“The beans, chicken, pictures, oh my gosh, you name it.” Then she starts laughing, throwing her hands up. “We’ve learned a lot. “I don’t think everyone knows that. She had gone to bed early that night last November, and the fire took the nightstand that held her glasses, and the Irish lace blanket keeping her warm, a keepsake from her mother, after she kicked it off and ran for her life. He’s smoking a lot now—too much, he says—three packs a day.
It took the sewing machines. “If I would’ve put moonshine in them, they would’ve won first,” she says.Faye McKinney in front of what’s left of McKinney’s Market.The fire left the sign, McKinney’s, still yellow but now askew atop their gas pumps, which the fire also miraculously spared.
On the night of November 28, residents of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, found themselves in the midst of a nightmare. I was able to get to my feet.” In March, Jillson, with a bag of his clothes, was living in the back of a dump truck. Lily’s first big roller coaster was the Thunderhead. Just sitting there in the quiet.” He hasn’t been back to Gatlinburg except once, with his father, to take a quick look at the house, to rummage through it, only for a few minutes—he had to leave.
Faye had planned on keeping those forever, or until they buried her in that Smoky Mountain town. “I want to.”Reed looks back at the highway, the Spur, over his left shoulder, first toward the grinding noise of the empty dump trucks bouncing toward Gatlinburg, and then at the bigger trucks headed back in the opposite direction, from the mountains, stacked with rows of burned-out cars. He couldn’t hear the woman who handed him the child as she clambered out of the car, fighting the gusts that threatened to slam the door shut.He glanced at the boy's face, wrapped in a blanket and shrouded in smoke. We’re going to be okay.
“What do I do?” she asked, terrified. She wore a cotton nightgown that flayed from her in wind gusts that topped 80 m.p.h. She could see the fire approaching the house. The white light of the bulbs patterned around the doorways of the shops all along the parkway illuminated everything, every door open, an extended invitation. More flames bent toward her as reflections on the creek. But it’s hard to be at Dollywood because the girls loved it there, too. Faye displays the candy cane in the kitchen window of her new house because the mug meant a lot to her. But she couldn’t move it without the key.She ran down the mountain toward Gatlinburg, almost tripping over downed power lines. “Call 911,” he said.The Reeds lived in Chalet Village on Wiley Oakley Drive, a squiggle of a road weaving down steep mountain ridges. Her business, colloquially known to just about everyone in town as Faye and Dale’s. Volunteers came from Samaritan’s Purse to help clean up rubble.
What’s the last thing you see? He didn’t know how to respond. And he prayed one more time for rain.Fourteen people died in the Gatlinburg fire, and more than 2,500 homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. When the orange of the fire was like some terrible painting in the distance, he said, laughing, “Lady, you In the mountains that night there were too many prayers to pick from, and not all of them were answered. The embers popped on the windshield as he drove over fallen limbs, and the sound he couldn’t forget was the air itself howling in a type of surrender. He kept driving, hoping, remembering how he’d ended the phone call:A blackened stove in the hard-hit neighborhood of Chalet Village.To be terrified of the fire was also to be in awe of it—of its orange at dusk turning to red, of the height of the flames, higher than the roofs of the houses; of the exploding windows and bowing steel, the blackened concrete; of how it actually looked to watch a house burn, in minutes, and know that it The fire began on November 23. “She was fearless after that,” he says. Some were meeting at town halls, people who had lost their homes and more and who didn’t believe there was enough warning or a proper evacuation system in place. On the day of the fire, the Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg—one of the country’s most popular aquariums—had stayed open as a shelter for people walking around town to come in out of the smoke before it was evacuated later that night.Ryan DeSear, the aquarium’s manager, was one of the first people allowed back in town the morning after the fire, pulling into the aquarium to check on the penguins and the sharks while the hill behind the building still smoldered in the dark. She’s wearing a purple long-sleeved shirt that hides her scars, glasses, and a little beret as she speaks with prospective buyers at her studio. Chloe had no fear whatsoever until she rode the Wild Eagle.
Everyone, they said, had to get out, now, leave the cars, escape on foot, the worst fire in a hundred years in the Smokies. She has since moved into the cabin. He remembers her yelling at him the whole way up, and halfway down she raised her hands and squealed. He can’t leave them there in the mountains.A tattoo on Michael Reed’s arm bears the names of his wife and daughters.On a cold night three and a half months after the blaze, from a balcony above the strip, the city looked like a fire itself in the middle of nowhere—flashing, blinking, sparkling—the air filled with something like the gold dust from Dolly Parton’s song “Smoky Mountain Memories.” It smelled of funnel cakes just out of the fryer, as though it were summertime at the fair. I have no idea what time it was. As soon as the girls went to bed, Michael and Constance would dip into it.