Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians (review)

books, and that you can read them, because you will find in them much to embrace and take to heart and never forget." In that distant classroom, the teacher will be speaking of Wilma Dykeman. —Art Jester Scott Weidensaul. Mountains of the Heart. A Natural History of the Appalachians. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing Company, 1994. 276 pages. $21.95. To many, if not most of us, who consider the Southern highlands home, the Appalachian Mountains consist of the Smokies, the Cumberlands, the Blue Ridge, and the lesser systems and spurs that lie in their shadows —figuratively if not literally. For our purposes, Appalachia itself is satisfactorily defined by the primary area served by Berea College, those mountainous portions of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina , Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. It has been our little conceit that the old Appalachian Mountains are our own. This notion has faltered only because of the immense popularity of the Appalachian Trail, ending far away in central Maine. For millions, the Georgia-to-Maine trail has come to define the Appalachians, Springer Mountain in Georgia and Katahdin in Maine marking the beginning and the end. Scott Weidensaul, a birder, rock hound, photographer, and all-round naturalist who has spent his life in the Appalachians, disabuses us of such ideas at the outset of Mountains of the Heart. Our Appalachia, our Southern highlands are no more than a quarter of the gentle range. Weidensaul, a Pennsylvanian, takes us into less known but no less majestic ridges of the Black Mountains, the Shickshocks, and the Unicois, devoting much of his time to the northern reaches. And at last, he takes us to the remote, inhospitable end of the mountains , 650 miles beyond Katahdin. The last tip of the Appalachians is a nine-by-five-mile outcropping that rises above the icy waters between Newfoundland and Labrador. Belle Isle is a distinctly Arctic place, inhabited only by lighthouse keepers and their families, seldom visited even by fishermen now that the cod fishery is moribund. The largest animal resident on the island is the red fox, caribou having been killed out by fishermen years ago. But Belle Isle is not some novelty dreamed up just to provide Weidensaul an ending or a counterpoint. When all is said and done, the Arctic island has more in common with Cheaha Mountain in northeast Alabama, where the journey begins, than one would suppose. 59 What Weidensaul has written is not a travelogue, but a strikingly literate and insightful discourse on the diversity and resilience of ecosystems long embattled by human encroachment. Tragically, there are too many cases similar to the caribou of Belle Isle. Some of them are legend: the elk, once the most widespread game animal in North America; wolves, gone for nearly a century; mountain lions. Nothing was more dramatic than the demise of the great American chestnut which stretched from Maine through the Southern highlands and westward to the Mississippi. A blight introduced in a shipment of Oriental chestnuts spread southward early in the century, reaching the Smokies by the 1920s. By the 1940s, they had been virtually wiped out. Says Weidensaul: "In less than a generation, the Appalachians were robbed of their single most important tree—important both ecologically and economically. The toll has been estimated at some four billion trees equal to nine billion acres of forest land, with a value of $400 billion, but even that number does not convey the rending quality of the destruction ." Now it is the Fraser fir, victimized by a European insect accidentally introduced around the turn of the century. The pest called the balsam wooly adelgid did not reach the Southern Appalachians until the 1950s, but anyone who has been in the Smokies in the last decade has seen the result. Nearly 90 percent of the magnificent trees have been killed. Pressures on the system increase with each passing year, but to truly appreciate the region's resilience, one must recall how thoroughly the forests were wiped out in the timber rush of the nineteenth century. Many of the large birds of the virgin forests saw their numbers decline precipitously. The raven, for one, appeared to be beyond recovery because...