Appalachian Water Music #42

APPALACHIAN WATER MUSIC #42 Not all spots within a single ecosystem are the same. Nor may they be reshaped at whim. It can be done, ofcourse. In Campbell's Cove, a valley's made a lake. In central Asia, the Aral Sea—its tributary waters dammed, or siphoned into irrigation—has lost halfits area. Two dozen species unique to that greatfresh pool are gone. Choking storms of dust roil up from the sun-cracked former lakebed. Some good news? Past the far tip of Virginia, a road across the Cumberland Gap has been more-or-less restored to the trail it was in Daniel Boone's day—in some of the days of the Cherokee, one might say. Loads of earth have been trucked in. An attempt's been made to reproduce pre-highway contours suggested in old journals, on old maps. Yet the subsoil and the humus aren't the same. Or the plant life, really; there's mown grass now. The Immortals and the Thunder People may have departed with those who knew them best. Could such restoration bring them back? The alleged trail is a walk-through diorama, a phony park. And look at the bypass growing like a melanoma near Sally's house. One sparse line ofyoung white oaks unbulldozed (third growth that stretched up close andfast, not branching) stands silhouetted, their neighbors stripped away, a thin company between two swaths of raw red clay that will be paved. Had afire, or the domino-fall a blowdown brings, revealed these lank trees, they'd be laid bare on one side only. Others would back them, filling in the emptiness around frail trunks. As things are, however, they seem mockingly denuded, sparse against the sky. They stand vulnerable to windstorms, as they were not when surrounded, would not have been had they grown always so exposed. Another consequence ofhuman action. A change that cannot be undone. —Jeanne Larsen 90 ...