about the area that surrounds the memorial of a man who was arguably the most effective civil rights leader and preacher of non-violence who ever lived. The complex encompasses several blocks, and it contains the neighborhood where MLK was born and grew up (Sweet Auburn), the church where he pastored, a information center/museum, and a memorial containing tombs for him and now his wife. The information center/museum building is pretty new and very nicely done with exhibits and a short film about the children of the civil rights movement. Across the street, MLK’s tomb sits raised above a long cascading rectangular pool. It’s a nice place to sit and reflect, however it has the feel of a San Fernando Valley Parks and Rec building, and it doesn’t seem dignified nor grand enough to mark the final resting place of one of the most important figures in this country’s history. The adjoining museum housing some of his, Coretta’s, and Gandhi’s personal effects is similarly underwhelming, and while very interesting, it lacks the sense of importance that the information center/museum across the street manages to capture.

By contrast, the World of Coca-Cola couldn’t be more self-important. I don’t know what it says about our culture that a museum dedicated to a sugary soft drink would be far more impressive than one dedicated to one of the most important people in history, but it can’t be good. And when I say impressive, I mean that it’s obvious a lot more time, money, thought, and planning went into the WOCC. Coca-Cola was born and bottled in Atlanta, and you’re basically paying $9 to be hit over the head with a three story commercial for Coke (the MLK Memorial was free, by the way, and about half as crowded), and the display I found most interesting was a theater where they looped a film of a bunch of Coke commercials from the ‘50s through today. Again, I’d like point out the insanity of paying $9 to get into a “museum” built by a corporation and then sit inside said museum with a bunch of strangers and watch 15 minutes of commercials for that corporation’s product. But when the commercials were over, damn did I want a Coke. Luckily, it’s just a short flight of stairs down to the tasting room, where you can sample Coca-Cola products from all over the world. You grab a plastic cup about twice the size of a shot glass, and you walk through a line of self-serve fountain machines sampling delights like an apricot soda made in South Korea, a passion fruit number from some island, and a lemony beverage from Israel. It’s a World’s Fair of carbonated beverages, and by far the worst entry is an Aperitif of Bitters from Italy. It tasted like battery acid mixed with radiator coolant and strained through a jockstrap, and it was funny to watch person after person sniff, sip, and then spit it out. Seriously, you could see the people who worked at the place standing huddled off in the corner snickering, and when they’d catch you looking at them, they’d disperse and go about their jobs. Hell, if worked there I’d stand around all day watching the stupid tourists drink foul liquids.

A short walk from the WOCC is Underground Atlanta, which sounded cooler in the guidebook than it actually is. It’s basically a mall built in an underground parking lot right beneath downtown, so it’s a nice, cool place to walk around in the summer heat and eat a pretzel. It was here I actually had my first taste of regional cuisine – Fried Green Tomatoes! As a vegetarian, it rare that I can open a menu and see local cuisine not found in California that I can actually eat, so it was a very exciting moment. They were good, too – crunchy and slightly sour and tasty. Sated, I set off for CNN.

I was probably more excited about this than anything else, given my career in talk radio. For the past several years I’ve basically been paid to watch cable news ten-twelve hours a day, so it was exciting to see the behind the scenes stuff. CNN is located adjacent to the swanky Omni hotel inside what used to be, I kid you not, an amusement park built in the 70’s dedicated to the World of Sid and Marty Kroft. CNN is run out of what used to be a building which showcased the visions of two guys who did a lot of acid. It’s hard to think of CNN as dignified when Christiane Amanpour used to write her reports in the same room where the H.R. Pufnstuff Fun and Furry Bonanza ride used to be.

You take an escalator up to the 8th floor, and when I got to the top I learned why I started to get dizzy about half-way up – it’s the longest free standing elevator in the world. Seriously, I thought I was going to fall backward at one point. I wondered if I fell off the thing and died, would CNN run a story about it? The first thing they show you is a large video screen set up with 16 or so picture in picture boxes; this is what they see in the control room. You see graphics that they have cued up and ready to go, packaged pieces waiting for a director to say roll, and reporters on scene waiting to be told they’re live (or “hot” as we’d say in the radio biz). They even let us listen in on the action going on the control room, with the tour guide warning “They’re supposed to know they can be heard, but don’t be surprised if you hear something you’re not really supposed to hear.” I know all too well what kind of conversations go on in the control room – we often joke that they’re a lot better than what’s happening on air. I was hoping to hear the guys saying what a douchebag Anderson Cooper is, or how Wolf Blitzer wears panties and a cock ring during his show, but no such luck.

Next we walked through a Habitrail looking above the main newsroom, and I was disappointed we couldn’t take pictures. It was weird – we were walking around the building like hamsters, looking into the fishbowl of CNN below us. It was hard to tell who was actually on display, us or them.

One thing that surprised me is that as soon as we saw the main floor, it hit me how much I miss that kind of environment. There something very exciting and sexy and alluring about the energy of a live broadcast newsroom in full swing. It’s a lot of fun to be a part of a team putting a product on air, and it’s the kind of thing that’s either in your blood or it isn’t. I realized it’s still very much coursing through my veins, and I was kind of hoping some kind of disaster would strike right there and then. It would be like when someone goes into labor on an elevator, and someone shouts “Is anyone here a doctor?!” Had there been a major incident, the tour guide might have yelled “Is anyone here a producer?” I would rip off my shirt to reveal a microphone hanging around my neck like a stethoscope, and yell “Why yes, as a matter of fact, I am!” and I would have run down there and delivered the news as a doctor would have delivered a baby. Well, not exactly the same way – I doubt I would be pulling the news out of the female anchor’s vagina, but you know what I’m saying.

From there I left Atlanta, a city I really enjoyed, and headed towards Savannah. Since then I’ve really just been driving, not really staying anywhere long enough to get more than a superficial sense of the place. Savannah was very picturesque, Myrtle Beach had more miniature golf courses in several square miles than I’d ever seen in my life – it’s as if every hurricane season the storms are picking up mini-golf places from the middle of the Atlantic and just depositing them on the shore of South Carolina. From there I headed Northwest, into the mountains and apparently into a storm. My destination was supposed to be Asheville, a town supposed to be somewhat of a hippie-artsy enclave nestled in the Carolina mountains, but with the rain I decided to stop about 30 miles short at this amazingly scenic campground. It’s what’s called a “Family” campground, which I’ve come to learn essentially means “Christian,” but it’s not like they asked me if I was circumcised when I checked in.

Tomorrow I’ll make it to Asheville, then it’s all the way back across North Carolina to the coast to check out Kitty Hawk and some of the surrounding islands, and then North to Virginia. It looks like I’ll have to blow through Raleigh and Durham and Winston-Salem, so no tobacco plant tours, but it’s just as well – do I really want to take a tour of a plant that’s actively killing me? I was traumatized enough as it was by the World of Coke – I don’t need to try cigarettes from around the world.