Totally Unauthorized

The employees claim to have never seen this sign.

Getting to our cabin from the playing site, we drive up Ski Run road, which runs all the way to the top of the mountain and the local ski resort.  This is one of the main ways to get to the many vacation homes here in Gatlinburg, which the owners rent out for much of the year.

I kept passing the sign you see above, and was fascinated by it.  “Restricted” communities have been illegal for quite a while now, it just isn’t possible to have the white, Christian enclaves of the past, so what can this sign mean?

Being congenitally inquisitive, I asked at the Chalet Village market, and the guy who worked there told me he had no idea.  So I turned off the road and into the rental office today, and asked the same question.

In truth, I expected them to tell me that it was an age thing, like Rossmoor, and you had to be of a certain age to purchase property and live there.  That’s not what happened.

There were 2 people in the office–a man in his 30’s and a woman in her late 40’s, I should think.  They told me that they had no idea.  The told me that they had never seen the sign–even though it is on  the main road and they would have to pass it every day to come to work.  I asked if black people could stay there.  I asked if Jews could stay there.  These are easy questions.  They didn’t seem to know the answer.

I thought I was in the twilight zone, and the aliens who were taking over the planet were pretending that they didn’t exist.  It was one of the strangest experiences of my life.

I knew that Gatlinburg was redneck heaven, but this is really more than one could possibly expect.  Is it possible that Chalet Village is really “restricted”?  Or is it possible that their employees are so incompetent that they don’t know what their own signs mean?  I’m fascinated, and intrigued, and amazed.