For Thursday: Tower, "No Amount of Traffic" (pp.243-253)

Here's a link to the essay in Outside magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/2086161/no-amount-traffic-or-instagrammers-or-drunks-can-take-magic-out-semi-wilderness

Definitions: trodden, vehement, preternaturally, postrandial, “gourmandizing pantomime”

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: At the end of the essay, Wells asks, “what do we want from the woods? Primitively put, we want the woods to put in us a feeling that doesn’t happen indoors” (253). What experiences does the modern world of “indoors” and “technology” not give us that we seek outside? Do you think people who grow up in more urban areas even know what to look for when they go outside? You might consider the question he asks earlier, “Am I getting it?”

Q2: In the previous essay, Santillan realizes, “if you don’t lose yourself, you’re never going to find yourself.” But getting lost is easier said than done. How hard is it to get lost in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Why might the park rangers and the National Parks Service not want you to get lost, and have a “finding yourself in nature” experience?

Q3: Wells writes that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has transformed “from an actual place to an abstract pop phenomenon” (249). What do you think this means? How does a place stop being a place and become something else? How does this change how people visit and experience the park?

Q4: Tower has a very humorous and poetic way of describing the place and the people in it. Discuss a brief passage (or even a sentence) that makes you see the place in a different light, either as a way to make fun of it, or to appreciate what it actually is (in his mind).