On a hot August night in Gatlinburg, you can wear out your flip-flops and soak your armpits walking the Parkway downtown. Before the road veers south into the Smoky Mountains, you’ll pass an assortment of restaurants and shops: Crockett’s Breakfast Camp with its enormous frying pan slammed between two stone pillars, Ripley’s Odditorium, a Hampton Inn beside the waters of Leconte Creek, indoor miniature golf courses, wine shops, and an assortment of tee shirt and souvenir shops.
At some point in your stroll, as you ramble past yet another postcard carousel and ice cream parlor, you know it’s only a matter of time before you encounter that vacation danger, the store that’s sucked more holiday dollars out of couple’s pockets than any other: the fudge shop. Some family’s entire holiday budgets have been lost to these nefarious hawkers of chocolate confections.
“Keep your eyes open for the fudge shops,” says your wife, as if you weren’t already on edge. She also doesn’t want to suffer another vacation lost to the addictive powers of fudge.
You know you’re going to have to confront them at some point: their clean, neat shelves filled with a dozen different flavors: from plain fudge to fudge with nuts, from vanilla to peanut butter. Newer flavors like dreamsicle and salted caramel will assault you. You cross the street before you encounter a known fudge hangout, the lair of maple walnut and dark chocolate toffee varieties, but new stores keep cropping up. Eventually, you’re trapped.
At no other time of year, do you even consider buying fudge. You wouldn’t even know where to look for it in your hometown. Occasionally, you might encounter a prepackaged chunk of some mass-produced brand while standing in the checkout line at the drugstore. You read the label before tossing it back into the candy rack. Old Granddad’s Fudge, founded in 1872. And it looks it.
Not on vacation. Oh, no. You think you’re safe until you walk into a shop and someone offers you a free sample. Sweet, little, innocent samples, you think. What harm can they do? Once you try that first bite, you’re doomed. You need more and more and more, until you find yourself waking up to a breakfast fix of vanilla cookies and cream.
You walk out of fudge shop after fudge shop, each time with a bag so large it would have fed Roald Amundsen’s crew on one of his polar expeditions. You can’t help yourself. In the quiet of your room, children asleep, you take that tiny plastic knife they give you, and chip away at the gooey mound of calories. Just a little piece, you say – of each of the twelve varieties you’ve purchased. What harm can it do?
By midnight, you’ve devoured the entire smörgåsbord, and still that’s not enough. You’ll never sleep with that sugar high. You need more and more. You decide you have to try fudge from all the shops, because somehow it’s become important to know who makes the best fudge on the strip, as if that tidbit of information will somehow make up for all the money you’ve spent and all the calories you’ve gained.
Your only hope is to admit you have a fudge addiction.
On the drive home, your hands shake, your head throbs. Coming down from the fudge high is rough. It’ll take weeks to go through the withdrawal process. You’ll need the help of family and friends. It’s likely you won’t be yourself for at least a month. Was it worth it? Were all those calories, all the months of exercise you’ll need to regain your figure, was it all worthwhile?
You ponder these existential questions over a box of chocolate chip cookies, savoring their crunchy texture, and the pop of chocolate chips in your mouth. You have another and another. Pretty soon… Will it ever end?
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