Monday, 10/14
On Saturday, the community held a work day to make an initial sweep of the river for the most volatile debris. We prioritized removing plastics and potential hazards from the water’s edge – oil jugs and paint cans that had been swept from people’s sheds, basements and garages. We concentrated on the most accessible kilometer of the river’s east bank, and filled a couple dozen contractor-sized trash bags. There are still tons of debris embedded in inaccessible tangles of trees and houseparts, but we managed to make a significant difference in cleaning up the buffer between HB Rd and the river. Working through lunchtime, one enthusiastic crew constructed a set of steps down to the new Granny’s Beach location where the “Waters of Babylon” ceremony had taken place the previous day.
Up here nestled against the highest peaks on the east coast, a few thousand river miles and 2700’ in elevation above the Mississippi Delta, we enjoy what I’ve long thought of as “headwaters privilege.” The South Toe is rumored to be one of the cleanest rivers in the state, and there is only moderate development upstream from us to pollute the river. Most of our 30,000 acre watershed consists of national forest or other relatively protected public lands. There are no paper mills or plastic plants or municipal wastewater systems in our watershed – just a couple hundred homes and their accompanying septic systems. Over the past couple years, there was an extensive logging operation that clearcut 400 acres of private land right along Hwy 80, adjacent to Blue Ridge Parkway NP. The clearcut is a garish spectacle, and in the initial hours and days pre- and post-flood (before the overwhelming scope of the impact had become clear), I had several friends say that they kept thinking about all that exposed soil washing away. I assured them it only represents 1% of the watershed, and a storm like this would loosen rock and soil far beyond areas disturbed by roads and logging.
The greatest blemish to our watershed is Mount Mitchell Golf Course. A couple years ago we hosted the director of a regional land conservancy during our launch of the South Toe Conservation Fund. He gave an eloquent and impassioned speech about his personal connections to the South Toe Valley, recounting childhood fishing trips he took with his father in the 1960s, and how it broke his heart when the golf course defiled the pristine river valley. Meanwhile the golf course itself, undoubtedly considered among the most beautiful in the region, is a scar of non-native grass in a forested landscape of native trees and shrubs. To keep it golf-coursey, it requires tons of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides. Downstream, we’ve often suspected that the sudden blooms of slippery algae on the river rocks each spring correlates with an influx of nitrogen fertilizer from the golf course.
Now, two weeks after flood waters scoured the riverbed cleaner than it has been in years, the slippery algae is suddenly back, far faster than I expected. It’s impossible to know what is soiling the river after an event like this, unprecedented in the history of this valley’s settlement: damaged drainfields and septic tanks? household refuse? golf course fertilizer? or simply tons of fresh organic matter from the forest floor?
Yesterday we drove up river to investigate. The clearcut didn’t look as bad as might be expected; sure, the steepest skid trail was a washed out gully of raw dirt, but most of the hillside is still intact, and from all appearances no worse off than lots of steep roadsides that gave out. The biggest slide we encountered was at what is now the end of the road for us: the top of 80S on the other side of Buck Creek Gap. I’d been hearing talk about how 80S from the Parkway down to Marion (aka the “Devil’s Whip”) was wiped out. There is much speculation as to whether it will ever be rebuilt, but few people have actually laid eyes on it. It was eerie to stand at the edge of a precipice where the road once was, looking down a half mile long landslide, where hundreds of trees that used to occupy the forested slope (and the accompanying soil) had completely vanished. Several acres of forest had been swept beyond the next switchback of the former roadway (as far as we could see). The lush rainforest growth of the blue ridge escarpment was stripped down to its naked geological core. I stood at the edge of the landslide and soaked in the remarkable quiet. It was a gorgeous Sunday in the peak of leaf season, and not a single motorcycle was heard.
We got back in the truck and turned around to inspect the golf course. A couple houses were crumpled in piles along the river, and the maintenance sheds had been flooded, one just a few inches, but one that contained cabinets of hazardous chemicals and pallets worth of fertilizer bags had been inundated by several feet of river water. The fertilizer and fungicide is not currently leaching into the river in large quantities, and presumably what ended up in the river during the deluge is mostly now in Tennessee. But still, all those bags are destined to be sprayed onto acres of grass that are continually rinsed by the mountain rains directly into the river.
Might the community of people who come here for the golf course be satisfied with a majestic park of walking trails through meadows and restored mountain wetlands – a paradise for native plants, birds, and aquatic life? Clearly I’m no golfer, but it doesn’t make sense to take a concept that has already decimated Florida ecology and plunk it down along the headwaters of a trout river in some of the most pristine forested mountains in the Southeast. If there has to be a golf course in this gem of a river valley, could it be an ecologically sustainable one that makes every effort to protect the river? Aren’t the OG Scottish links courses built to accommodate native coastal dune ecology?
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