Listening to the Land: Stories from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley by Jamie S. Ross (review)

Listening to the Land is a gorgeous book, full of stunning photos of the land and people of the Cacapon and Lost River Valley of West Virginia and accompanied by carefully selected text chunked out into fourteen short chapters, with generous white space and expert attention to fonts and layout that draws the eye on every page. No reader can come away from this book without falling in love with the place it depicts and the people who live there.

But Listening to the Land doesn’t want to be a glossy coffee-table book: its purpose, according to Nancy Ailes, the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Land Trust’s executive director, is to “document the Valley’s history, introduc[e] newcomers to local values, and encourag[e] land protection” (xix), as well as to explore “modern political conflict and tension—how land use change is affecting the Valley, its families, and their quality of life” (xix).

As such, the book presents a thoughtfully braided natural and oral history of the valley, which runs through Hardy, Hampshire, and Morgan Counties in the eastern panhandle. Ailes suggests that one cannot look at the land without considering its people and their history, since, “If we lose the land, the memories and stories that are inextricably tied to it fade with the passing of generations. Or, if the stories are no longer told, the land becomes less valued” (xxi).

The Cacapon and Lost Rivers Land Trust, which sponsored the book’s production, is the “largest local land trust in the state, and one of the leading protectors of land in the East” (xix). It has grown from permanently protecting just a few hundred acres in the year 2000 to over 11,000 acres today (xix). The Trust employed Jamie S. Ross—the producer and cowriter of the PBS series Appalachia: A History of Mountains and Peoples—to do research and write the text and Charlottesville-based photographer Tom Cogill to photograph the places and people that Ross describes.

Each chapter focuses on a different family or community in the area, telling their stories and showing us the history of and the threats to their “home places.”

And what stories there are here: Ralph Spaid recalls turning down a five-million-dollar offer for his family’s mile-square farm, Little Egypt; the Rudolph family tells the harrowing story of their father getting caught in a sudden blizzard while walking his cattle back from their grazing area, only making it home by holding onto the tail of a cow who knew her way back regardless of the conditions; Steve Slonaker recalls that back in the days of party-line phones, when people were snowed in, his grandfather and great uncle would call each other on the phone and sing, and the other folks on the line would pick up to listen.

But lest you think the book presents a rosy, romanticized view of rural life, guess again: Bobby Ludwig remembers that his father told him that if he wanted to continue the family farm, he “better get a damned good job,” because “to keep everything, you need big money” (19). The Slonaker family describes their inability to fight Virginia Power and Light’s plan to put a gigantic transmission line right through their apple orchard: “They wouldn’t even let us wait until September, so we could pick the apples. They could’ve avoided that patch of orchard and worked on either side but they didn’t. They just pushed the trees out” (125).

But there are also stories of heroes like Butch Mills, who, along with members of his hunt club, purchased property adjacent to the hunting camp to protect it from clear-cutting, and who plant fifty to seventy-five trees a year to replace the ones that have been lost. The book is a tribute to those local landowners...