Sharbs, who is in his early forties, grew up in Knoxville, thirty-six miles north of the park, and has been a Smokies regular since elementary school. In the early two-thousands, he and his wife, Laura, a veterinarian, worked on cattle ranches in California. “When we would do roundups, there was this old firefighter who’d come out and help us, and I’d talk to him and think, That sounds like a pretty cool life style,” he said. Firefighting didn’t stick. Sharbs joined the Tennessee Army National Guard. In 2012, he deployed to Afghanistan and spent a year in Helmand Province, as a combat medic. He was telling me about it over sandwiches in the park, at a picnic table beside the Little River, when an acorn the size of a golf ball very nearly fell on my head. Sharbs went “Holy shit!” Then he said, “Also a big killer in the park? Falling tree branches.” Dead, dangling limbs are called widow-makers. Jonathan Dee, the park’s medical director, who is a family physician, told me that a patient once asked him which of the park’s wild animals frightened him most; he said that nothing scared him more than the wind.