Having grown up in the foothills of the Smokies, I enjoyed your story of the salamander and wanderings through the mountains that I grew up exploring as a young man… and while I truly love the unique beauty and diversity of the Smokies, I discovered early on that for me the heat and humidity of the area in general were constraints to an enjoyable level of activity in the summer. This ‘discovery’ was readily confirmed on my first climbing trip to Colorado while a college student. The irony is the rain never really bothered me as I enjoyed it’s cooling effect, especially at some of the higher altitudes in the Smokies. In fact, one of my all-time favorite experiences was going to sleep listening to the rain on the tarp. Now that I live in Colorado, I treat rain as a welcome event, especially after enduring our recent dry, hot, long, smoke-filled summer.
On the one hand, I hear what you are saying when people ask where you are from… on the other, I have no regrets of where I grew up nor the people I grew up with. Having since traveled literally millions of air miles across the country as well as internationally on business, I have found that people are basically the same everywhere – there will always be the good, the bad and the ugly no matter where you go. Their opinion of where I am from is about them, not about me or where I grew up. As the saying goes, “those who care, don’t matter… and those who matter, don’t care.”
Keep up the great stories…
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