A PLACE FOR SOLITUDE – National park enthusiasts fear that the proposed North Shore Road would bring development to one of the most scenic and remote forest areas in the East. Photo by Charles Seifried.

LONG TIME PASSING – Century-old cemeteries were relocated before the flooding of Fontana Lake in 1945. In the wet climate of the Smoky Mountains, they are rapidly returning to a more natural state.
Photo by Rachel Doughty.

WHERE THE ROAD ENDS, THE FUN BEGINS – Hikers take an afternoon trip to visit the site of the proposed North Shore Road. Photo by Bob Gale.

Photos from the National Park Service taken in the 1950s when the first portion of the North Shore Road was built. The photos are from a report expressing concern about the damage caused to this remote portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park from the preliminary phases of road construction.

The original photo caption from the Park Service report pointed out how, in the photo to the right, the fill in the ravine had, “…denuded the entire ravine area, placing the drainage on a new rock bed.” The report also called attention to how “unstable rock” from the cuts shown above had “already begun to slough down into the road bed.”

Story by Jack Igelman
Pilkey Cemetery is on a small knoll surrounded by a forest of mature poplar, hemlock, pine, oak and lush green undergrowth. In the center, on the flat apex of the ridge, stands a slim tree hung with white and yellow blooms that are so bright and vivid they appear artificial from a distance. The tree is the only one among the gravestones on the knoll.

The burial ground is not meticulously manicured or ordered, but the 41 graves have been recently re-mounded and leaves have been carefully swept to the side revealing the soil’s orange hue. The clearing has allowed a thin veil of light green moss to gather in spots between the tombstones. Although some of the stones in the cemetery seem recently etched, they’ve replaced older ones that had been chiseled away by the elements. No one has been buried on the small knoll since 1941, when the last of the local residents moved away.

The state of repair is impressive considering this particular necropolis is virtually an island, isolated by a lake and the uninhabited ridges and valleys of the Great Smoky Mountains. At present, the only access to the graveyard is by water or ten-mile walk. Although no road comes near the cemetery, this may soon change.

On a cool morning in May I arrive at Fontana Marina at seven o’clock sharp on the lake’s west end. At the pier I meet Steve Shuler, a seven-year employee of the National Park Service and chief of the Cemetery Crew – a group of six men that maintain twenty-two cemeteries in the park along the lake. We board a small silver, park service craft with four other employees. I sit in the cabin while two of the crew ride in the stern accompanied by an assortment of gear, including two chainsaws, several rakes, an axe, and containers of fuel.

The lake was created in 1943 along with the completion of Fontana Dam – at 480 feet the highest dam east of the Rockies. The elongated body of water snakes frantically through a narrow corridor of the Little Tennessee River watershed for 29 miles with 238 miles of shoreline. Its placid current, slender breadth, and frequent bends conceal its length and scope, creating the illusion of a smaller, less significant body of water.

Calm as it seems, the rippling effect of the lake’s contentious beginning has churned a tidal wave that will reach a crescendo this fall. In 2007, the Great Smoky Mountain National Park (GSMNP) determine the potential fate of the largest unpaved area east of the Mississippi. The park will choose among five alternatives to resolve a 1943 agreement with residents of Swain County, North Carolina: a cash settlement to the county, a picnic area, or variations of a thirty mile road to run the entire length of Lake Fontana in the park. By way of the cemetery crew I hope to get a better grip on the clash over the proposed North Shore Road.

While researching a backpack guidebook to the region, I walked the thirty-mile Lakeshore Trail through dozens of bygone communities. The proposed road would roughly follow the trail’s path. Although the area is remote, lush, and beautiful, what captured my imagination are the thirty cemeteries scattered near the trail.

Hundreds of families were relocated to make way for the lake in 1943. While remnants of such communities as Pilkey, Forney and Proctor have been swallowed by impenetrable growth, the cemeteries have an uncanny vitality. And perhaps no one, aside from the families, is as familiar with the burial grounds as Shuler and his crew.

The morning is cool and a dense layer of low clouds makes the valley seem particularly tight. While there are pockets of development on Lake Fontana, through this section there is national forest on the right and national park on the left. And being a Tuesday and seven in the morning there are no other boats with the typical cargo of sightseers, fishermen or beer drinkers.

On the ride we exchange few words, in part because of the engine’s roar, but also because of a polite distance the group maintains with outsiders. While I live less than one hundred miles away, I am indeed viewed as an outsider. The entire crew is from the area – born and raised. Shuler himself is from Bryson City, the seat of Swain County and ground zero for the dispute over the road.

After working three years as a seasonal animal caretaker, Shuler became chief of the lake-district trail crew. In addition to shoeing park horses and shuttling visitors, his primary task is to manage the cemetery crew. Shuler speaks with a strong mountain drawl and chooses his words carefully, particularly around me. Roughly 5’9”, Shuler’s physique seems to have been designed to handle a chainsaw, which he does often. While not built like a linebacker, his shoulders are as rounded as softballs and he has the forearms of a pipe fitter. In his mid-thirties, the white hairs on his head and in his beard are beginning to outnumber the others. He is wearing work boots, green pants, and in the morning cool a park service issue fleece jacket.

The boat ride is twenty minutes across the still lake. Shuler maneuvers the craft into a small inlet below Pilkey Creek. He parks against a barge placed on the shore a week ago. The barge has enough room to haul a Suburban, which Shuler and his crew use to shuttle visitors up the steep jeep road to the cemeteries less than a mile from the inlet. Since it is not Sunday, and there are no visitors, in place of the Suburban is a green John Deere four-wheeler with a small American flag stuck behind the front seat.

Here, the group will spend two weeks preparing the area for the annual visit the NPS coordinates for folks with family buried in Posey and Pilkey cemetery. While the crew spends time at each graveyard, the majority of the two weeks is used maintaining and replacing footbridges, clearing trees, and repairing the approach trails to the cemeteries. On Sunday, at the conclusion of the two weeks, the group will assist families on their annually scheduled outing. The visitors will pay respects at most once a year. Shuler estimates that fifty to sixty people will cross the lake this coming Sunday, but that depends on the weather.

Posey Cemetery, the smaller of the two, has five plots arranged in lines like rows of crops. One of those men buried here served in the Civil War. Like many of the graveyards, Posey is on a small ridgeline. Last year, pine trees crippled by the pine beetle shadowed it. Over the winter, most of the pines fell. It took the crew more than a day of dedicated work to uncover and clean the cemetery. On the day of my visit, the ridge looked like a logging operation with sawed section of pine scattered like giant toothpicks around the ridge.

One can imagine that if undergrowth doesn’t swallow the cemeteries, fallen trees surely will. Caring for the plots is like growing fruit in the desert. The amount of work to maintain them seems absurd considering how little they are visited. The park service has been holding back the creeping flora for nearly fifty years at no small expense – at a cost of $150,000 in 2005. It begs the question, how long would it take for the cemeteries to disappear under a layer of vegetation if not for the trail crew?

Despite the kindness of the crew, they’re cautious around strangers. And lately the area has received a lot of attention because of the dividing issue that is the North Shore Road. Throwing out a question that relates to the road, the crew scatters as if the question were radioactive. Their reluctance is understandable. Many of the supporters of the road live in Swain County. Since the crew lives here too, choosing the wrong side of the issue could shake up the social order of their lives.

Away from the crew, Shuler speaks with more ease, yet with a measure of restraint. We chatted while he sharpened the teeth of his chainsaw, his attention toggled between our conversation and the tool. “We’ve got to get along with both sides,” explains Shuler, taking a break from his file. “As far as the road, whatever the park service chooses I’m behind them 100%.”

Few share Shuler’s sentiments. The North Shore Road is among the most unpopular projects in the park’s past. In fact, throughout the history of the Smokies, roads have been built rather reluctantly. Some of the early promoters of the park opposed development of grand lodges and skyline drives. “Many supported the park in the region, because any roads were welcome in Appalachia in the 1920s and thirties,” says Bob Miller, GSMNP spokesman, “but there were purists who were true conservationists.”

In that era the primary struggle of conservationists was to safeguard the Smokies from logging interests. No longer do the Smokies need to be shielded from the saw, the contemporaries of the early park protectors are more concerned with bulldozers. Though the relative scarcity of roads has preserved undeveloped space, the highways leading to and around the park have become more numerous, creating problems of a different type. “We’re the hub of this wheel. The spokes are getting bigger, but the hub isn’t,” says Miller, referring to a four-lane highway directly to Atlanta, the widening of US 321, proposed Interstate 3, and other projects in development. “There is always the potential to create new roads in the park.”
Nowhere is Miller’s prophecy of road creation more real than at the remote boundary of the park, which is located in Swain County at the terminus of Lake View Road, also known as the Road to Nowhere. In 1943, Swain County, the state of North Carolina, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Department of the Interior agreed to build a road through the park along the north shore of Lake Fontana. Created to fuel the war effort, the lake swallowed several Swain County communities, including Pilkey, and the park added to its dominion 44,000 acres of private land on the north side of the lake.

Between 1948 and 1962, the National Park Service carved a portion of road, but unexpected costs due to the area’s steep terrain halted construction, which was not a popular decision among proud mountaineers. “The road was promised to the people of Swain County who gave up everything they had—their homes and their lives,” says David Monteith, a county commissioner and road advocate.

By the 1980’s the road movement had lost momentum. “At the time there was no expectation that the road would ever be built,” says Miller. “That’s when shuttling folks and the park’s policy to maintain cemeteries evolved.” Two decades later, in 2000, a $16 million dollar budget item to restart construction was introduced by local Congressman Charles Taylor and former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, reestablishing hopes for a road.

Despite the ups and downs, the cemetery crew and the families maintain a steady relationship. Shuler and his crew treat visitors with great respect, yet the road is a touchy subject. The subsistence mountaineer’s legacy, dating back to prohibition and strengthened by the unfilled 1943 agreement, is a distrust and distaste for the government. Nevertheless, the families are thankful for the crew’s care. “A lot of the people appreciate the work we do, they’ll always have good remarks,” says Shuler.

While few ultimately benefit from the hard work of the cemetery crew, I sense a strong dedication to their work despite a lack of rewards. To enjoy their labor, it’s not only a prerequisite to be fond of the woods and solitude, but to appreciate history. It occurs to me that a yearning for times past is what makes the cemeteries and, more generally, the north shore of Lake Fontana so alluring: it is an extinct sliver of America. Both for opponents and supporters of the road, the north shore is a link to a long gone era. For some, abandoned homesteads and cemeteries are the connection to the past. For others, that age is nature in its purest form – places untouched by asphalt, strip malls, and billboards.
Building the road will certainly transform this area. It’s possible that a crew will not be assigned cemetery repair and maintenance. It’s hard to believe that the plots will look as fine as they do now with the strain of crowds and the crooked fragment of society that harm property, heap trash, and spoil solitude.

Among the buried in Pilkey cemetery is a woman who lived beyond 100; several are infants; and there is a substantial tombstone memorializing a couple (“Dear parents tho we miss you much we know you rest with God”). I try to imagine Pilkey as it had been: quiet, simple, peaceful. I also attempt to feel the resentment and anger of folks moved from their down-to-earth lives and isolated communities and away from their small graveyards; but my thoughts stumble. The truth is I like it as it is now. A site reclaimed by weather and intense foliage, and the absence of people. Now, it’s an uninhabited place where Shuler and his crew occasionally move leaves and drop pines with chainsaws; and one Sunday of the year families gather to eat egg salad sandwiches, drink iced tea, and pay homage to a time now departed.

For more information on the North Shore Road project and how you can provide input, see the alert on p.18.

Brenda Huggins, Awarded Outstanding Volunteer in Watauga County

Appalachian Voices would like to congratulate and thank Brenda Huggins for her dedication and service. She has been honored by the State of North Carolina as an Outstanding Volunteer in Watauga County.

Brenda is a great volunteer and is always lending a helping hand. She drives from Hickory to Boone in order to volunteer her time in the office. She has done it all; from calling all over the country to set-up mountaintop removal presentations, to stuffing envelopes for membership mailings. Brenda also worked to pass a clean air resolution in the town of Hickory. In addition, Brenda delivers thousands of the Appalachian Voice in Lenoir, Hickory and Morgantown. Last but certainly not least, Brenda was a huge help with organizing and soliciting prizes for our very successful open house in November!

Congratulations Brenda and thank you!

Appalachian Voices Volunteer Update

Ending Mountaintop Removal
JW Randolph and Jenna Lowe organized our MTR Wednesday volunteer nights. We held 10 volunteer nights where our volunteers made phone calls to members and activists across the country urging them to write their representatives and tell their families and friends about the devastating effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. Adam Wells has joined our intern team working on our MTR campaign. Eric Willis also collected and analyzed data on MTR in West Virginia.

Clean Air Campaign
Erica Palmer led our Clean Air Campaign Tuesday volunteer nights. We held 10 volunteer nights awesome students from Appalachian State University. The volunteers made phone calls and sent packets for our Virginia Clean Air Campaign. The group was a great team, working hard and getting to know one another over pizza.

Appalachian Voice
Foster Hunt, Assistant Editor for Design and Steve Wussow, Assistant Editor have done an excellent job working on the past two issues of the Voice. Foster has been instrumental in creating ads for the Voice as well as developing professional Business League Membership materials. Steve’s assistance in research and writing for the Voice has been a tremendous asset.

Open House, Raffle and Silent Auction Fundraising Event
Katie Higgins and Brenda Huggins worked hard on creating one of the best open house events. Both did an excellent job of organizing and soliciting donations for the raffle and silent auction. In addition, Katie has been working with the membership coordinator sending out our fall business renewal mailing.

General Office Support
Elizabeth Chatfield, our work-study student this fall, has graduated with a degree in Biology from ASU. Elizabeth is amazing! She conducted research and managed our mountaintop removal kit requests and contact list and always offered her assistance with any task. We will miss Elizabeth, but know she will accomplish great things! Stephanie Hall was a huge help with our business renewal mailing this fall. She also assisted with the Open House and was an excellent addition to our overall general office support.

This fall the Appalachian Voices office was fortunate to be one of the subjects of ASU’s Interior Design class. We had 24 professional students come in and redesign our office space to be more efficient and organized. The students were great and provided us with a fresh look at our space and how to arrange and organize our systems. We would like to thank Jeanne Mercer-Ballard and her students for the great designs and work they did for us this semester.

Boone Saloon Fundraising Event
Kelley Chapman organized a very successful benefit concert for our mountaintop removal campaign at the Boone Saloon. Kelley lined up two great bands, Crookneck Squashers and The Bootleg Crew, which brought the crowds. This was an excellent opportunity for us to show our slideshow on the devastating effects of mountaintop removal, bring more people to action to stop this destruction, and raise some money.

We can always use more help. If you are interested in becoming an intern or volunteer, please contact Shelly at outreach@appvoices.com or (828) 262-1500.

Restorative forestry workshop in Ashe County, NC

The Healing Harvest Forest Foundation (H.H.F.F.) will hold a free public workshop on “Restorative Forestry in the Southern Appalachians” on March 18th, 2006. The event will be hosted by Michael and Virginia Tate of Ripshin Farms near Jefferson, NC.

H.H.F.F. certified Biological Woodsmen and their draft horse teams will be on hand to explain and demonstrate their “worst-first” single tree harvesting techniques. Local land owners, forest workers, students, and families are encouraged to attend and witness real ground-level practitioners in the environmentally sensitive logging movement. There is no attendance fee but donations are encouraged and will go directly towards training more Biological Woodsmen. This program teaches the necessary, theory, skills, and safety measures to those wishing to make a living in the mountain forest while promoting the longevity of the ecosystem.

A special invitation is extended to all teamsters interested in skill sharing. The H.H.F.F.’s crews will be showcasing the rare Suffolk Punch breed and this will be a great opportunity to talk with other horsemen and share your experience. Those wanting to bring their own teams are encouraged to do so and should contact Ian Snider at (828) 262-3000 or naturelink@gmail.com no latter than March 1st.

Action Alert: HELP PROTECT THE LARGEST UNPAVED AREA IN THE EAST

On January 4 the Park Service published a notice of availability of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the North Shore Road through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Federal Register. While the DEIS did not identify a preferred alternative, it did indicate that the Environmentally Preferred alternative is a Monetary Settlement for Swain County. The public has until March 20 to comment. In addition, a series of public hearings are scheduled. Turnout at these hearings and a strong public response in support of a monetary settlement instead of the road is critical.

The proposed 34-mile road would breach the largest unbroken tract of mountain forest on federal land in the East, leaving a gash on the landscape that would be visible for miles. Cutting through the most rugged section of the park, the road could include three massive bridges, each one roughly the length of the Brooklyn Bridge. Among other impacts, the road would bisect the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and be visible for many miles along the AT, destroy 28 miles of the Benton MacKaye Trail, pose a serious threat to 140 pure mountain streams due to polluted runoff from exposure of the acidic rock in the area, and harm vital habitat for a multitude of forest species including black bear and migratory songbirds.

The World Conservation Union has judged the Park: “The most important natural area in the eastern US … of world importance as an example of temperate deciduous forest. [I]ts floristic diversity is unmatched in any other protected area of its size in the temperate world.”

The National Park Service has publicly acknowledged in the past that the highway would serve no transportation need, and would jeopardize the agency’s mission to protect the rich biological and cultural resources of the Park. The National Park Service began construction of a replacement road in the 70s, but quit after completing seven miles due to the extreme environmental damage and exorbitant costs.

For updates, additional photos, or more information on what you can do, visit: www.safc.org

A LANDSCAPE OF DEVASTATION – Photo of a mountaintop removal operation in eastern Kentucky provided courtesy of Southwings.

A HOME IN RUINS – This West Virginia home, located just below a mountaintop removal operation, was destroyed by flooding. Photo provided courtesy of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Photo of a coal slurry impoundment in southern West Virginia provided courtesy of Southwings.

The afterward to Missing Mountains: We went to the mountaintop but it wasn’t there ; Kentuckians write against mountaintop removal (Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2005).
www.windpublications.com

Attempting to deal with an enormity so staggering as the human destruction of Earth, it is difficult to resist the temptation to write out a “vision of the future” that would offer something better. Even so, I intend to resist. I resist, not only because such visions run the risk of error, but also out of courtesy. A person of my age who dabbles in visions of the future is necessarily dabbling in a future that belongs mostly to other people.

What I would like to do, instead, if I can, is help to correct the vision we Kentuckians have of ourselves in the present. In our present vision of ourselves we seem to be a people with a history that is acceptable, even praiseworthy. A history that we are privileged to inherit uncritically and with little attempt at rectification. But by the measures that are most important to whatever future the state is to have, ours is a history of damage and of loss.

In a little more that two centuries – a little more than three lifetimes such as mine – we have sold cheaply or squandered or given away or merely lost much of the original wealth and health of our land. It is a history too largely told in the statistics of soil erosion, increasing pollution, waste and degradation of forests, desecration of streams, urban sprawl, impoverishment and miseducation of people, misuse of money, and, finally, the entire and permanent destruction of whole landscapes.

Eastern Kentucky, in its natural endowments of timber and minerals, is the wealthiest region of our state, and it has now experienced more than a century of intense corporate “free enterprise,” with the result that it is more impoverished and has suffered more ecological damage than any other region. The worst inflictor of poverty and ecological damage has been the coal industry, which has taken from the region a wealth probably incalculable, and has imposed the highest and most burdening “costs of production” upon the land and the people. Many of these costs are, in the nature of things, not repayable. Some were paid by people now dead and beyond the reach of compensation. Some are scars on the land that will not be healed in any length of time imaginable by humans.

The only limits so far honored by this industry have been technological. What its machines have enabled it to do, it has done. And now, for the sake of the coal under them, it is destroying whole mountains with their forests, water courses and human homeplaces. The resulting rubble of soils and blasted rocks is then shoved indiscriminately into the valleys. This is a history by any measure deplorable, and a commentary sufficiently devastating upon the intelligence of our politics and our system of education. That Kentuckians and their politicians have shut their eyes to this history as it was being made is an indelible disgrace. That they now permit this history to be justified by its increase of the acreage of “flat land” in the mountains signifies an indifference virtually suicidal.

So ingrained is our state’s submissiveness to its exploiters that I recently heard one of our prominent politicians defend the destructive practices of the coal companies on the ground that we need the coal to “tide us over” to better sources of energy. He thus was offering the people and the region, which he represented and was entrusted to protect, as a sacrifice to what I assume he was thinking of as “the greater good” of the United States – and, only incidentally, of course, for the greater good of the coal corporations.

The response that is called for, it seems to me, is not a vision of “a better future,” which would be easy and probably useless, but instead an increase of consciousness and critical judgment in the present. That would be harder, but it would be right. We know too well what to expect of people who do not see what is happening or who lack the means of judging what they see. What we may expect from them is what we will see if we look: devastation of the land and impoverishment of the people. And so let us ask: What might we expect of people who have consciousness and critical judgment, which is to say real presence of mind?

We might expect, first of all, that such people would take good care of what they have. They would know that the most precious things they have are the things they have been given: air, water, land, fertile soil, the plants and animals, one another – in short, the means of life, health and joy. They would realize the value of those gifts. Theywould know better than to squander or destroy them for any monetary profit, however great.

Coal is undoubtedly something of value. And it is, at present, something we need – though we must hope we will not always need it, for we will not always have it. But coal, like the other fossil fuels, is a peculiar commodity. It is valuable to us only if we burn it. Once burned, it is no longer a commodity butonly a problem, a source of energy that has become a source of pollution. And the source of the coal itself is not renewable. When the coal is gone, it will be gone forever, and the coal economy will be gone with it.

The natural resources of permanent value to the so-called coalfields of Eastern Kentucky are the topsoils and the forests and the streams. These are valuable, not, like coal, on the condition of their destruction, but on the opposite condition: that they should be properly cared for. And so we need, right now, to start thinking better than we ever have before about topsoils and forests and streams. We must thing about all three at once, for it is a violation of their nature to think about any one of them alone.

The mixed mesophytic forest of the Cumberland Plateau was a great wonder and a great wealth before it was almost entirely cut down in the first half of the last century. Its regrowth could become a great wonder and a great wealth again; it could become the basis of a great regional economy – but only if it is properly cared for. Knowing that the native forest is the one permanent and abundant economic resource of the region ought to force us to see the need for proper care, and the realization of that need ought to force us to see the difference between a forest ecosystem and a coal mine. Proper care can begin only with the knowledge of that difference. A forest ecosystem, respected and preserved as such, can be used generation after generation without diminishment – or it can be regarded merely as an economic bonanza, cut down, and used up. The difference is a little like that between using a milk cow, and her daughter and granddaughters after her, for a daily supply of milk, renewable every year – or killing her for one year’s supply of beef.

And there is yet a further difference, one that is even more important, and that is the difference in comprehensibility. A coal mine, like any other industrial-technological system, is a human product, and therefore entirely comprehensible by humans. But a forest ecosystem is a creature, not a product. It is, as part of its definition, a community of living plants and animals whose relationships with one another and with their place and climate are only partly comprehensible by humans, and, in spite of much ongoing research, they are likely to remain so. A forest ecosystem, then, is a human property only within very narrow limits, for it belongs also to the mystery that everywhere surrounds us. It comes from that mystery; we did not make it. And so proper care has to do, inescapably, with a proper humility.

But that only begins our accounting of what we are permitting the coal companies to destroy, for the forest is not a forest in and of itself. It is a forest, it can be a forest, only because it comes from, stands upon, shelters and slowly builds fertile soil. A fertile soil is not, as some people apparently suppose, an aggregate of inert materials, but it is a community of living creatures vastly more complex than that of the forest above it. In attempting to talk about the value of fertile soil, we are again dealing immediately with the unknown. Partly, as with the complexity and integrity of a forest ecosystem, this is the unknown of mystery. But partly, also, it is an unknown attributable to human indifference, for “the money and vision expended on probing the secrets of Mars … vastly exceed what has been spent exploring the earth beneath our feet.” I am quoting from Yvonne Baskin’s sorely needed new boo, Under Ground, which is a survey of the progress so far of “soil science,” which is still in its infancy. I can think of no better way to give a sense of what a fertile soil is, what it does, and what it is worth than t9o continue to quote from Ms. Baskin’s book:

A spade of rich garden soil may harbor more species than the entire Amazon nurtures above ground… the bacteria in an acre of soil can outweigh a cow or two grazing above them.

Together [the tiny creatures living underground] form the foundation for the earth’s food webs, break down organic matter, store and recycle nutrients vital to plant growth, generate soil, renew soil fertility, filter and purify water, degrade and detoxify pollutants, control plant pests and pathogens, yield up our most important antibiotics, and help determine the fate of carbon and greenhouse gases and thus, the state of the earth’s atmosphere and climate.
By some estimates, more than 40 percent of the earth’s plant-covered lands … have been degraded over the past half-century by direct human uses.
The process of soil formation is so slow relative to the human lifespan that it seems unrealistic to consider soil a renewable resource. By one estimate it takes 200 to 1,000 years to regenerate an inch of lost topsoil.

And so on any still-intact slope of Eastern Kentucky, we have two intricately living and interdependent natural communities: that of the forest and that of the topsoil beneath the forest. Between them, moreover, the forest and the soil are carrying on a transaction with water that, in its way, also is intricate and wonderful. The two communities, of course, cannot live without rain, but the rain does not fall upon the forest as upon a pavement; it does not just splatter down. Its fall is slowed and gentled by the canopy of the forest, which thus protects the soil. The soil, in turn, acts as a sponge that absorbs the water, stores it, releases it slowly, and in the process filters and purifies it. The streams of the watershed – if the human dwellers downstream meet their responsibility – thus receive a flow of water that is continuous and clean.

Thus, and not until now, it is possible to say that the people of the watersheds may themselves be a permanent economic resource, but only and precisely to the extent that they take good care of what they have. If Kentuckians, upstream and down, ever fulfill their responsibilities to the precious things they have been given – the forests, the soils, and the streams – they will do so because they will have accepted a truth that they are going to find hard: the forests, the soils and the streams are worth far more than the coal for which they are now being destroyed.

Before hearing the inevitable objections to that statement, I would remind the objectors that we are not talking here about the preservation of the “American way of life.” We are talking about the preservation of life itself. And in this conversation, people of sense do not put secondary things ahead of primary things. That precious creatures (or resources, if you insist) that are infinitely renewable can be destroyed for the sake of a resource that to be used must be forever destroyed, is not just a freak of short-term accounting and t he externalization of cost – it is an inversion of our sense of what is good. It is madness.

And so I return to my opening theme: it is not a vision of the future that we need. We need consciousness, judgment, presence of mind. If we truly know what we have, we will change what we do.

EASTERN COUGAR – Photo courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Natural History

MAP OF EASTERN COUGAR SITINGS – From The Eastern Cougar: Historic Accounts, Scientific Investigations and New Evidence.
Map reproduced courtesy of Stackpole Books

images/AppalachianVoice/AVJan06/Photos/circles/Circle_Cougar.gif

“It was only natural that the earliest explorers described what they saw in terms of what they had known in Europe. Amerigo Vespucci scooped Columbus by being the first to give a name to the New World animal we know today as a cougar – actually two names, beginning the long, confusing history of multiple names for this cat. On his first voyage in 1497, skirting the Caribbean coast of Central America, Vespucci saw a land “full of animals, few [of which] resemble ours excepting lions, panthers and even these have some dissimilarities of form.”

Those dissimilarities of form would be ignored for many years. Columbus, too, in a 1503 letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella about his fourth and final voyage to the New World, named lions as one of the animals he saw along the coast of Central America. “I saw some very large fowls (the feathers of which resemble wool), lions, stags, fallow-deer and birds.”

What Columbus and Vespucci meant by lions and panthers were the medieval images of African lions and Asian leopards. These animals were last encountered in the flesh by Europeans during the Crusades several centuries before Columbus sailed. In medieval iconography the lion was seen as both noble and brutal; the panther was beautiful and treacherous. Over the course of the next three centuries, cougar folklore absorbed all of those ambivalent images and developed unique twists of its own.
Cougars are almost magically elusive, able to appear and disappear with hardly a trace. This characteristic made early settlers uncertain about the kind or number of cats that lurked on the frontier. It also made understanding the cat’s behavior extremely difficult, and what is not understood is often loathed. The cougar’s secretive nature even made many Native Americans uneasy; the cat seems to have been generally respected but not necessarily beloved….

… The pace of cougar encounters reported by both rural and urban residents throughout the twentieth century [has accelerated]. The response of the wildlife establishment – state and federal wildlife agency scientists and administrators, plus academic research biologists – was simple; deny, deny, deny. Sightings were attributed to delusion, deception or drunkenness. “There’s never any field evidence,” was the common refrain of the officials to whom sightings were reported – until the 1990s, when the situation changed dramatically.

Confirmed field evidence began to accumulate, and at an astonishing rate. This continued phenomenon may be due to increasing numbers of cougars throughout the East, increasing numbers of people living in rual areas, increasingly sophisticated DNA technology, or increasing interest by the press in reporting alleged encounters – or all of the above. Now, instead of dismissing the possibility of wild cougars, biologists acknowledge that there might be a few, but maintain that these cats couldn’t possibly be remnant natives and must all be FERCs (feral escaped or released captives) from subspecies other than that designated as the endangered eastern cougar.
By calling into question the genetic heritage of cougars living wild in the East, wildlife officials can sidestep the Endangered Species Act, which lists only the Florida panther (Puma concolor coryii) and the eastern cougar (Puma concolor couguar).

Never mind the intent of the act is to preserve rare life forms, or the scientific impossibility of defining unique eastern cougar genes, or the common practice of substituting subspecies from elsewhere in many official wildlife projects (including the Florida Panther Program) when the original genome is extinct or debilitated from inbreeding.

For more information on the Eastern Cougar from Chris Bolgiano, see: Mountain Lion, an Unnatural History of Pumas and People (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1995). Or visit the Cougar Network website at:

http://www.easterncougarnet.org/

While the fish may still be biting in the winter, many anglers choose to spend the cold months preparing their tackle box for fairer weather.

The White Bass (shown above) was caught with the author’s signature fly, the “Paynekiller,” shown below.
Photos by Dave Payne Sr.

Although fish have to eat year-round and can be caught in any season, winter sees most anglers retreating from the water.

For flyfishermen, however, it is less of a retreat than a time to regroup for the following season. It’s the time when most tie next year’s flies.

Flies are expensive. At two dollars or more per fly, a season’s worth of fishing can quickly add up. Yet, the cost of buying store-bought flies is a secondary concern for most, said Joe Webb, president of the Blennerhassett Chapter of Trout Unlimited in West Virginia.

“It adds to the whole experience. You’ve created something with your own hands that was actually good enough to fool a wild creature. After a while, you get to the point where you don’t even want to fish with store-bought flies because catching fish on your flies in so much more gratifying,” he said.

There are beginner patterns which might take a first-time tyer only minutes to learn. Foremost among those that are easy to tie, but effective, is the Green Weenie. Other patterns might take years to master, said Mike Ross, a lab technician from Huntington, W.Va.

“You only have to look at the beauty, complexity and elegance of a may fly to realize God hated fly tyers,” Ross said.

However, “You can’t put into words what it means to have a wild trout take a fly you’ve tied, but the silly smile on your face says it all,” he said.

Traditionally, fly tying has been a way to participate in fishing while cooped inside during winter months. Ross said the hypnotic, repetitive motions of fly-tying give time for contemplation and thoughts about fish.

“Sitting in front of the vice is like kneeling before a holy altar, a time for introspection in the hopes of revelations, for we believe that by our acts of contrition we might be blessed with better days on the water,” he said.

While some fly tyers spend years studying entymology and trying to perfect their representations on a hook canvas with a pallet of fur and feathers, others continue to use, or even champion, the simple designs. Brandon “Bubba” Holt, a student in Parkersburg, W.Va., is one of the latter. He uses the Green Weenie fly almost exclusively and has developed a cult following of sorts for it on the popular message boards at www.WVangler.com.

Holt promotes this fly as if he were managing a political campaign. In some ways it is just that, since many old-school purists look on it with disdain.

All Holt cares about is that it works.

“For people starting out that want to catch a whole lot of fish with relative ease, it is great,” he said. “If you don’t catch a fish by the fourth cast with a weenie, that hole doesn’t have any fish. It’s that simple.”

Tying the green weenie is simple: put a No. 10-size hook on a hook vice and wrap thread around the hook shank several times. Tie a strand of medium florescent green chenille near the hook bend, make a loop for a tail and tie the strand on again at the same spot where the end was tied. Wrap the chenille around the hook in a tight spiral until you reach the bead. Wrap the thread several times just behind the bead to hold the chenille firmly and tie off the thread.

The beads and chenille are available at any fly-tying supplier.

As Green Weenie lovers will testify, a fly does not have to be complicated to catch fish. It doesn’t always have to be well-tied; the first flies were simply red wool tied to a hook.

Even something as simple as a few strands of deer hair tied to a hook will catch fish today.

Bluegill and sunfish, fish that often consider a drowned cigarette butt a potential meal, make an excellent first quarry for the beginning flytyer.

Any kind of dry fly, a floating fly, is perfect for these fish. One fly that doesn’t float, but works well for bluegill (as well as trout) is the San Juan Worm.

You need only red thread, small red chenille and a No. 10 hook. Tie the chenille to the hook so that an inch of material extends beyond both the head and tail. Apply heat to the tip, just enough to melt them into a sharp point, but not catch on fire, for an added touch of realism.

Retrieve this fly below the surface with short jerks to mimic the way a helpless worm kicks in the water.

Don’t be nervous or shy. Whatever another flyfisherman might think of a fly you have tied is irrelevant. There is only one test your fly must pass and only one critique that matters – that of the fish.

That’s what makes flytying so satisfying, said Kim Stewart, a maintenance foreman from Bridgeport, W.Va.

“How does it feel to catch a fish on a fly I tied? Awesome! To me, flyfishing is about fooling a trout into a strike and when I accomplish that with my own tie, then that validates me as a fly tyer. It’s nice to have other fishermen and fly tyers say my flies are good, but in the end, the trout is the ultimate judge,” he said.
Not all flies are small, nor are trout the only gamefish that can be caught on a fly rod. Streamers, flies that represent fish, are often tied big and catch big fish, including muskellunge, pike and bass.

On a 20-degree day last November, I caught a trophy citation white bass from the Ohio River on a flyrod on a fly I designed the night before and call the Payne Killer. The fly is tied on a 1/0 and much bigger than anything one might see on a trout stream, nor is a traditional trout fishing rod and line, three-weight to five-weight heavy enough to cast it.

For Ohio River fishing, I use 9 weight flyline, which is also heavy enough for musky fishing.

The white bass was two pounds, five ounces, monster size for a white bass, and the fact I caught it on a fly I had tied, and moreover, designed, made the catch that much more satisfying.

My Danish-made Triax flyrod has handled bigger fish. It was given to me by my friend Dirk Stiebler of Bad Oldesloe, Germany, who had used the flyrod to catch several pike and a 31-inch Sea Trout in the Baltic Sea and several Pike in the eight months he owned it.

More information about fishing for Pike – the same advice will apply to muskellunge – is available at www.pikeonthefly.com.

For information about local fly shops and fly-tying classes, contact your local Trout Unlimited representative. Local TU contacts are available at the organization’s Web site, www.tu.org.

Thousands of instructions for tying flies are available online. One excellent resource is Virtual Flybox at www.virtualflybox.com.

Contact Dave Payne Sr. via e-mail at der_fishjaeger@yahoo.com.