NOBODY CARES IF TENNESSEE BURNS

My parents married in the spring of 1973, in a modest white Baptist church by a creek in a small hollow in southeastern Kentucky. My mother borrowed her sister’s wedding dress, and after the cake-and-punch reception in the fellowship hall, she changed into a baby blue minidress and set out with my father to the Smoky Mountains resort town of Gatlinburg, Tenn., for the honeymoon.

Today much of Gatlinburg is gone, destroyed by an enormous wildfire that began Monday, killing five, driving thousands from their homes and dimming one of the region’s few economic generators. But for most folks like me, this calamity is less about the lost jobs than about the lost memories of a place of great beauty, in a part of the country that sorely needed it.

For my parents and countless others who had grown up poor in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, a visit to Gatlinburg was a treat — a place to enjoy the natural wonder of the Smoky Mountains, to splurge on a meal at the Howard Johnson, or to visit Goldrush Junction, a small- scale attraction that was renamed Silver Dollar City and ultimately transformed into Dollywood. A trip to Gatlinburg meant that things were looking up, that they themselves were on their way up — that a place at the table of the American middle class was within their grasp.

And indeed it was. My parents became the first and second in their families to graduate from college, and both became educators. By the time I was born, nearly eight years later, their white-collar, middle-class identity was assured.

I grew up with vacations to beaches in South Carolina and Florida, to New York, Texas and California, to the nation’s capital. But we still went to Gatlinburg, usually for weekend getaways, visits that created many enduring childhood memories: a ride up the mountainside on the chairlift with my frightened cousin, learning to ice skate at the Ober Gatlinburg amusement and ski complex, getting sick from too much freshpressed apple cider at the Apple Barn in nearby Pigeon Forge.

The Smoky Mountains have never been immune to flames, and like dozens of other places in southern Appalachia this fall, they have been ravaged by wildfires. But on Monday, all the awful elements came together: high winds from the south spread fires that had erupted because of persistent drought and, as with many forest fires, arson.

By Monday night, downtown Gatlinburg and its surrounding mountains were under a manda- tory evacuation order. Images of the danger and destruction spread as fast as the fires themselves on social media: wedding chapels ablaze, uncontrollable fires reaching main highways, smoke and ash obscuring the night sky.

According to local news outlets, more than 14,000 people have been evacuated from Gatlinburg alone. Thousands fill a convention centre turned Red Cross shelter. Several people, including children, are missing. Others are being treated for severe burns. Dozens of homes, rental cabins, chalets and businesses have been destroyed.

Even amid the disaster in Gatlinburg, some commenters on social media have perpetuated hateful stereotypes

Little attention has been paid to this disaster by the national media. CNN and ABC’s Good Morning America offered only a few com- bined minutes of anemic coverage. By Tuesday afternoon, only CNN’s website had it as major news, and neither the White House nor president-elect Donald Trump had made a statement on the situation.

This may all change in the coming days, but it’s hard not to feel that, were this a wildfire in Malibu, Calif., we’d be watching round-theclock coverage of the multimilliondollar houses being threatened and the natural beauty of the Pacific Palisades being ravaged. Unfortunately, this lack of attention is all too familiar to the residents of Appalachia, who have historically been ignored or misrepresented in the national consciousness. News coverage has focused on economic poverty rather than cultural riches, a handful of feuds rather than strong family ties.

Even amid the disaster in Gatlinburg, some commenters on social media have perpetuated hateful stereotypes: that the moonshine stills of the poor, ignorant hillbillies have accidentally set the mountains ablaze, or that Tennesseans, who largely voted for Trump, are getting their just deserts. And even though thousands of wooded acres throughout the region have been burning this fall, it appears that the only reason the Gatlinburg fire is receiving any coverage at all now is that businesses owned by big corporations are at risk.

I haven’t been to Gatlinburg much in recent years. But on a trip last fall, I sat in a restaurant with my family. I looked across the table at my husband, aunt and uncle, cousin and niece, and thought about all the love that united us. I remembered what was so special about the Smoky Mountains in the first place: generations of collective memories shared by countless families, all tied to a stunning mountain range that, today, sadly lives up to its name.

FIRES IN MALIBU GET MORE COVERAGE THAN APPALACHIA.