“So I guess we already went through Fairyland Caverns,” my friend Brooke said after a while, disappointment in her voice. We continued down the trail, through Goblins Underpass and Fat Man Squeeze. “I feel you, girl,” I said between mouthfuls of Dippin’ Dots. My second-smallest friend, Cora, regarded him from a safe distance, her face contorted with repulsion and delight. Kids hugged his knees and grinned for photos, just as I’d done a generation before. Rocky the Elf sauntered around the plaza, his old red stocking cap replaced with a jaunty straw boater but his toothless grin as insistent as ever. The path led us through the woods, over and under lichen-flocked footbridges, past assemblages of plaster gnomes working and playing and making moonshine, over an enclosure of fallow deer, all the way to Lover’s Leap with its view of, if not seven states, then at least the rolling green hills and blue haze of Lookout Valley. As we navigated one tight passage, my smallest friend, Calvin, strapped to his mother’s chest, rolled back his melon head and grinned at the bright sliver of sky far above. The humidity dropped precipitously, blessedly. But within moments, we found ourselves walking a trail lined with ferns and rhododendrons cut by nature and time between the mossy walls of hulking sandstone. Our posse bought tickets and entered the park through a gift shop stuffed floor to ceiling with birdhouses painted like the famous Rock City barns and lawn gnomes wearing American flag–printed vests. If we came out the other side bemused and uncertain-or worse, overtired and hungry and sticky with the sap of a tourist trap-my strange fealty to a handful of gauzy memories would be to blame. Naps, feeding schedules, and diaper situations were on the line. But as we pulled into the parking lot, I got clammy. “It is exactly the right amount of cheesy and bizarre, and the views are really beautiful,” I promised. Last August, I used some friends and their tiny kids as an excuse to revisit this childhood mirage and try to get a grip on whatever it was that eluded me. I knew I’d seen something there, once upon a time, but I could no longer say what it all added up to. When I poked at them, they squirmed and shifted away. Its claim was true, but I found myself unable to trust my memories of the place. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to slap the sticker on my car. A few years ago, I even bought a seen rock city bumper sticker to prove I could lovingly eye-roll like a local despite having lived in Atlanta for a decade. I still mentally salute every see rock city sign I pass along the roadsides of the Southeast-at ease, you weary soldiers of outdoor advertising. The Carters opened the gardens to the public in 1932 and a few years later paid a man to paint black-and-white ads on barns all the way up to Michigan. Then her husband, Garnet, saw dollar signs. Frieda designed the trails, augmented the landscape with native plants, and hired a sculptor to build the fairy-tale statuary. In fact, it had been coaxed into being during the late 1920s by Frieda Carter, an avid horticulturist, lover of European folklore, and wife of a local real estate developer. Back then, the place seemed not just entirely natural but eternal to me, without beginning or end. With my family, I wandered the narrow paths between boulders and over the suspension bridge to the Lover’s Leap overlook, where I strained to See Seven States and posed for photos with foam-headed mascot Rocky the Elf before descending into the lurid dreamscapes of Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village, a subterranean hallway lined with black-lit dioramas of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. When I first read those lines, I bristled-my standard reaction to anyone daring to describe anything relating to my hometown without first living there for eighteen years-then huffed in grudging recognition.Īs a kid, I made the pilgrimage up Lookout Mountain to Rock City countless times. In his 2001 fantasy novel American Gods, the British author Neil Gaiman describes visitors to Rock City-Chattanooga, Tennessee’s most famous non-locomotive attraction-like this: “When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.”
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