5/31/13, Friday, May 31: This is the carny strip, Pigeon Forge, TN: Bob Lamia warned me that the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park was a crazy commercial zone I just wouldn't believe, and he was right. It reminds me of Anaheim right around Disneyland. This condition is also due to Dollywood and Dolly's Splash Park, and the place is JAMMED. It's almost embarrassing. What must people from other countries think? ("What will the neighbors think?!")

  I'm feeling a deep tiredness that calls for a few days in one spot and lots of sleeping. Yesterday, driving between Nashville and Pigeon Forge, I suddenly felt a wave of homesickness for my sun-scorched hills, California's weedy, brown roadsides, and for the smell of juniper and sagebrush. I was sick of green, green, green -- I must say, though, that I thought Arkansas was greener and prettier than Tennessee as far as the very little I could see. I miss Da Boyz, their shedding fur, their reeking letterbox. I wanted to call Cammy and beg her to "magic" me home. (Alas, she's in Georgia or Oklahoma.)

   In a way, it reminds me of the strange "divide" I felt going from Van Horn, TX, to Sonora, TX. My skin had told me that the climate was getting drier and drier as far as Van Horn; my face felt as if it would crack into hexagonal plates like a desiccating mud flat. Guadalupe Mountains National Park was completely parched. Then, suddenly, I had a sense, a real, physical feeling, that this was no longer true, that moisture had returned to the air, that my skin was beginning to heal. And it was so: the climate grew steadily more humid. Curious!

   Although I had planned to venture farther on Friday, actually into the mountains and the park, my body and spirit were just out of gas. Tomorrow will be soon enough for a couple of days in a campground -- Smokemont? -- in the Great Smokies.