I’ve been back at (paid) work this week. The ecotour season came to an abrupt end about 6 weeks early this year; like many of my fellow Yancey residents, I’ve spent much of the past month volunteering with clean-up and recovery. In Snakeroot’s off-season, I typically pick up a few carpentry and construction jobs. This fall, I have an opportunity to try something new in my favorite, familiar setting – forestry. Felix Stith, a friend and former student of mine, started Black Mountain Field and Forest a couple years ago and has quickly built it into a thriving business that consults with property owners and manages hundreds of acres of local forest. We spent three long days this week treating a 30-acre tract in Little Creek, a community in the far northeast corner of Yancey County. We were using a combination of “hack-and-squirt” and traditional timber felling to open the midstory canopy for oaks and hickories on a little spur ridge off Bald Mountain Ridge which is where the Appalachian Trail traces the border between NC and Tennessee.
Typically Little Creek would be a scenic 50-minute drive through Burnsville and down 19W along the Cane River, past 100-year-old tobacco barns, homes, churches, and little community stores. On our first day it took us 4 hours to get there. The lengthy, adventurous commute was initially a result of misinformation about which routes were open, and then was compounded by the fact that as we neared our destination, we missed a crucial turn because the once familiar landscape is now utterly unrecognizable. The turn we missed turned out to be a makeshift ford over the river, in a place where there isn’t normally a bridge or any kind of crossing.
19W closely follows the Cane River, crisscrossing it several times on its way from Burnsville to Spivey Gap, TN. Aside from the 19W bridges, countless small private bridges – some for cars and trucks, and some built for only foot traffic – provided access to homes that are across the river from the highway. More than half of the main highway bridges are completely gone or damaged beyond repair; nearly all of the smaller private bridges are gone, leaving many surviving homes with no road access. 19W itself was wiped off the map for several miles of its route. Roads, it turns out, are water soluble. Many of the homes and other structures along the highway have similarly been erased from the landscape or are now piles of rubble.
What was once a verdant river gorge is now an industrial zone, as enormous excavators work with Caterpillar dump trucks to dredge rock from the river to rebuild the roadbed. It looks more like a working strip mine or canal under construction than a natural river. For three days, this was our commute (after the first try, we whittled it down to a more reasonable 70-80 minutes). When you spend all day in the forest, tromping up and down steep hillsides, your senses become attuned to bark, leaves, briars, and birdsong. This sylvan attunement was abruptly broken each afternoon when we piled into the truck and drove back through the industrial zone of the Cane River. In a previous job, Felix was the Toe-Cane Watershed Coordinator for Blue Ridge RC&D. As we crossed the makeshift ford over the river for the last time that week, he mulled whether, with each scoop of the excavators, we were watching the extirpation of the Appalachian elktoe mussel from the Cane River. The Cane is one of the only rivers that this shy freshwater mussel is known to still inhabit.
Due to their clarity and steep terrain, Southern Appalachian waters have served for millennia as an evolutionary crucible for niche aquatic species like mussels and salamanders – one of the many ways in which these mountains are a biodiversity hotspot. The Tennessee River basin, which includes the Cane, is home to more mussel species than any other waterway in the world. Like many of its fellow freshwater mussel species, the critically endangered Appalachian elktoe has been eliminated from most of its historic range due to dam building and diminished water quality. The flood itself, bringing enormous amounts of sediment into the river and relocating nearly every rock on the riverbottom, was likely a tremendously disruptive event for the delicate population of Appalachian elktoes. Presumably they’ve survived floods of similar magnitude before, but can they survive the months-long process of continual river dredging by the big machines?
On our way home on the last day, we passed a long line of dump trucks waiting to dump loads of crushed rock to rebuild the roadbed at the end of a broken bridge. They were fancy dump trucks with California license plates. We stopped to greet a couple of the drivers, who were chatting by the side of the road as they waited for the line of trucks to creep forward. They were indeed from near Los Angeles, and had driven across the country over three days last weekend. They said they planned to stay here until they weren’t needed. These emergency FEMA/DOT contracts are pretty lucrative – this job is paying $126/hr, but they’ve received as much as $150 for others.
Less than a mile after the dumptrucks, we passed a couple unloading supplies from their sedan, preparing to carry and wheelbarrow it across a makeshift footbridge to their home, which was a couple hundred yards upriver from the bridge. We were an able-bodied crew of four, so we stopped to help lug their propane canisters, kerosene jugs and potato sacks across the river. We managed to cart all their stuff in two trips and finished as it was getting dark.
The woman told a harrowing tale of watching the river rise from their house which was tucked just far enough into the side of the hill that it escaped the raging water. Across the river, a house on the highway side was not so lucky. Only the remnants of a foundation and a large safe were left. The woman told us that an older couple had lived in that house. During the flood, the man was pinned by the safe in the basement, and the woman had come out of the house looking for help. The elderly man somehow freed himself and the two escaped before their whole house washed away.
After telling this story, she went on to tell us that after the waters went down, they didn’t see another soul for 8 days. Meanwhile, they were caring for her father-in-law, an insulin-dependent Vietnam vet with a CPAP machine. By the time we met them, they’d been without electricity (or a road) for five weeks. She’s not expecting to have power until February (thus the loads of propane and kerosene).
Yet, a few miles up the road, crews of linemen from around the country are working dawn-to-dusk replacing poles and lines. French Broad EMC’s latest statement implies that they may be ready to energize Little Creek and the surrounding communities within a week. The roads and bridges will take longer – but the river’s being dredged for rock, and convoys of California dump trucks are hauling entire mountainsides in from neighboring counties to rebuild a road that was just sent a clear message delivered by the overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
This video was made by a 19W resident about the loss of his home and the local Egypt/Ramseytown fire station.
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