The Appalachian Voice
Telling Tales
Coming to Jonesborough, Ten-nessee during the National Storytelling Festival is like coming home. Even if you’ve never been to Tennessee, even if you don’t know one of the 11,000 spellbound story listeners, even if you never heard of either a “haint” or a “yenta.” When you sit here in a tent that’s slowly being covered…
Read MoreBetween a Rock and a Hard Place
images/voice_uploads/C.gif Consider the plight of the crayfish crossing the road. It lumbers along, waving tiny pincers threateningly as your shadow falls across it. You stoop and grasp the cool, damp carapace between thumb and index finger. It twists, squirms, tries to fend you off. You deposit it gently in the ditch it seemed to be…
Read MoreBuilding a Ginseng Business In Harmony With Nature
images/voice_uploads/sangjar.gif The healing power of the woods, which is perhaps their deepest level of beauty, might be said to reside in ginseng. The roots of this shadowy perennial have been so valued as a source of pure wellness that at times they’ve been worth their weight in gold. Even today, properly dried wild ginseng roots…
Read MoreSea Kayaking On NC’s Bear Creek Reservoir
Picturesquely nestled in the Appa-lachian mountains near Cullowhee, North Carolina, Bear Creek Reservoir has become one of our favorite sea kayaking destinations. A breathtaking waterfall beckons the adventurous from its eastern end, and we’ve observed all kinds of wildlife including a variety of ducks, raptors, and one intrepid mud turtle. It’s surrounded by rolling peaks…
Read MoreBush Energy Plan Short On Conservation
The energy plan recently released by President Bush is an ill-conceived effort which takes advantage of our current short-term energy problems to push bad long-term policies. The plan, developed behind closed doors by oil man Vice-President Dick Cheney for oil man President Bush, offers a feast for the coal, oil, and nuclear industries, while providing…
Read MoreAppalachia’s Stradivarius
images/voice_uploads/fiddle.gif The Fabulous Fifties had arrived, and things couldn’t get much better. The Great Depression was ancient history, World War II a fading memory, and Americans were back on their financial feet, striding confidently and blissfully down the road to eternal prosperity. Most of them, anyway. Young folks who hailed from the misty ridges and…
Read MoreStrip Mining Blasting Residents On Black Mountain
In Wise County, way down in southwestern Virginia, Black Mountain forms part of the Virginia-Kentucky border. On the Virginia side, Black Mountain’s ridge curves protectively around the upper Powell River watershed, which, along with the watersheds of the Clinch and Holston rivers, forms the headwaters of the Tennessee River system. The Nature Conservancy calls this…
Read MoreClinch Residents Rally To Protect VA’s High Knob
Down in the far southwestern toe of Virginia, the forested mountains are rugged and wild…and endangered by rapacious exploitation by extractive industries. And these days, down in Scott and Wise counties, the High Knob area of the Clinch Ranger District of the Jefferson National Forest is on the chopping block. The Clinch District, with its…
Read MoreWill Hemlocks Go The Way Of The Chestnut?
images/voice_uploads/HWA.gif The recent discovery of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) infestations in Graham, Macon and Yancey counties is a major setback in the battle to keep Eastern and Carolina hemlocks alive in southern Appalachian forests. “Until a few months ago, we thought the adelgid hadn’t spread beyond the northern tier [of North Carolina] counties,” says Fred…
Read MoreBeauty Is As Beauty Does
Richard Cartwright Austin may be a Presbyterian minister and internationally known theologian, a high-brow intellectual and refined aesthete, but he’s also something of a Sybarite. I found this reassuring, in a man who might otherwise intimidate. What gave him away was his hot tub, set into a gracious deck with beds of summer flowers and…
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