You can walk into the Smokies, into the heart of the wilderness. You can drive through the Smokies, through the jewels in the crown of the Appalachian highlands. You can enter them through North Carolina or through Tennessee. But you can also enter them through any strong interest _you_ may have, for there are as many Smokies as there are ways you can see them. And one good way to see them is through the eyes of a native son whose love for these mountains is exceeded only by his love for people. Such is Glenn Cardwell. Glenn Cardwell took his aging mother and father down to the Noah “Bud” Ogle cabin just after the National Park Service finished restoring it. Glenn works for the park and would conduct nature walks at the cabin, so he wanted to see what his folks would say. They used to live nearby and his mother’s Aunt Cindy and her husband, Noah, built the cabin just off Cherokee Orchard Road out of Gatlinburg. “Well I’ll tell you,” Glenn said, “my mother got to reminiscing not one step off the parking lot and stopped at every rock and spot in the yard and told a tale. It must’ve taken the better part of an hour just to get her through the yard and down to the porch.” Glenn’s mother took one look at the porch and said, “They put the step [a big flat rock] in the wrong place.” And so the restoration team had ... but it was another rock that bothered Mrs. Cardwell most. Walking back to the car she stopped dead in her tracks and said despairingly, “What have they _done_ to Cindy’s rock?” Glenn had no idea what she meant although he could see the road cut close to a big boulder. The road had been relocated but Glenn recalled nothing unusual about the rock. His mother, still staring, repeated her question. Glenn’s father shrugged, “Looks to me like somebody blowed hell out of it.” “I still couldn’t figure out what was bothering my mother,” Glenn said. But now, in the 1980s, he will tell you that everyone in the Smokies had scaffolds in their yards back in Aunt Cindy’s day for drying fruits and vegetables for winter storage. Everyone, that is, but Aunt Cindy. She used the big boulder across from their cabin, or what used to be the flat part of it. Many’s the time Glenn’s mother, as a little girl, helped Aunt Cindy spread produce to sun dry on the rock. Glenn Cardwell is an affable walking encyclopedia of Smokies life at the time the Smokies changed from a piece of Tennessee and North Carolina real estate into our second national park in the East. Stories such as Glenn’s—and there are many—supply a compelling human resonance to this wilderness land. Glenn’s enthusiasm is a bit unusual, because his father was bought out _twice_ by the Federal government as lands were being acquired for the park. And each buy-out meant an unplanned relocation for the family, moving and building anew.