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The people who live here and work in restaurants, hotels, and all the other jobs-now called the "service industry"-are almost invariably much more polite than they need to be. They can't help it; that's how they were brought up to behave, even to people who don't deserve it. They don't have to be trained to say "sir and "ma'am"; they do it naturally.
As for fellow vacationers, many of them come from the South, and they are friendly as well. The people standing in line with you will talk to you. They will generally ask where their conversationalist is from, make some favorable comment about that place, and, if possible, ask if the speaker "knows so-and-so's brother there--no, he doesn't live there anymore, he got to thinking he was Elvis and they had to put him in a home." And on from there.
The final group of people that visitors may encounter are ghosts-the people who settled the Smokies, who lived their lives in the shadows of the mountains, and who were forced off land that their families, in some cases, had owned for generations so that the rest of us can enjoy pleasant vacations.
Looking at the engineering it took to construct the Mingus turbine mill on the North Carolina side of the park, or at the innovative design of the cantilever barns in Cades Cove, the thoughtful visitor comes to the realization that the people who lived in these mountains were not the stupid hillbillies so often trotted out in popular culture and by the hucksters in towns surrounding the park. The families who settled the Smokies were intelligent, resourceful people who created art in quilts and music, who read and believed the King James version of the Bible, and who lived lives that were in many ways superior to the frantic ones that the rest of us come here to escape.
by Mike Sigalas, from (Moon Handbooks: Smoky Mountains, cowritten with Jeff Bradley).
