The Road to Nowhere

The drowned-towns story has a second chapter, and it might be the maddest, saddest broken promise in these whole mountains. They call it the Road to Nowhere. Let me tell you how a road becomes a monument to a lie.

When the lake drowned the north shore and cut those families off from their old homes and — this is the part that cut deepest — from the graves of their kin, the government made them a promise. In exchange for the land, they'd build a new road along the north shore of the lake, so folks could drive back in to visit the family cemeteries and the old home places. A road to reconnect people to their own dead. That was the deal.

And they started it. They built a few miles of pretty lakeshore parkway, and a long tunnel bored right through the mountain — and then they stopped. The money ran out, or the will did, and then they hit a nasty snag: the rock they were cutting through turned out to be full of sulfur, and digging it bled acid into the streams, and fixing that would cost a fortune. So the road just... ended. Dead. A few miles of pavement running into a dark, unfinished tunnel in the middle of the national park, and beyond it, nothing but woods where a road was promised and never came. The Road to Nowhere. Folks waited sixty years for the rest of it.

It never got built. In the end, in twenty-ten, the government gave up and paid Swain County a settlement instead — fifty-two million dollars — cash in place of the road they'd promised two generations before. Money for a broken promise. But here's the part that'll put a lump in your throat: the families never stopped going home. To this day, the Park Service runs boats across Fontana Lake so the descendants can cross to those cut-off cemeteries on the north shore, clean the graves, and hold a reunion they call Decoration Day — carrying flowers to the dead of a drowned country, across the very water that drowned it. Sixty years, and they still come home to decorate the graves. That's not a road to nowhere, friend. That's a road to everywhere that matters.