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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0245, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this rich interview, Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition member (his precise role is unclear) Taylor Barnhill describes his rural childhood and its impact on his adult life. He is an environmental activist who decries the deleterious effects of development on rural North Carolina communities and wilderness. Barnhill aims his frustrations at road building and roadpaving—in particular those projects related to the I-26 corridor in Madison County, North Carolina—which he thinks open rural communities to a soulless world of consumption and interfere with natural evolution. He hopes to inspire communities to rally around conservation issues, not only for the sake of the state's air and water, but also to give community members a renewed sense of place.
Taylor Barnhill, an environmental activist concerned about the effects of development on communities, describes his rural childhood and its impact on his adult life.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Asheville in the offices of the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition.
It is Wednesday, November 29th at about
approximately 9:15, and we're getting started. Taylor would you just
speak to me? Tell me your name and where you're from and all that kind
of stuff.
Sure, Rob. Taylor Barnhill. I live in Madison County, just east of Mars Hill on Little Ivy Creek.
Taylor, you were saying you live in Madison County east of Mars Hill. How long have you lived in Madison County?
A little over twenty-two years. I moved there July 4th, 1978.
Is that right? That's great. And where from?
From Raleigh.
Okay. Now, you're not from Raleigh, though?
I'm from Durham, and also spent part of my childhood outside Atlanta.
I had a sense that you spent some time over east of Raleigh, too, around Martin County.
I did. All my family is from Beaufort and Martin County. Both my father and mother's sides. I spent summers working tobacco on my uncle's farm outside Little Washington.
Is that right? So you, when you were growing spent a lot of time with your grandparents on their farm.
Yeah. This was an aunt and uncle, actually. I never really had grandparents, but spent a lot of time on a farm getting to know eastern North Carolina rural communities.
Did, was this your father's brother or—
This was my mother's sister.
And it was, what else did they farm besides tobacco?
A lot of peanuts, a lot of soybeans. The sickest I've ever been was having to hoe half mile long rows of peanuts on a summer day and getting sun stroke. Sweet potatoes. Of course, my aunt had these fabulous gardens. Everyday in the middle of the day we had a huge meal that would rival any Thanksgiving dinner, just as a matter of course. Long days, seven to seven, fifty cents an hour is what I got paid. That was good money for a kid.
How old would you have been when you were doing that?
This was probably from about nine to thirteen.
Wow.
Yeah. I was the only white kid. I was working alongside anywhere from five to thirty black tenants. Actually, they weren't tenant farmers; some were tenant farmers, but most were what we called migrant farmers, migrant workers. But they actually lived through the summer on my uncle's property. They were extremely poor black farmworkers—men and women, children, old folks—all out in the field together.
And those jobs now have basically been taken over by Hispanic, Latino farmworkers, I guess. It almost sounds like the same kind of situation.
Well, they were taken over first by machines. I worked times when in wetter weather we actually used mules. My uncle had these fabulous huge draft mules. They were all snow white, and they were much bigger than most mules you see. They were fabulous animals. Then machinery came in by the time I was a teenager, and the black workers were having to find jobs other places. A lot of them were moving back up North. There had been one movement to the North and then sort of a second movement up North when I was a teenager—which would've been in the '60s—partly because of mechanization with the burley tobacco industry. Now the Latino farmworkers are doing most of the labor.
How did that time spent on the farm with family and also with this group of other workers, how did that influence your life today? Did that kind of set a course for you, or give you ideas about who you were and maybe what you wanted, or at least kind of affect a kind of an opinion about what life was?
Yeah, it clearly did. I've only begun to really understand it more
recently. I'm fifty-two, and I probably have come to understand more of
my life and who I am in the last few years. Much of it clearly goes back
to my roots in rural North Carolina [and a] tremendous appreciation for
those black farmworkers that nurtured me and took care of me on those
hot days when we were out in the field. They were worried about what
kind of shoes I was wearing and whether I got a honey bun and a Pepsi at
break time. They took care of me. I was their baby. I just gained a huge
appreciation for them and their sense of community and family, but also
was deeply troubled by their poverty and what they didn't have, and what
opportunities they didn't have. I became a different person; I grew up
as a different person because of that. I identified with them, also, in
an
Was your family, I mean, your mother and father, would you describe that as a middle class situation in Durham? I mean, was that, what did your parents do?
He was a lineman for Southern Bell Telephone for their cable system. He worked outdoors. When I was younger than nine I went to work with him a couple of times. He was literally digging ditches to check out damaged underground cable. This was telephone cable. He was about to reach a supervisory level when he died of a heart attack.
Oh man.
Yeah, but it was very much blue collar, middle class. We moved from Greensboro to Atlanta, and we had the Ozzie and Harriet life. Everything was good—new house, barbecues in the yard, badminton in the yard, children, wonderful neighborhood, and our bubble burst. But yeah, it was classic middle class Atlanta suburban fifties.
That must have been a real event for you to get to the farm in eastern North Carolina and come in contact with a different group of people. You must have been a real, well, I certainly understand what you're saying about the identification. At the same time it must've been almost a shock to you to have come in contact with a different group of people that were living a life that seemed far different from yours at that point.
Yeah, there was a shock every day. Of course, when I was not in the
field and riding from one work site to another with my uncle in his big
Cadillac, we would pull
So then when you got to a point where finishing high school and college and stuff like that, did—what did you study in school and where?
I actually wound up studying architecture at North Carolina State. But
when I was a kid—in fact, early in high school—I decided to be a vet,
because I loved animals from getting to know the farm animals but also
other animals. I had an older, grown cousin who was kind of a mentor. He
told me that being a poor kid I'd never be able to afford vet school or
afford to set up an office, so I should give that idea up. I didn't know
about loans and banks and stuff like that. So I thought that was out.
All my childhood I wanted to be a farmer. That was what I was going to
be. I approached my uncle at one time and said, ‘Uncle Harvey, this is
what I love, and I want to be a farmer.’ My mother always thought I was
going to be a farmer because I loved it so much. He said, ‘Well, nobody
gets into farming these days unless they inherit a lot of land, because
nobody can
This was even in the early `60s or so.
Yeah.
Mid `60s.
Mid `60s.
That he was anticipating that the land would be too expensive (). That's pretty perceptive on his part.
This was about the time when First Colony Corporation Down East was buying up every swamp and every marshland, all around Lake—well phooey I just forgot the name, Phelps Lake and the big, the huge natural lake down there on the coast. They were buying up all that land. That's when agribusiness was really starting up big time in eastern North Carolina, and it was becoming global. I think they were Dutch; they were a Dutch company. So I couldn't go into farming, either. I always loved architecture and structures. I would sit in my high school gym during ballgames. Instead of watching a ball game I would gaze at the huge trusses supporting the roof of the gym, and was much more fascinated by those than the game. In fact, I remember making the decision to go into architecture at a basketball game sitting there staring at these giant steel trusses in the roof. So that's what I did.
So you finished architecture school at State, and then did you stay in that area? Yeah, you must've stayed.
Yeah, but I was fortunate or unfortunate, however you want to look at it. Being the `60s the School of Design had a very strong social consciousness bent. This was a period when architects were reevaluating their role in society, and several of the professors of the school then had come from other parts of the country—California in particular—and they had these ideas of architecture and social change. So our mandate in some in these classes was to become architects that crafted communities and landscapes and buildings for a better social interaction. So actually I have in my transcript from those days. I brought it in for some other reason, but it was really interesting looking at it, because I could've minored in sociology or in psychology.
Wow.
Because that was a strong emphasis in some minds of professors at the School of Design. So as projects we worked with very poor rural communities around North Carolina helping them design day care centers and health centers. My rural roots became extended in my architectural training and planning to be a designer of rural communities, mostly poor rural communities. Left there and went into planning school, graduate school at Carolina, city and regional planning. I still was interested in those more rural and regional issues, and was kind of recruited by peers who had recently started up a new office in state government the Office of Rural Health Services under Governor Jim Holshouser. They were creating rural health care centers around North Carolina. It all just fit with who I was and my interest. So went to work for them and that kind of cast my rural perspective in stone.
That's interesting, I mean, at that time, too, it seems like there
was—certainly society-wise—less attention being paid in some respects to
rural communities. There was
It's real interesting because you had the War on Poverty. You had the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Exactly.
You had the whole Appalachia image and identity, but you also had this urban renewal effort beginning or going on, this huge urban renewal effort. I was lucky enough to be in a rural state that had sense enough to look at its own fabric and realize that rural communities were losing doctors and losing a lot of other resources. This office, that state office came together to figure out how to deal with that problem. Through that work I was sent to the mountain region to work with rural health centers.
So that's how you ended up in this part of the state.
I ended up in Hot Springs. Yeah.
So at that point you were working for the government, for the state office.
The Office of Rural Health Services.
Okay. Wow. So you came up here then as a planner?
As part of a community development team. We had a team that consisted of
an architect, which was me, a community organizer and a health systems
specialist. Three people. We had found out through different vehicles
about a community that had no health care delivery system, such as
Bakersville, for example. In that case the doctor
So tell me, you were working initially up in Bakersville area. Did you then move over to Madison County? Did you have contact with the Hot Springs Health Program? Was that like a next phase of what you all did?
It was. The first time we visited Hot Springs was in '74, and it was already going.
Wow. Right, it was up and going. It was pretty miniscule at that point.
It was Linda Mashburn and Linda Tulle.
I don't remember her. Mashburn—
I think Linda was a, Linda Tulle was a nurse at the time. She's still around, actually.
They had that little building in Walnut, I think. There was an old house or something I think they were working out [of] some time in the mid 70s.
There was one in Laurel. Glendora's—the house that Glendora owned up on Shelton Laurel.
Glendora Cutshaw's—
I can't remember one in Walnut. We did the renovation of the old Madison Grill into the Marshall-Walnut Medical Center building.
Okay, and that would've been about '76?
That was '77, '78 because I spent a weekend with Justin Skemp, who was born during that construction, and I got to see him on the way home from the hospital with his mom. His dad was doing that renovation at the time. John Skemp—
Johnny was doing that.
Right, John and Tom McCaig, and Dan Shehan.
Wow. The boys.
The boys. So Justin's now twenty-two.
Dan's brother dated one of my cousins in Sil—he's from Silver Spring also.
I didn't know that.
His cousin or his brother dated one of my cousins, and I always found that to be just remarkable that Dan and I—and Paul Gurewitz is the same way. We're all raised right there and ended up right here.
Part of the connection to Madison County goes back to Paul, too, because Gary Gumz—who owned land with Paul—taught at State in the School of Design, and I took a course after graduating when I was working for the Office of Rural Health Services from Gary. Got to talking about, got to know him and got to talking about Madison County, and so had this dual connection between Gary and the Hot Springs Health Program. Later got, was actually consulting with the Hot Springs Health Program on their building needs and beginning the planning for Marshall-Walnut Medical Center, and just fell in love with the people. They actually had an interim director at the time who was Hawk Littlejohn, a Cherokee Indian and self-proclaimed medicine man. Got to know him and as he tells it, he conjured me to the mountains and I moved up. I bought land in '77 and moved up a year later.
And you bought that piece of land that you're on now.
No, I bought land up on Shelton Laurel with Drew and Louise Langsner and Don and Nancy Durrell. We split up a two hundred-acre cove.
I see. Wow.
So I had a fifty-two acre farm.
I guess I knew that, but certainly had forgotten.
I never lived on it. I lived near there, but it didn't have a house. My
dream was to live up there and build my house and raise my family up
there. Meanwhile I met
Do you still own that property?
No, I sold it about ten years ago.
When you were, when you went in and bought that land with Drew and Louise and Don and Nancy, I mean, were you thinking, you mentioned that you wanted to live there, and you were thinking this was the place where you wanted to raise your family. Were you also thinking that, Well, maybe at some point in time I'll be able to get back to that farming ideal?
Oh yeah. I was going to farm. I was going to have an organic farm. So this was my, this is coming back around—my circle was to move back onto the land and run an organic farm. I was very much into organic gardening and eastern philosophy and macrobiotics, natural healing, and was a trained masseuse and—or masseur—and actually studied acupuncture and all kinds of healing arts. So I was going to go back to the land and be one with the earth.
Obviously if you bought that land back in the mid '70s, late `70s that kind of thing, organic farming certainly was not at the point it is today.
Right.
So that's really looking very far down the road at that point in my mind.
We didn't realize that. We thought we were looking at the road, not down the road. We thought its time was come and that all we had to do was some basic education and people would get it. I remember talking to Jim Woodruff about his organic tobacco farming.
Jim and I raised organic, I was living there at his place then. We raised a crop of organic tobacco. I think that was one of the wettest Julys in Madison County history. I remember we had twenty-five days of rain in July.
Oh, that's right. That's when I was in Bolivia.
Of course, blue mold just came in. It wasn't even blue mold as it was just rot. It just came in with a vengeance. I remember us going out into the field with a weedeater to—that's how we were hoeing was with a weedeater, because weeds were, we just couldn't get out and work the soil at all. It was, what a gome [a mess].
That was '79. I went to Bolivia and had an old college roommate keep my house for me, and he said it rained the entire month. Wow.
That's, organic tobacco. Wayne Uffelman has raised organic tobacco the last couple of years, and is actually doing that on contract now with RJR I think.
Really. So they're getting it.
There is, they understand, RJR understands the need to kind of move in that direction, that there is a market niche there.
Definitely.
Anyway, now we are diverging a little bit, which is fine, too. So you had bought this place, and you were still working for the state at that point and—
No, oh yeah. When I bought it I was still in Raleigh.
Oh, okay.
When I bought it. I moved up a year later. I just quit, walked out of my
office in Raleigh. Didn't have a job up here but made a decision to take
on that lifestyle, and bought me an old '71 Ford pickup truck. Sold my
red convertible Austin Healy with
This allowed you to make enough money doing that, doing the consulting to then come back and—
Yeah, yeah. Then it was all also timed with Hot Springs Health Program's needs for new buildings. I was the logical architect for those. So I designed three buildings for them. That and other work sustained me for a while. I did other health center buildings around North Carolina and was—when I was still in Raleigh I also got very interested in energy-efficient design and solar. So when I was still at the Office of Rural Health Services we were able to build or help a community build the first commercial solar building.
Okay, go ahead.
We helped a community down in Bladenboro build the first commercial solar building in the state. That was exciting.
Yeah.
It was about '76. So I was taking every course in solar design I could find around the country. That's how I spent my vacations. I would go take courses in solar, massage, macrobiotics, acupuncture.
Wow.
So when I got to the mountains, I also started a solar design practice. That was my specialty, along with rural primary health care centers, up into the mid `80s.
I'm curious. You talked about this a little bit in terms of the organic farming, that you basically didn't see that as so much down the road as saw it as being the road. My sense is that you're thinking the same kinds of ideas about macrobiotics or organic healing, all those kinds of things, solar energy even. But how did you see that meshing with this other ideal of the land and farming, and also that time spent on the farm as a child? How did you see all of this integrating itself in Madison County on Shelton Laurel?
The word that I used at the time was holism. This was a holistic lifestyle that I was attempting to carve out, where everything is integrated and your use of the land, your sense of community and your place in community and family, use of resources was all one. It had a logic to it. What I recognized in these rural communities that I had been working with was that that was already there. This was not something I was bringing to Shelton Laurel. Getting to know my neighbors, that was already there.
How did you see that exhibited? How did that sense of holism in the community in Shelton, in a place like Shelton Laurel, or Sodom, or a place like that?
Well, to give you an example. The first day I moved into the community
up on Shelton Laurel I moved into this little shack on Mill Creek,
because I didn't have a house on my land but it was within walking
distance of my land. One of my neighbors saw me unloading the truck.
This was one I had not met yet. He put down what he was doing and got up
his fishing rod, went fishing up Mill Creek, caught me four of the
prettiest trout you've ever seen and brought them by and gave them to me
for dinner.
And most of those neighbors at that time I assume were probably farming and living—I mean really living right there in that community. It wasn't people leaving for periods of time to go work or whatever. People were actually doing everything right there.
Many of them were. There were still a lot of people that had left or had to commute outside the county that got real jobs, but there was some remarkable farming going on. I wish I could remember their name now, but there was this one old fellow and his wife that grew some beautiful crops of tobacco, and beautiful gardens, and they were just dirt poor. They didn't even have a car. He drove everywhere on his tractor. When she wanted to go with him, he would hook up a trailer to the tractor and they'd go flying down the road. She had long hair, and her hair would be streaming out behind her and she stood up on this chariot like trailer. She looked like Ben Hur.
That's great.
Riding down the road, and they were just flying. He had this tractor wide open.
That's a great image.
She'd just be smiling. She was like a dog riding down the road sticking its head out the window of a car. She was just joyful of that chance to ride down the road in the wind. But yeah, it was, I recognize the holism of that. Now, on the other hand, there were fights going on. There were shootings going on, women being beaten, neighbors driving up next to my shack with a big pistol on the seat asking me to sell them something that I had. They would use, they would use, handle the pistol as a way of intimidating me into selling something that I had that they wanted. In particular, oak barrels that I had brought up from Raleigh that they wanted to make moonshine with. There was a lot of violence and a lot of fearfulness. But there, the fabric was still community and caring and nurturing.
Even that violence, in a sense, was a—I mean, I recognized that, too, pretty quickly. It's hard to ignore up in the area, but it was also a sense of people handling their own problems as opposed to going to the sheriff or going to some kind of law enforcement thing. You had an issue; you just dealt with it. In that sense it was a very integrated solution to a community problem, or what they perceived as a community problem.
Right, and it was family, also. Most of these were family issues, and on that little valley of Mill Creek even though there may have been eight different families there, they were all interrelated.
Right.
There was an accountability within family. I never saw violence that wasn't the outcome of drinking. I've read for years that closed isolated mountain communities all over the world have a problem with drinking, many ancient cultures and native cultures in particular. Now they've even isolated a gene to back that up. So drinking alcohol is a really serious problem, and that's where the violence came from. Mountain men in particular are very loving and gentle people, but they, it's a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon when they drink. They flip to the other extreme, to their dark side.
You spoke a little bit about your first day up there and this person bringing you some fish that he caught as a kind of a welcome. How did you, how did you sense your acceptance in the community as a person from the state but from a different culture, a different part of the state, a different mindset, and then moving into this very enclosed, isolated, integrated community where you are obviously different? You're the hippie with the plants and the moving van and the oak barrels. So over a period of time, how did you sense your acceptance and things like that?
Well, my situation was different because I came to the community as a professional from state government that was there to help them. I know that's a cliché. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
That's right.
But in a lot of people's minds I was a hero because I was part of a
program that was meeting a desperate need for people, which was health
care. They were so appreciative, most people, and so before I even moved
there, I was well liked and welcomed. People were just so pleased that I
was going to live on their valley. I mean,
At that time do you recall sensing that this community is changing? It
is really starting to experience more people like yourself moving in,
more demographic change, maybe less kind of emphasis in the native born
community, on what I would call some of those older values or older
traditions, I guess, or even older economies. Did you see that as
changing then, or could you anticipate that that was going to come? I
didn't, because what I saw were us outsiders, hippie transplants, back
to the landers with Peter and Polly Gott as the first lady and the first
guy on Shelton Laurel who came back in the `60s. We outsiders were there
to support native lifestyle, and I think we thought were
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
That traditional life style we valued as outsiders and we thought we could support indefinitely, and sort of create a static county of that lifestyle and avoid change, sort of ward off change. I didn't realize, the change didn't really occur to me until they paved the road over Devil's Fork Gap, at the head of Shelton Laurel. Widening and paving that road and straightening it out was sort of the first slap in the face. It opened up that end of the county with that end of the road.
Now is that the gap that goes over to Flag Pond?
Yeah.
Okay. So it now connects with I-26.
Right. Yeah.
Do you remember when that was paved? About what year?
Oh, let's see. Early `80s, very early, maybe '80. Chipper Jones had bought the Hazel Cutshaw farm up on top of the mountain before they paved it. That was the other thing. It was paving the roads. I've got this old video of Sodom, activities down in Sodom from the Adams family down at the store, and a dance and all this kind of stuff in the `60s. None of the roads were paved.
Right.
None of them in that whole side of the county—
Yeah, I have that same video.
Okay. Peter Gott—when they moved up on Shelton Laurel none of the roads were paved. So it was dirt roads everywhere. That was as much a part of the fabric of the community as anything. You couldn't drive fast partly because the roads were bumpy and curvy, but also you didn't want to stir up dust.
Right.
You didn't want to put clouds of dirt on your neighbor's garden or on their porch. And then paving the road or straightening the roads—that was where I was kind of startled into reality that things were changing.
Did you sense that this impetus to pave the roads, was that coming from Raleigh or was it coming from the local community? Was it coming from Shelton Laurel or was it coming from outside?
It was, my sense was—and this could be very inaccurate—but my sense was local commissioners, one of whom was my father-in-law, were always petitioning Raleigh for money. The county was poor; they needed money. There were different pots in Raleigh that they could draw from, and DOT was one of those pots. The leadership of the county was tuned into those road funds, and it was of course all very political. You had your Transportation Board member from the area, and so the politics was always—they were always vying for power for their own county. If you had a Republican governor, you weren't going to get any money if you had a Democrat county commission.
Right.
So they were, it was politics. The governorship changed, and I guess
Madison County started—I guess that was Jim Hunt's first term. The
county started
What do you, how would you, what would you say would be some of those costs? What would be some of the examples? Things certainly come to my mind. You mentioned the whole just speeding up of, not just travel on the roads, but speeds up kind of everything.
Everything sped up. As new consumerism, a new kind of having money and
the subsequent consumerism related to that came more into play, it
replaced traditional values and things—making your own stuff, putting up
your own food, working on your own truck to repair it and keep it in
order. Now you could drive down to Freddy Henderson's and he'd do it,
because the road was paved. Or you could drive over to Flag Pond or
wherever. Now I can get to that new store in Erwin, Tennessee, so let's
go there and buy groceries. Glendora's business began to fall off,
because she was the grocery store. So all of those shifts in consumerism
and value placed on being able to be self-
Seems that one of the real definite effects is that it—and it's something we've spoken to—but it really takes people away from their individual community. Whereas prior to these changes people did, they farmed their land. They worked on their property. They maybe probably went to church in the community. They entertained in the community. They did their shopping in the community. And suddenly if you are leaving to work, to entertain, to consume whatever it might be, that is all time spent away from place, which I think changes the dynamic quite a bit.
Right, exactly, yeah. You lose that sense of place, and you lose being in touch with that place. I mean, the things that I learned from Delly were her appreciation for taking a walk up on the mountain and seeing what was blooming, what wildflowers were blooming. And of course, she was always looking for ginseng and other herbs, but being there and the kind of energy and spirit that you get from place—especially a natural place—was so important, even though they may not have been intellectually aware of it or maybe even not conscious of it. But it was part of them and who they were and thus very, very important. Then all of a sudden that was in competition with all these other attractions outside. So there's an erosion of place and connectedness to place that happens.
I was always struck by the—not just Delly, but other people in the
community—but I was always struck by the intimacy of their understanding
of place, also. Delly understood where the springs were and where those
herbs were and where that
Yeah, right. You knew where your needs were met and how, and you had great value in those. Yeah.
So at the point we're at now in the year 2000 obviously not all of the roads in the county are paved. But certainly a lot more of them are paved than not anymore, and there is a big push to get everything paved. And we have this new superhighway coming through the eastern, northern and eastern edge of the county that they finished in a couple of years. How do you, what is your sense of all of that, and where is that kind of putting the county and putting county residents? What affect is all of that going to have? Where do you see things kind of moving with the—
Well, because of the scale of this road and the amount of traffic that
it will bring, more than ever it becomes the big cultural blender. It
blends the people and the activities into this homogenous soup that
looks just like every other place in North America, and the world for
that matter. The icons of transportation nodes are the chain businesses
and gas stations, and they're all the same all over the world now. So
you have this homogenous stuff that is created, and the uniqueness of
place and culture disappears unless people fight very hard for it.
There's an irony in that fight because on the one hand, an
anthropologist might say, ‘Well, if you have to fight for it, it's not
real anyway, it's an artificial culture or tradition,’ like the ballad
tradition. As soon as you collect, as soon as the first person collected
those ballads whether it was Dan Campbell or Cecil Sharpe, everything
changed. It became a performance tradition and not a community
What do you feel the effect of this will be in terms of—
[phone ringing]
Somebody will answer it in a second.
What do you feel like the, other than what you've mentioned, like there's obviously going to be other changes, also, and one of the things that seems kind of evident right off the bat is the idea of land values and land prices and land taxes. All of that seems to be going through the roof at this point in time. With that I don't know—I have an interesting quote from Harold Wallen talking about, ‘Well, we build roads and then the people are going to come and they're going to put houses up’ and things like this. He's, of course, a real promoter of this and what he wants for him, for his family and for the community, that kind of thing. I mean, it seems that that's really coming true at this point. At the same time with prices being what they are now-a-days, it just doesn't, it seems like if Harold Wallen had to go out and buy property right now he would really be in a fix.
Yeah. I would like to think that there are models somewhere around the country where this has happened before that demonstrate tax structures to provide some equity to local people. In other words, is there a tax system within a county that gives tax breaks to local people to balance it out to where the extremes of growth and the impacts are tempered by tax breaks and tax incentives? There's something to be said for people who have stayed at a, stayed on a place, stayed in a place for generations. They need to get some kind of credit for enduring the poverty and all they have endured to stay at that place. So there needs to be adjustments in the economy of a community that account for that, and bring some equity to that. But I don't see it happening. It was one of the things that I was preaching in the `80s when we first were hearing about I-26 being planned. I was preaching this as part of the opposition to building I-26. It was me and Bobby Towsie against everybody else, basically. We were trying to point out that here are some of the negative impacts. At the same time, if it's going to be built because of the I-26 Corridor Association power, the political power in that organization, it was going to be built come hell or high water. Then you look at damage control. How do you allow this change to occur with a minimum negative impact? What programs do you put into effect? What tax structures do you put into effect to mitigate problems and enhance opportunities for local people? Luckily, we've got some folks, Ray Rapp in Mars Hill and others, who understand those kinds of things and I think are working hard to do some of that. But we started ten years too late. It's the story of civilization, I guess.
Well, yeah, I've been astounded in terms of my work on this project not
only how late I came into the project, but also how long kind of the
planning has been going on for this road. This is, this road has been a
done deal in a way long before you and I
We know that. We know that. We have that information about roads twenty-five years hence now.
Right.
A couple of months ago when the I-26 connector debate was going on here
in Asheville, that's all you heard about. Some guy—well informed, very
bright Asheville resident—wrote a letter to the Mountain Express saying, ‘How can we let this happen? Why in
the world do we have I-26 in the first place? We shouldn't even allow it
coming into this city’ and on and on. I wrote him back through the
editor, which didn't get published. I said look, ‘This was done fifteen
years ago, if not sooner. If you really want to affect some change, get
off your ass, go down and find out what's being planned right now.’
That's where your letters need to go. That's where your advocacy needs
to take place, is what is being planned for twenty years down the road,
because that's the only way you can affect any change as far as major
state highway projects go. Of course we're all, we don't see things
until they're right in front of us. There's no, Bobby Towsie and I could
not get the Western North Carolina Alliance interested in I-26 in the
`80s—and I was working for the Alliance—because there was nothing you
could put your finger on. It was a verbal picture that someone had
painted, but there was no ground being
Even in the early `90s, when I started doing this project. I mean, I would go out in the woods and you could find the little survey markers that were every fifty feet on the right of way or on the center line or proposed center line, but even that was a real struggle to find. It was just, I'd make these walks through the woods. I walked the whole route, and you'd kind of go, what's going on here. This is, these are the woods in back of my house. This is the exact same place, and there's going to be a road here? I'm not sure. Your work now with the Southern Forest Coalition obviously would involve you in projects like this.I'd like you to talk a little bit about what you feel are the the environmental impacts of not just I-26, but kind of what we're beginning to see is the paving of the area, that kind of thing. How that is going to really affect us, our community and the region environmentally?
Well, for us as a community the impacts of that sprawl and growth that
are most easy to relate to are air quality and water quality. Air and
water are where we lose first, and that's where the costs are going to
be highest—to try to buy clean air and clean water is going to be the
most expensive endeavor that we've ever encountered. So those are the
two big things. My work with the Forest Coalition also looks at the
importance of wildness and wilderness as defining who we are as a
species. We are defined by those parts of the earth that we haven't
changed. We're defined by wildness, whether it's through our religion or
our economies or just our basic spiritual identity. That's always been
the defining element, and we feel that if we lose wild areas, we lose
ourselves. It also is related to the importance of our being able to
leave something alone. Are we
Of course.
And they're going to get hit by cars and trucks or shot by hunters who are sitting there on the side of the road waiting for them, with their dogs in close pursuit. So the solution to that issue is nuts. It's just pathetic, and we should be ashamed. The black bear is one of those charismatic megafauna that is an indicator species for many of these elements, and it's an indicator species for us. It indicates our inadequacies in understanding biodiversity. So that's a fragmentation issue. That's what they call a fragmentation issue, where you fragment the natural landscape to where the needs of species are unable to be met, because they cannot move or they cannot behave in natural patterns and behaviors.
Taking that to another degree, how does this fragmentation affect what
we probably would've identified when we moved here as an almost wild
human culture? There was a certain, I'm not thinking wild in kind of the
violent kind of way, but more wild in terms of people again living
self-sufficiently and people living within communities and in a more
natural kind of way. That was one of the things that attracted
Yeah, people were closer to nature. The highway—again, it's a conduit away from place to activities that are farther from nature. Consumption, for example. I mean, that's kind of my pet peeve, if you haven't noticed. It makes it easy to justify going to spend some of that money. It enables you to do it at a speed so that you can do a lot of it. You can do it frequently. You can do it quickly. You can do it efficiently in terms of energy consumption. So there are all the reasons to go do it. I think back on studying the ballad tradition. I once thought, ‘Well, these ballads have survived here in Sodom because they were so isolated. They never had people from the outside coming in and screwing around with things, and they didn't leave to go outside.’ Well, they did. They had, I mean, Cas Wallen, Lee Wallen and many others traveled. Byard Ray never stayed home. The dispersal of these oral traditions was there. It was part of what was going on. But it was all part of that pace. That was life in these mountain communities. Now the pace is such that there's no dispersal of traditional activities and communities. It's all taking on the new more glamorous, more stimulating activities from outside.
So that the dispersal takes on the nature—again, maybe a country-western star or the Grand Ole Opry or something like that, or getting CDs out there as opposed to communicating. You would go over to Delly's and listen to her sing. I mean, you would not only get a healthy dose of her music, but you would also get a healthy dose of who this person was.
It's in a context; it's in a real life context. It's in a lifestyle, culture and all that. Now the context is media. It's not place and community. It's media like MTV. So Marshall McLuen was right.
Yeah, that's really true. Seems to me that in the pitch for this road we hear two things. We hear safety, and we hear economic development. Those are the mainstay reasons for the building of this road. How do you respond to those? To me the safety issue is real. I mean, this is a, it's a dangerous road in terms of the traffic that is on it now. Twenty years ago, maybe not. But—
Well, I think we have to be first clear to understand symptoms as
opposed to root causes. We unfortunately were forced into dealing with
symptoms, mostly because that's what's in our face. Safety is one of
those. Understanding the economics of transportation and transportation
through rural areas is so complex, and it is driven by issues way
outside of our community. Right now it's driven by globalization, which
is driven by consumption. None of this is being driven by meeting basic
needs. So the ultimate question has to do with our soulless society and
its need to feed its soul with material stuff. Why is that? Where did we
lose our spirit and our soul, and why? Maybe—is this a natural point on
a curve of development for a relatively new country? We're only two
hundred years old. Is this, do we have an organizational curve sort of
like an organization, where the curve is steep where you have all this
growth and development and everything, and it levels off and reaches a
plateau? Then there are a couple of bumps in there, and then it begins
to slowly climb back toward a path of stability and longevity and all
that. Well, I don't know, because the world is changing so fast that
none of those curves apply anymore. But this road, this highway and what
it
Yeah, I was, I remember the first time I went to Delly's and walking
into the kitchen of the upper house, and she basically had this spring
running right into the sink. She left it running all the time. It was
just that constant flow. I remember going over and thinking, ‘God why
are the leaving the water running.’ So I went over and turned the water
off, and Junior immediately followed me over there and turned it back on
again. This was this little thing of me turning it off and him turning
it on and then explaining to
That's one thing that I remember about Delly more than anything else, was her bragging about how her water tasted and how she had to carry it with her. Anytime she traveled she had to carry her own water from home. She would not drink water from cities. She just wouldn't, wouldn't put it to her lips.
It was so cold it'd bust your teeth.
Yeah.
I have a very clear memory of that. Well, I talked with Ray Rapp, I guess it was last week or the week before. He was talking about this very issue in terms of Mars Hill and where the watershed was and how that was definitely was going to limit development right along the corridor, right along the highway because of where the watershed was. He was just tickled to death that that was the case. It was going to have to limit things down there. That's interesting. What is your sense of the demographic growth that's going to be happening? Again, we spoke a little bit about the fact that we view each other, ourselves as kind of the initial change agents coming into a place like this, that kind of thing. Obviously there are going to be more of us coming in. What is your sense of that? I find myself kind of complaining about the new breed of newcomers that are coming in.
Yeah, well the thing that—I was shocked the first time that someone was telling me about this couple [that] had moved in up on East Fork or somewhere, and I didn't know them. I thought, I don't even know these people and they're living up here. Of course, that's fifteen miles away from me, but it's still here. I thought I knew everybody in the county. One of the advantages of working for the state and being single when I first moved here was I traveled all over the county. I got to know everybody. I knew all the hippies because Jerry Plements had tagged them. I got to know them, and I dated half of them. Now there are all these people that I don't know. I'm threatened by that. Not only do I not know them, but they are people they're carrying out activities that I had claimed as part of my liberal value system, like organic farming. Yet I find out that they're conservative Republicans doing it and it shatters my world view, my county view. That's a shock. It's like, No you can't do organic farming if you're a conservative Republican. We don't allow that. You have to go into business, and you have to steal from people.
Right. That's right.
I'm the one that takes the high road here. It's a shock, and it's really
rattling my reality, but it's happening. My church is a classic example
of that. The Episcopal Church was created by outsiders, priested by an
outsider, and is this fabulous community of wonderful, wonderful people.
I guess I just assumed they were all liberal Democrats because they were
doing these wonderful things that I believed in, and they ain't. That
sort of political perspective demographic is turning everything upside
down for me. But the other part of that is, who are these people? Being
in Asheville I meet somebody every week that has just moved here or is
about to move here because they heard so much
I think, actually, that's a perfect place to end.
END OF INTERVIEW