LAKE FONTANA
This was the day we visited Lake Fontana. In my 60 years of living in Asheville I had never been to Lake Fontana, either. Lake Fontana is a man made lake, built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA, which dam crazy, wanting to dam up rivers all around the Tennessee area. They even planned for awhile to put in a dam at Warren Wilson College which would, every time the Swannanoa flooded would create a lake in the view out my back window. Luckily they failed. The excuse for damming up the Nantahala and Little Tennessee rivers was to get hydro electric power for the huge Alcoa Aluminum plant in Alcoa, Tennessee and was done during the Second World Wars as part of the war effort. Most of the mountain valleys that were flooded to create Lake Fontana were sparsely settled but the town of Proctor, a former logging town, was inundated. The thousand people who were displaced were promised that a road would be built to connect to the cemeteries that mountain people visit once a year on decoration day, but the “road to nowhere” was never built. Everything on the Western and northern side of the lake is the Great Smoky National Park and access to this remote section of the park is either by boat, as we did, or by a long hike through the park. The Great Smoky National Park is the most visited national park and the biggest tourist draw in the area. The ride through the center of the park is a beautiful ride.
The boat ride on Lake Fontana to the inundated town of Proctor is beautiful. At several places along the lake people have the rights to a spot on lake where they can place a houseboat, a little house on pontoons anchored to the lake bottom.
Joanna and Jamie fell in love with Lake Fontana twenty years ago when they married and bought a houseboat on the lake for $13,000. They have since had to renew the pontoons but the little house, reachable only by boat and with no electricity except for solar, is their summer cottage.
In the winter the level of the lake goes down and the house boats end up sitting on the lakebed for the winter. The water level has already started to be drawn down as we could see by the bare earth below the vegetation line all around the lake. October 1 is the end of the season so we were invited just in time. Joanna drove the very comfortable and speedy pontoon boat through the narrow winding lake that spreads out through the former mountain valleys where some mountain peaks are now islands.
We went up one former valley to where Hazel Creek enters the lake and, after our picnic on the boat, walked a mile up a beautiful wooded road beside broad, clear Hazel Creek to what is left of the town of Proctor and then we made the hour long ride back to Joanna’s houseboat, where we all jumped into the lake for a swim and then drove home.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 