Of Bear Pits and Sadness

The other day, Kristin mentioned wanting to go outlet shopping in Pigeon Forge today and asked if I wanted to go, so I took the day off from work and made one request:

"Can we stop at the Three Bears General Store and see the bear pit? I'll pay for your ticket."

"OK." Pause. "What's a bear pit?"

Not a gay bar full of hair chubby guys, surprisingly enough, although I would be willing to bet ten American dollars that somewhere there is such a bar with that exact name.

Back to the bear pit, though, a few years ago I wondered why it was called the Three Bears General Store but only had two bears out front:



A little research revealed that the third bear (and four of his friends) was inside the gift shop, in the live bear habitat:



I've wanted to see it ever since, but now I wish I hadn't. I've seen things in Pigeon Forge that I jokingly wish that I hadn't seen, like the anatomically correct pegasus with dragon wings' horse penis:



but this is the first time I really, truly wish that I didn't know something even existed.

Jesus saves, but he doesn't save bears.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though, and need to backtrack to our arrival. We walked through the entire two story gift extravaganza, which was full of candy, souvenirs, an arcade, and Rebel flag merchandise, and then spotted the bear habitat:



I eagerly bought our tickets, which are good for the whole day, and paid a little extra for a cup of "bear food" to feed to the bears, which should have been our first indication of a problem:



I doubt bears in the wild survive on broken dog biscuits and wedged apples.

Anyway, Kristin carried our food, I readied the camera, and we flung open the door to the bear habitat observation area. The overwhelming sense of despair was immediate and palpable. As Kristin put it later in the car, "It was like we were om one of those Sarah McLachlan commercials, but the commercial was about bears!" Maybe the problem was Elvis Presley's "I Can't Help Falling in Love With You" blasting over the speakers, or maybe it was the immediate realization that the bear habitat is a cinderblock cave system in the middle of a parking lot, hastily tacked on to the back of the building:





but our first steps onto the bear habitat observation area filled us with sadness which only got worse when we saw the bears:



A fourth bear was down below those three, near some balls, the only visible source of stimulation or activity for the bears in the whole habitat:



and the last bear was down in the bottom in a corner, rubbing its head back and forth against the stone wall of the habitat, clearly driven insane by captivity.

One of the bears lifted his head and slowly blinked at us, so I prompted Kristin to throw him some food but please don't hit him with it. She did, and the bear slowly trundled over to where the apple piece landed. Encouraged, we threw them all of our cup of food from the top level before realizing that there are pipes on the bottom level where you can drop the food much closer to them:



When we got down that close, we discovered that one bear had been pelted with food by previous visitors and now had a piece of apple stuck in his fur:



but we could do nothing to help him.

After a few moments of watching the bears:









we headed back upstairs to the door, where we noticed that now that we were no longer throwing food the bears had all moved back to the exact same original positions in the habitat and were sitting, presumably waiting for the next group of visitors to throw dog biscuits and apples at them, and this was the last straw for me.

"I feel so bad that we spent money on this. Not because we got ripped off, but because I feel bad for supporting this."

Kristin agreed.

I'm not saying the bears are mistreated. They seem well fed (I assume that they are eating something besides what is thrown at them by visitors), but the overall feeling was despair, and it was immediate. We both felt it as soon as we stepped onto the observation deck, and it stuck with us for the next several hours. I'm not sure why this was sadder than seeing bears at the zoo, but there was something terribly depressing about this whole experience.

After many years of tacky mini golf stores, gift shoppes of all shapes and sizes, laser arcades, dinosaur boat rides, Titanic museums, old timey photos, wedding chapels, airbrushing stands, go-cart tracks, indoor skydiving, and pancake houses, Pigeon Forge has finally produced something that horrified even me.

The National Knife Museum

On Saturday morning, after Elizabeth and I went yard-saling for an hour or so (she bought a lamp and I bought a book for myself and one to donate to the resource center), I decided that since I was already awake and in the car, I would drive to the nearby National Knife Museum, located in Pigeon Forge in the gigantic multilevel Knifeworks store:



Then on Saturday afternoon and on and off during the day on Sunday I tried to think of an entertaining way to write about my trip, but kept running into a wall. You wouldn't think it would be hard to find something entertaining about a place where this brand of horror is the first thing you see:



Animatronic anthropomorphic animals with muscial instruments, covered in the preserved skins of actual animals. It's like a Chuck E. Cheese designed by John Wayne Gacy. It's also one of the few interesting parts of the trip because, unfortunately, the National Knife Museum is pretty boring.

Sorry, knife enthusiasts.

I really thought I would enjoy the trip. I'm not a knife craftsman (knifemaker?) or carnival sideshow performer, but I've watched a lot of horror movies and I cook a lot, so I have an appreciation for bladed weapons, and the knife museum and knife store has thousands of knives, swords, and other sharp objects. It just somehow managed to make them completely un-fun.

For starters, nothing in the museum is labeled. That means that if you do see something intriguing in one of the cases, like these wooden pocketknives:



you can't find out anything about them. Who carved them? For what purpose? And when? I'll never know, because the knife museum exists only to display knives, not to actually educate you about them.

There does seem to be some sort of order to the display cases, but this is just guesswork on my part. Here are the displays I think I saw, since there aren't any signs to tell me any different:

Animals That Died by Stabbing



The Knives That Won World War II



Knives of the American Old West, And Also a Gun



South American Knives Except for the Bottom One That Looks Asian



African Knives and Other Pointy Things



I Think This Is About the Civil War Except That One of the Coats is Red Instead of Gray



And that's it. I don't know if they were famous, historical, examples of something important in the hostory of knives, or if someone just cleaned out the knife sections at Pier One and the antique store and dumped the results into a few display cases. I learned nothing, except that knives exist and there are a lot of different kinds. Worst of all, I didn't even find the one famous knife that I was told to be there.

All I found was a poster:



You know what should be in a case, right next to that poster?

A bowie knife.

One that Rambo used to liberate entire countries of oppressed people in a movie.

But there's not. There's not even a plaque or a sign that tells you where the knife should be or if it was ever there at all. There's just a poster and a rack of dried fruit, down in the basement in the cooking section of the store that also happens to house the knife museum.

What a disappointment.

Thursday Night Mini-Adventure

Last night, Kristin and I decided we needed to get out of town for a couple hours to escape work and blow off steam before we went to the hospital for ICU visiting hours, which are oddly scheduled from 9 to 10 PM. I drove over to meet her at her car, but she was running late, so I walked around the parking garage for a few minutes, taking random photos:







I really like this one, part of my ongoing black and white project:



After Kristin got there, we headed out to Pigeon Forge, so that she could pick up a gift certificate for the indoor skydiving place for someone's birthday. I have no interest in indoor skydiving, but there was a love machine in the lobby that seemed kind of interested in me:



Sexy, you say? Me? Hmmmm... maybe I won't die alone (in the rain, as I've always suspected that I will) after all.

After we picked up the gift certificate, Kristin decided we should stop at Mel's Diner for dinner. They have a pretty extensive menu for a vintage, tiny sized aluminum trailer-style diner, with many of the dishes named after famous people:



Once I saw the Bette Davis BLT, I was compelled by the knowledge of their legendary Hollywood feud to check the rest of the menu for a Joan Crawford dish, and discovered that there isn't one. No penne in vodka sauce or viciously slapped chicken, but the diner did serve Pepsi Cola, so maybe this particular matchup is a tie.

Or maybe somewhere up in movie heaven, Bette is enjoying a good, cigarette-raspy chuckle, especially after Kristin ordered her BLT.

Lacking a Joan dish, I instead ordered the fried bologna and cheese sandwich, with mustard:



and fries. It was crispy and melty and really, really good, and then, on the way home, this happened:



No matter how sad or tired or stressed I am, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg always find a way to make me smile.

Destination: Horror!

Bryan, Kristin, and I were supposed to go on an entirely different trip today. I had planned out a whole adventure in North Carolina, but it turns out that the main place I wanted to go to operates on a seasonal schedule, and won't be open again until the spring. Somehow this didn't come up in my planning, and after I apologized profusely earlier in the week Bryan decided that he would pick us up anyway and would drive toward Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and just stop wherever we saw something interesting.

Interesting for Bryan and interesting for Kristin and I are two different things, as Bryan had his eyes on the majectic beauty of the Smokies, and Kristin and I had our eyes on something directly in front of them:



The World's Largest "As Seen on TV Store", which we expected to be a magical wonderland of Snuggies and giant cupcake cake pans and juicers and choppers and Sham-wows. We did see all of those things inside the store, but we saw so many other, more terrible things, and eventually just kind of fled.

Things started going downhill as soon as we walked in, when we were confronted in the vestibule by a Santa statue.

"He's sort of creepy," Kristin said, and I immediately noticed why.

"Where's his mouth?"

"Let me look."



He didn't have one. There was a lot of beard hair, and underneath a blank, featureless chin. What kind of biological nightmare produces a human being with no mouth?

Probably the same kind that produces flying killer whales:



I've never seen one of those on TV, by the way, but that seems to be a theme at the World's Largest "As Seen on TV" store. In between the food dehydrators and jugs of C.L.R., you see things like this:



I've never seen a commercial for the Bun and Thigh Doer. I realize the name "Thighmaster" is already taken, but the best word the marketing department could come up with instead was "doer"? Usually when someone around me mentions doing someone's buns (like the ones drawn on the seat around the word "bun") they mean a whole other form of exercise. After looking at it, I wasn't really sure what it was supposed to do to your buns and thighs, and there was no one around to ask besides the Obamas:



The "As Seen on TV" store, for unknown reasons, carries a large number of cardboard celebrity standups, and displays them all over the store. Jesus was hanging out in men's t-shirts, Glinda the Good Witch hovered over the discount books, Chris Pine as Captain Kirk watched over a display of discount coffee mugs, and John Wayne looked vaguely shocked at being there:



There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the placement of the standups. If I was running the store, for example, I'd have Jesus over by the display of religious license plate tags:



On the other hand, it's possible that they didn't want it to appear that Jesus condones unauthorized use of licensed logos:



For shame, "As Seen on TV" store.

Then again, what's a little infringement when you're peddling open racism? Since I've moved to Tennessee I've heard more than once that the Confederate flag:



is a symbol of proud heritage that I, as a liberal Yankee, can't really understand and that it has nothing to do with racism, but how else do you explain this?



Not only are the makers not ashamed to print and sell this, but they're actually proud:



Right about then is when we decided we'd seen enough, and left the store. Not having a real destination in mind, we drove through to Gatlinburg, walked around, and saw things that were just odd and bizarre, rather than openly offensive.

Wait, day-glo plastic Buddhas might be offensive:



I'm not really sure what the rules are for Buddhism.

Caramel apples, on the other hand, are never offensive:



Neither is taffy:



I was going to say that neither is bacon, but the bacon flavored lip balm leaves me uncertain:



Could this finally be a way in which bacon is not wonderful? Or would tasting someone's bacon-flavored lips lead to the kind of makeout session that Aaron Samuels and Regina George enjoyed in "Mean Girls" after he discovered that her face smelled like peppermint? Until someone tries it, the bacon balm is simultaneously wonderful and horrible, a Schrodinger's tube of lip balm waiting to be revealed. It's a question for greater minds than mine to ponder.

There's no question, on the other hand, that chum flavored candy has to be disgusting:



Almost as disgusting as the grammar on the side of the buffet we ate at:



No one who works there has ever noticed this? Do they not have schools in Gatlinburg, or did they tear them down to build a school-themed minigolf instead?

Either way, it was a fun day, even if I do feel like a little bit more of a hillbilly every time I visit: