Through the fire and back
Smoke closed in on every side. There was more than usual, and it was thick. It was not the fog the Cherokee had once called “blue smoke.” Ash fell from the sky. It was still a bright, hot orange as it floated down.
Samantha Suttles drove home from work and turned onto Ski Mountain Road, where her and her husband’s small rental house was located. It was a short drive from the Gatlinburg entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As Suttles described it in an email, it was a 1960’s one-level home “with a giant picture window on the front side that caught the morning light.” Three sides of the property were on the park boundary.
Upon seeing the ash, Suttles knew instantly she needed to leave. Suttles called her husband who at the same time was calling her.
She pulled onto their steep, quarter-mile-long driveway and up to the house, which was nestled in the woods, perfect fuel for a fire. Her husband was already home, and they frantically began grabbing what they could. The fire was clearly near.
A black-and-white cat named Ferris Mewler and a long-haired cat named Katy Purry. The dog, a husky mix with one blue eye and one brown, named Jenji. A laptop. A work bag. An antique rifle. Those were the only things the Suttles grabbed and shoved in the car. Ten minutes. That’s the amount of time that had gone by.
Suttles couldn’t see Ferris Mewler. She knew she had put him in the car, but she feared he had wiggled out. There was no time to double check, but she worried about the cat for the remainder of the drive.
Suttles saw the flames as she and her husband drove away from the first house they shared together.
The traffic had not yet backed up in Gatlinburg, as it would shortly after the Suttles drove away. They had a straight shot out. They arrived at a friend’s house. It turned out Ferris Mewler was in the car and had been hiding on the floorboard.
No one thought anything of the fire a few days before the Suttles rushed from their home. Inside the most-visited national park in the United States, there had before been smaller brush fires during the late fall and winter months. This one proved to be more threatening and not as small as the others.
According to an article from National Geographic, wildfires consume four to five million acres of land in the U.S. each year. In the Smokies and the surrounding areas, 17,000 acres burned in late November and early December 2016. “It’s hard not to think about,” Suttles, who has worked in the park since she was a graduate student, said nearly three years after the fire. “It’s such a vivid memory for the people of Gatlinburg.”
Suttles has been a supporter of the Great Smoky Mountains since she was a child. Born in Louisiana and later transplanted to South Carolina, she and her family frequently vacationed in the Smokies.
She moved to Tennessee and began college studying English Literature at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, located less than an hour from the park, until she realized the only stable job for that might be teaching. She knew she didn’t want to teach. Suttles would eventually go on to study history, one of her passions.
“I always thought you needed a biology degree to work in the parks,” Suttles said as she sat in the office at work. She discovered she could use her history degree after working as an intern and then a ranger for the National Park Service.
When she finished her graduate education, her work as a ranger was set to end. However, Suttles didn’t want to leave the park. Fortunately, while she was still working as a ranger, Suttles met Erik and Vesna Plakanis’s daughter. Erik and Vesna own A Walk in the Woods, the outfitters company for which Suttles has worked for nearly a decade.
Suttles now considers Erik and Vesna dear friends. When Suttles went into labor with her daughter Abbie in December 2016, one week after she evacuated her home and a month before her due date, she called Vesna to ask what it was like to have your water break. Vesna responded, “If you have to ask that question, we need to get you to the hospital.”
The Plakanis’s house was where the little Suttles family stayed when they were first displaced, and they would later stay in a vacation cabin owned by Vesna’s mother-in-law.
“Everyone who knew Sam knew she was a great historian,” Plakanis said as she remembered hiring Suttles. Suttles was (and is) kind, sweet and a perfect fit for the job as a hiking guide.
The Suttles lost their entire home to the fire, including an antique four-harness loom that had been passed down in the family of Suttle’s husband. They lost her grandmother’s hand-written cookbook, as well as all the baby items they’d been given for Abbie.
Abbie will be three in December, three years after the wildfires. She loves the outdoors, just like her mom. She calls herself “Adventure Abbie” when they go on hikes.
“We all just sort of rallied together,” Plakanis said of the days following the 2016 forest fires. “It was an amazing thing to watch not only the local community but also the hiking community at large come together to support one another.”
Suttles said family, friends and the rest of the Gatlinburg community helped them out as they tried to adjust to their new life, one where they were new parents and didn’t have a house of their own. They were given so many baby items Suttles began donating the excess they didn’t need. She knew there were others who needed help just as much, if not more than she did.
“She’s the kind of person who will give you the shirt off her back, even if she doesn’t have another shirt,” Plakanis said. “I can’t imagine her not being part of our family.”
Despite losing a lot at the hands of the fire, Suttles hasn’t been persuaded or scared away from the park she loves. Some of her and her husband’s first dates were hikes. Four weeks after Abbie was born, Suttles had her out on the trails with her.
“It’s hard to not fall in love with this place,” Suttles said with a toothy grin, one that crinkled her freckled nose and brown eyes.
Sometimes, she confided, it was hard for her to return to work after the fire. Even now, over two years later, a certain place or a certain question can make Suttles cry. She has had panic attacks when people burn brush piles.
“You can replace physical stuff, but you can’t replace family memories,” she said. She missed the family pictures, the baby shower cards and the loom her husband was restoring for her.
The Smokies and A Walk in the Woods are her home. She “never thought of leaving.”
Suttles regularly guides people on walks and hikes in the Smokies. She picks up orange peels other less-knowledgeable guests have left behind. Non-native foods and plants are not supposed to be disposed of on the trails or in the woods. Wildlife who come upon it and eat it have their life expectancy cut by half.
As snow lightly glided down on a March morning in 2019, Suttles was dressed in her warm hiking gear, and her dark hair was pulled into a pony tail. Her ears were guarded by a gray ear-warmer headband. She moved rocks to make a way to cross a stream that had popped up across the Walker sisters’ trail. When she and her hikers made their way back, she returned the rocks to their original spots, in case wildlife had made homes in the original location.
“A lot of people don’t realize the Great Smokies are considered the jewel of the national parks,” Plakanis said, noting the immense biodiversity present in the Smokies. The national parks are “incredibly worth preserving.”
Suttles, Plakanis, the team at A Walk in the Woods and other park advocates have answered the call to protect them.
“They have to be protected,” Suttles said. “You don’t have to be an experienced hiker to get out and enjoy it. There really is something for everybody.”
**Please note that the following story, which is provided in its entirety, has not been published elsewhere. It was originally written for a class assignment in 2019. Do not print or duplicate without the author’s permission.**