THE GOOD LIFE
THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR when the western mountains usually fill with tourists, who occupy resorts and Airbnbs and ply the Blue Ridge Parkway to marvel at
Kristiana Fuller, a 20-year-old Bryson City native shown here at work at her parents’ ice cream shop, says the initial lockdown nearly put them out of business.
the autumn foliage. As I write this, at the beginning of the season, it appears that some of those visitors will still make day and weekend treks from the Charlotte area; if you’re going to leave the house and minimize the risk of contracting COVID, you could do worse than hike mountain trails and take in multihued landscapes from your car. But of course, the virus has cut into the number of visitors and the money that businesses and employees depend on. North Carolina tourism spending
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dropped 58 percent from March to the beginning of August, a reduction of $6.8 billion in spending and $871 million in related tax revenue, according to the U.S. Travel Association. (Visit North Carolina, the state’s travel and tourism agency, does not track those numbers by region.) The timing could hardly have been worse in the mountains, where spring tourism season arrived with the virus. Jeff and Paula Fuller, who own BoxCar Café & Cones in Bryson City, barely hung on with takeout orders from midMarch to early May, says their daughter Kristiana, 20; she works as a server at BoxCar and at the front desk of the Swain County Heritage Museum downtown. “Right when it should have picked up,” Kristiana says, “is when everything had to shut down.” The museum, housed in a former courthouse built in 1908, is closed under Phase 2 of the state’s COVID response plan, although the visitor center remains open. Kristiana speaks to me, masked, from behind clear plastic. She was born and bred in Bryson City, describing herself as “ninth-generation Swain County.” Once the statewide shelter-in-place order lifted in May, she says, business picked up, and most people in the visitor center and the restaurant observe the indoor mask requirement—though not everyone. THAT MATCHES MY EXPERIENCE. On a gray Sunday afternoon, I pull up to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I’m mildly surprised to see the parking lot nearly full—not overflowing, as it’d ordinarily be, but close. Some visitors wear masks as they emerge from the main building and detached restroom
BRYSON CITY / SWAIN COUNTY NC CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
They’ve been open for study, shelter, and relaxation since the first day of classes a week ago as a way to keep too many students from congregating indoors. Now, in late August, it’s about 10:30 on a Monday morning that threatens rain, and it doesn’t appear that anyone’s using them. It’s quiet on what normally is a campus alive with new-academic-year energy and preparation for football season. But Whitmire Stadium is silent, too. Across Catamount Road in the intramural fields rests a makeshift arrangement of free weights and exercise equipment on the wet grass, overseen by campus trainers. A few people go through their paces. I walk by on the track that surrounds the fields. I introduce myself and ask one of the trainers about the setup. His supervisor advises me, adamantly, to consult university public affairs. I thank them and walk on.
