Gatlinburg burned last night.

Nearly 14,000 people were evacuated from the city. At least four died.

My parents eloped there in 1973, getting married in the justice of the peace’s living room because there weren’t yet wedding chapels on every other block. I grew up going to the Smokies every summer, camping mostly in Cosby campground but visiting Gatlinburg annually, too.

I’ve always remembered Gatlinburg as a tourist trap, with its space needle, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum, mini-golf and many arcades and air-brushed t-shirt shops. It’s gotten worse over the years, but at its core it remains the same old Gatlinburg while nearby Pigeon Forge and Sevierville — both of which I can remember with a spare handful of strip malls — have gone full mutant, sprouting water parks and upside-down houses and multi-level go-kart tracks.

We lived in Gatlinburg one summer while my dad collected research in the Smokies. My mom worked out a deal for us to swim regularly in a nearby motel swimming pool. I practiced riding my Variflex skateboard and went running for the first time, accompanying my mom on a route that took us past the Donut Friar, whose donuts were only average but whose smells were exquisite. I remember spotting an elf out of the corner of my eye in the parking lot outside our apartment. I’m still half-convinced it was real.

Later I visited Gatlinburg on church youth group trips without my parents. The last time was in junior high, when I went with my best friend’s church group, and he and I played hooky, wandered the streets and gleefully tossed glasses from the 17th story balcony of our hotel room. I’m not proud of that, but it was part of growing up.

Gatlinburg functioned that way for generations of kids around the Southeast and beyond. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is *the* most visited national park in the country, and on any given summer day you can find a good two-thirds of those people on the streets of Gatlinburg.

The sprawling, tacky, touristy Gatlinburg acts as the yang to the cool yin of the Smokies’ less-visited sections, covered in rhododendron, ferns and old trees that have seen many, many people come and go.

Part of me feels like the wildfires of 2016 were the manifestation of nature’s response to mankind’s reckless growth and disregard for the natural world. It feels like the Smokies rose up like the Old Testament God of wrath and smoke the cancerous blemish that disfigured its western edge. If nothing else, that image is a satisfying metaphor, especially during the Christmas season and its bacchanalian celebration of unbridled consumerism and plastic.

That metaphor is false, though. Nature doesn’t really care what we do. We’re part of that same natural system, after all, no matter how far we stray from the root. Wildfire has periodically consumed these mountains as long as there’s been fuel to feed it. People didn’t change that — not the Cherokee or earlier American Indian tribes, not the first European settlers, not our modern land agencies or the people who use these wildlands as playground and therapy.

Gatlinburg will rebuild, bigger and glossier and possibly tackier than before. Someday the fire will return and take more structures. The cycle repeats, until one day people will be gone. The fire will remain, though, and with it the new life that always rises in its wake.