Troubled Waters (review)

"Fire" is about the old problem of forest fires, accidental or set, and a family with the problem of alcoholism. Welfare checks provide the title for "First of the Month." The story explores the relationship between people who are making it and those who are down and out and offers a reminder of how tenuous economic stability is. It is also about family tensions. A three-generation family deals with change in "Eminent Domain," as the family is scattered for economic reasons, trying to find a graveyard on the family farm that has been forever changed by strip-mining and the construction of a four-lane highway, and hoping that family bonds are stronger than the forces of change. Taulbee is in deep trouble in "As a Snare." After the death of his father, he takes to dope and alcohol and precarious schemes to make a living. In the meantime, his religious family sets out to save him, and we are left wondering how successful they are going to be. "Eulogy" is about the funeral of a beloved grandmother, and Tara's coming home from college in Ohio to a family yearning for her visit but disappointed with her short stay. She has a frightening experience on the way back with the kind of people she is trying forever to escape with a college education. In "The Idea of It," a Kentucky migrant brings his wife and son back to live on the old homeplace, even though his wife had to forsake nurse's training and the son had rather live in Florida. Father and son go looking for a remembered spring but find only a strip-mine silt pond. The only job he can find is as a scab coal-truck driver in the midst of a strike. Choices are grim, and the future is uncertain. These stories are as good as any I have read about the Appalachian experience. The characters don't all make good choices. Sometimes their flesh is weak, and their dreams are often a hazard to their future, but they have verisimilitude. Not all Eastern Kentuckians fare so poorly, but many do, and these are the ones that Chris Holbrook presents with a clear insight into their lives and circumstances. I highly recommend this book. —Loyal Jones Bartlett, Richard A. Troubled Waters. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. 348 pages. Hardcover $35.00. Paperback $17.95. Certain books tend to make their readers very angry, angry not at the writer, but angry at the circumstances and people described in the book. Troubled Waters represents that kind of book. In carefully researched detail, Richard A. Bartlett traces the history of the often futile 63 attempts of people in North Carolina and Tennessee to stop a giant paper company, Champion International, from polluting the Pigeon River, a small stream that snakes its way through picturesque parts of the Great Smoky Mountains. The controversy, which even made news in the New York Times and on "The CBS Evening News," becomes a kind of real-life morality play, replete with white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains. The good guys include such unlikely heroes as an elementary school teacher, a retired paper company executive, and the current vice president of the United States, Al Gore. Those curling their mustaches in gleeful disdain of the forces of reason and decency are the executives of the paper company and the North Carolina politicians who seem to be constantly rubbing the shoulders of the paper mill people, assuring them that "everything's gonna be all right" while these same political hacks are asking for money for their campaign coffers. What is so incendiary about this tale is the sheer frustration the reader feels for those who have decency on their side and want very simply to have their pristine stream back. Time after time, through foot dragging and blatant stone-walling, the paper company manages to thwart the efforts of those who merely want the stream to be free of dioxins and other suspicious chemical agents. Fish in the stream, mostly scrub fish like carp and buffaloes, show up with strange sores and other abnormalities. Nobody fishes the river that once...