Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

The Standing People

ELLESA CLAY HIGH Ellesa Clay High was born in 1948 and raised on the suburban edge of Louisville, Kentucky, but has lived her adult life in Appalachia. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1981 and has since taught creative writing, Appalachian literature, and American Indian literature in the English Department at West Virginia University . High's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scholarly work have appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the years, and she has received numerous awards, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award and a James Still Fellowship in Appalachian Studies. Her best-known work, Past Titan Rock (1984), provides a unique portrait of mountain life in the Red River Gorge of Kentucky and received the Appalachian Award in 1983. Today High has "hunkered down" on an old farm in Preston County, West Virginia, with her son and wolfdogs. For the last several years, she has been listening to, collecting, and writing her own material about the Eastern Woodland tribes of Appalachia. The essay included in this volume is part of an ongoing writing project she has tentatively titled WolfTrail Spring. * * * The Standing People Appalachia Direction: element: color: animal: medicine: knowledge: strengths: weaknesses: West water black black bear roots what can be learned in the Cave perseverance, sacrifice, humility; honoring oftradition and ceremony ; respect for elders; realizing the importance of dreams; ability to dream alone; facing the unknown, especially the Darkness within; reflection, as in pools; accessing the power of silence ; closeness to the female energy ofearth and water; respect for the struggle ofothers; commitment to and defense ofa higher order ofright and wrong than may be dictated by outside forces; love for the Creator; understanding of death; groundedness the same, imbalanced I live in a place of sacred white deer and slag heaps. My son and I drink from a spring pure and forthcoming as dawn, which downhill joins the Cheat River, one of the ten most endangered streams in the nation. A wolf spirit guided me here, and together we protect a spot I call WolfTrail Spring. Who I am, what has influenced me, and where I'm going might best be understood by a walk around this farm. Here, I'll unlock the gate. Of course, we might just define this place as the tax assessor and real estate agent have: 85+ acres, with chestnut stumps marking boundaries (100 acres computer estimate ), near Parker's Run, Pleasant District, Preston County, West Virginia. Mineral rights-negligible. No gas found. House, built circa 1880, empty for 30 years. No running water or central heat. Electricity and telephone service available . Unusable except for hunter's camp. Barn more valuable, though it too is falling down. Several other outbuildings, including cut-stone milk house built circa 1785-1825. Salvage value only. Mature timber, ready for harvest. High level field in back-potential air strip. Needs work. 148 ELLESA CLAY HIGH This type ofappraisal, though, illustrates why much ofWest Virginia, and Appalachia in general, remains unknown, lost, unacknowledged, misinterpreted-the wellsprings of its meaning secret. So let's you and I roam around for a while, that is ifyou don't mind the soft female rain that can last for days here-something we share with Seattle and other places. There, ocean moisture hitting the mountains over time created a northern rain forest, the old-growth giants of the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, America's prevailing winds again "picked up steam" crossing the Great Plains, then dumped their load on the Appalachians, conditions that fostered the greatest hardwood forest on earth. This shimmering green blanket stretched from Maine to Georgia, encompassedWestVirginia, and supported untold diversity ofplants and animals as well as uncounted tribes of indigenous peoples. By the 1920s, most had been clear-cut away. Then these mountains cleansed themselves with fire and water. The leftbehind tree bones tindered and ignited themselves with the sparks plentifully found around stream-driven logging equipment. Much of the ten million acres timbered inWestVirginia burned, and the rising smoke was prayer made visible from the earth. God's answer was flood. With nothing to hold it to the ridges, the soil created by trees over thousands ofyears eroded away in a few seasons, choking the streams with silt and industrial pollutants from logging and mining. At the turn of the century, the Cheat and its tributaries were "dead." The river spirits had buried themselves, for nothing could live in the...