Issue 2:2 | Non-Fiction | Sam Gray

I-26 And the Will of God

Sam Gray

I The Ecology of Progress

First there is a mountain. It appears and disappears

Into its own bones, shapes, colors.

Then there is no mountain.

Then there is: called Walnut Mountain for the profusion of that tree

Along its numberless creeks, in the high Unakas.

More than a mountain; a disarray of mother hills,

Drainages rumbling across Northern Madison County

Up and over the Tennessee line, Walnut Mountain

Sheds water into every compass point.

So that if hikers start up a creek headed northwest

As four of us do on an August morning, [1998]

The moon in Taurus, sun on our backs, eyes to the wet ground,

Watching for slippery rocks, sucking holes, copperheads,

Might later pause amidst the silence and

Look up, as from a dream,

To seethe sun now in our eyes.

So many are the turnings, so diverse the forms of what

First is a mountain. Then no mountain.

Then is.

We, a photographer, a botanist, his friend, myself,

Trudge wordlessly up a creekbed holler,

Enveloped in the silence of ferns,

The steam of the morning, the knowledge

Of what is to come.

Reminded by an occasional stake tapped into the dark earth,

Tied with faded pink plastic tape, bearing black numbers,

That the beauty of this cove

And a nine-mile strip of others like it

Will soon enough be traded for rock and rubble;

The slopes above and ahead of us blasted clean

And from this rage will rise Interstate 26, replacing the sometimes

Deadly curves of old US 23.

We are looking for the highway of the future

And we are looking for a flower or a skink or a slug…

That special species of plant or creature

Which will not, or cannot

Live anywhere else; its very fragility

Will be the power that stops the road in its track.

Not one of us believes this will happen.

We know that even if, against odds,

We find that endangered rarest: a White Irisette, Fringeless Orchid

Or the giant Cherokee water booger, DAGWA, poised

Between the two worlds,

It wouldn’t matter.

Wouldn’t stop this road.

From within the green community of the concerned,

Listening still for a whisper of hope,

Came the suggestion: “Walk

The right-of-way one more time.

Seek the contravening golden flower, snail-darter savior.”

But out here, on the morning side of the mountain where the sun

Burns away the fog, a breeze moves the leave; it whispers. “You too late.”

Taylor Barnhill, of the Forest Coalition

Spoke about it later:

“We were looking elsewhere and something huge happened

Right here in our own backyard.”

“Elsewhere” means Washington, Raleigh, The US Forest Service,

The Timber Lords, Chainsaw Charley Taylor,

All of whom, indeed, bear watching. “ Something huge” is the

Environmental footprint of the largest earth-moving project ever contracted

By the state of North Carolina.

“Backyard” refers to these steep flanks of Walnut Mountain

Where, dwarfed by the immense, doomed poplars that rise limbless,

Untapered and straight for sixty feet or more, we climb.

II From Name to Number

The first signs that a highway is to be pushed through

The walnut heart of the Unakas

Are felled trees and orange numbers painted over the land.

All along the track of imminent domain

Folks are told to cut their trees and leave.

They are offered money for their land and their memories,

And a deadline for leaving.

They can appeal to courts of law

And of the forty-nine families moved out

For Interstate 26, four do just that.

These, maybe did, maybe didn’t get a larger slice of cash,

But in no case will they be let to stay.

Imminent domain is never less than imminent

Never shy of dominion.

So they go back home and, like their neighbors,

Sell the timber on their land and begin

The search for some other place to live.

“Where will I find water like this?” One man says

His eyes bright- wide as he remembers the spring up the holler, water

So pure it can quench any thirst.

Months before the big dozers,

Trucks and loaders

Arrive to chew on this mountain

The logging trucks are hauling the forest away.

The trees, whose task was to cast shadows,

Were there for centuries standing in the sun

Which, now, for we who climb Walnut Mountain,

Is high and warm so

We peel our outer shirts and look as we walk

For a spot in cool shade to rest.

The numbers seem drawn into the spaces

Left by the deep tree shadows.

Their job is to quantify all that the shadows protected

So their smell and their voice are different

The numbers smell like the singed edge of the future and

Their voice speaks

Coded information about grand demolitions,

Satisfying rearrangements:

This hill goes here,

That holler goes there,

Blow over yonder to smithereens.

Burn this.

Bury that.

The shadows smelled of transmutation and spoke of nothing much at all; they

Were just openings into no sound within the mind.

It was in burial and disinterment

The numbers began to speak to the rest of us.

South of Walnut Mountain

In the watershed of the Ivy,

A church and three cemeteries lie in the path of Interstate 26.

The dead, like the living, must move.

Little Ivy Baptist Church has to be razed and rebuilt

About a mile to the east

Alongside its relocated graveyard.

Headmarker stones have to be numbered and moved, so too

Footstones [#5], Sisterstone [#7],

Fatherstone[#9,Motherstone[#21].

The coffins are dug out, numbered

Raised up by a truck-mounted crane,

The screech of its cable offers a voice

To the voiceless within.

The older the grave, the less the coffin.

The oldest graves hold only bones or just dark carbon dirt.

Boxed, Numbered, Registered, Hauled away,

Re-buried

While relations knelt on the dusty ground with eyes averted.

It was amidst these difficult doings that the notion of the

Will of God turned up.

Like dark soil behind the plow. Preacher Eugene C. of Little Ivy Baptist

Had to go into the Will of God when he spoke of the removals

Someone nailed up a hand-lettered sign in the church yard. It read:

Know where you tread is sacred ground…

This church a monument to God…

This cemetery the sacred burial ground of those who built it.

What God put together no man should destory (sic).

Later, by the Will of God and Winter, when

All the trees except the sacred beech

Cast down leaves and

The dead were snug in their new eternal places,

The numbers flew from the eyelids of the dead,

From their dark houses and out the stone gates with their names,

Flew back up Sprinkle Creek,

And Buckner Gap, scattered themselves

Over every available surface along the highway right-of-way:

On junked cars, barns, implements and boulders.

They bounced off the great arch of the GPS and were written on bags of dirt,
Stacked in a corner of the mobile field office, spray-painted on trees and stumps,

On the ground itself; on neatly sawed stakes and makeshift stobs, tied

With stretches of pink plastic marking tape fluttering prayerfully

In the December wind.

III Selu and the Bears

Before noon we break through to the ridgetop and step on the

Appalachian Trial between Devils Fork and Sams Gap, named for the

Sams clan that has lived hereabouts for two centuries, some in

Carolina, most in Tennessee, where the new highway

Already has dismembered their ancient ground.

We flop down in the first flat spot we find.

Desultory talk as we break out motley food:

Crackers, granola, sardines;

A frayed chunk of cornbread,

An apple, some nuts, and water from a rock spring discovered

A quarter-mile back down the trail.

One of the rocks had a blue number; 21 A-10, and in the damp earth

Nearby, the clear track of a strolling bear.

The bears come and go across Walnut Mountain.

They have trails, and dens and wallows

Ranging for fifteen or twenty miles.

These are places a bear just needs to be.

The Interstate will change everything for the bears.

No more going down to Barretts Apple Orchard

For a snort of golden delicious

Or up to Buckner Gap to make love

Among the rocks.

Then down along Little Creek for a mud bath.

The nine-mile stretch of 21st Century road

Will wall off the intricate movements of the Bear Clan.

It will divide and isolate breeding groups,

Inhibit distribution of bear DNA.

Now, bears are practiced in public relations

And have numerous contacts

Among the media. Hardly a season goes by that some bear story isn’t

Reported in the newspapers, radio or TV.

In the early 1990s, articles in the Citizen-Times

Brought attention to the plight of the Interstate bears

And the road planners responded.

Two bear tunnels are included in the road design

So that Bear Clan movement, though impeded, might endure.

Lunch is followed by flatulence, murmurs about bears, and an aimless

Prowling and peering about because our spot is a high scenic one;

Flat and grassy with sedge,

The overhead canopy thin and splintered,

For the winters are strong up here.

Sizeable openings in the foliage bid us stand and stare

Far into Tennessee.

The descending hills of Unicoi County roll North.

Those distant patches of buckskin yellow are cornfields

And the little patch of silvery blue is not water,

But the new four- lane road.

The cornfields put me in mind of, Selu, the Cherokee Corn Goddess and her

Two human Sons, who, fearing her magic, witching ways, decided to kill her.

Selu had fed those boys corn produced from her own body,

Along with deer meat brought in by Kanati, their

Father and Keeper of All Game

It was delicious,

And all they needed was at hand.

The two boys grew strong, then restless.

They began to remind each other that they were men, of a different order than

Selu and Kanati and could do men things.

Selu’s strange and incomprehensible ways were an affront to their notions of

How it ought to be. So they came to kill her.

She knew their intent and told them,

“Now you boys clear a circle on the ground in front of the hut

And drag my Corn Mother Corpse seven times outside

And seven times inside the circle

And you will always have corn.”

The boys, because they were men and needed to do something,

Decapitated Selu and

Stuck her head on a pole looking West, toward the darkening land

Then, they began to clear a circle

To drag her body in and around. After only a little dragging

They grew tired and abandoned her instructions. And her body.

So that, ever since, corn grows only twice a season and then, after hard work,

Only here, there and yonder like those distant dun-colored patches

In the bottomlands of Tennessee.

Selu’s sons, though it’s a long time gone now,

Chronically spread change and seek release from what is given,

Dragging her magic body to trace chaotic patterns

Across the grief-sown earth.

We pull ourselves out of our lassitude and on the trail,

We follow it northeast along the ridge

Toward Sams Gap, where, like flowers in a fist,

A cluster of contrasts come together.

To our left, the new highway

To our right the steep, descending grade of US 23

Down Murray Mountain ,

Beneath our feet, the most famous trail in Eastern America

Winding out ahead of us for 2,000 Appalachian miles.

We hear the gearing of engines before we step out from the forest

And look down onto an open, noisome gap.

Truckers have to mentally and physically find

The descent gear

As they crest the hill. Going South,

They squeeze into a single lane

Steep as a mule’s face,

Curved as the drivers’ own innards

Whose roilings now remind them and us that, in recent memory, at least,

Six drivers over-revved going down Murray Mountain,

When that happens, the engine eats itself, then the air brakes are gone,

The rig breaks loose and they never make it home.

We stand mesmerized as several eighteen-wheelers,

A logging truck,

And dozens of smaller fry,

Including a posse of motorcycles, stream

Through the gap.

When we’ve had enough, we turn back to regain

The silence of the trees.

Though a long time passes

Before the thrum of gap traffic becomes unheard.

IV Inshallah

The sun slants across our bodies right to left

When we begin our descent.

Already the hollers below us are in shadow.

Paul, the botanist,

Eases a small tape recorder from his pack

To record a botanical transect, a spoken inventory

Of those species that catch his eye as he walks along.

The only sounds are our footfalls

In the dry leaves

And the intoning of the species names: Kalmia Latifolia, Pinus Strobus, Cornus

Florida, Tsuga Canadensis, Hypericum Greveolens,

Aster Acuminiatus, Acer Rubrum, Lilium Superbum.

A calm Latinate chant

An afternoon requiem

For the excommunicated mountain.

At the end of this good walk

The botanists said goodbye and never returned

For within a few weeks there was nothing there for them.

Plant rescue then happened.

A woman named White Wolf

Prowled the interval between the loggers and the bull dozers;

Dug up and re-buried, somewhere near town,

Ginseng, Star Root, Pippsissawa, Wild Ginger, Sassafrass,

Cohosh, Bloodroot, St. John’s Wort and Angelica.

Amberg and I returned to the road many times.

We became road junkies.

We gathered documents, artifacts, photographs, maps

Ideas, memes, themes, names, opinions, stories and stones.

We started to give talks and show slides about the road.

Then, the road assumed a voice of its own.

There were articles in newspapers and magazines,

A web site went up.

NPR sent Lisa Hartman to do a story for All Things Considered.

She digitally recorded a demolition near Buckner Gap

And interviewed people.

When she talked to Richard Dillingham of Mars Hill

He said, “There are no atheists in these hills”.

He was trying to tell her something about the people, and

About the road

And about the Will of God,

Because that is what the voice of the road was telling him.

As for me, I never ciphered out the Will of God,

And in spite of hundreds of photographs and

Thousands of words to instruct me, an

Understanding of what I-26 means remains elusive.

I do know the voice of the road is incessant.

It does not hibernate in seasonal silence like the bears.

It does not wax and wane

Like the wind or the moon.

The sound of your own wheels is unceasing even

In madness, driving on towards the will of God.