The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future

CHAPTER 1 The Cleanest Stream in Kentucky

6 C H A P T E R 1 The Cleanest Stream in Kentucky Erik Reece There is nothing more eloquent in Nature than a mountain stream. —john muir On the first day of spring, I pull my truck off a narrow back road at the confluence of Buckhorn Creek and Clemons Fork, deep in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Each stream begins miles from here, up in the headwaters of Robinson Forest. Just up the road I can see the main entrance to the forest. This morning is cool, but the sun has just emerged above the steep eastern ridge behind me. I unroll an old topo map of Robinson Forest on the tailgate, anchor it with a cup of coffee, and try to get my bearings. Fading purple lines undulate out from the ridgetops, defining the contours down to each streambed. Robinson Forest, shaped like a horse’s head looking east, sits atop the eastern section of the Cumberland Plateau between the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Kentucky River. The Cumberland Plateau itself is a 360-million-year-old tableland of sandstone and shale. Stretching from Alabama through Tennessee and across most of eastern Kentucky, it is the world’s largest hardwood forested plateau. And I am standing in its last large forest. The two main watersheds of Robinson Forest—Clemons Fork and Coles Fork, both about four thousand acres in size—drain into Buckhorn Creek, which flows west in a gentle loop toward Troublesome Creek, which then empties into the North Fork of the Kentucky. Most of the The Cleanest Stream in Kentucky—7 ridgetops in Robinson Forest crest at around twelve to fourteen hundred feet. A steep, straight ridgeline running north from where I am standing divides Clemons Fork’s watershed from Coles Fork and Buckhorn Creek. The stream I’m most interested in today is Coles Fork. Stretching almost to the forest’s eastern boundary, Coles Fork is the cleanest body of moving water in Kentucky, the benchmark by which the Environmental Protection Agency measures all other streams in the state. My aim today is to traverse Robinson Forest from west to east by following Buckhorn Creek to Coles Fork and then Coles Fork up to its headwaters. There, I have been told, I will find the remnants of a cabin that once belonged to a local sawyer. With one finger I trace my path up Coles Fork, past Panther Fork, Snag Ridge, and White Oak. Near the source of Coles Fork I read the barely legible words “Cabin Branch.” That, I decide, must have been the site of the sawyer’s home. I stow my map and start walking along an old logging road that follows the bank of Buckhorn Creek. The stream is shallow, and its clear water moves swiftly through the low riffles. I would like to say that I am slowly entering a pastoral reverie. But I am not. There’s too much trash littering the creek banks. Downstream, on Troublesome Creek, the situation is even worse. Recent flooding has festooned the banks with all manner of garbage. Half-deflated, muddy basketballs bob in the water beside a flotilla of plastic bottles. Plastic bags hang like ugly Christmas tinsel in the trees. The powerful flood currents wrapped large sections of metal roofing around the trunks of sycamores. It all reminds me of something Verna Mae Slone wrote to her grandchildren in a beautiful memoir called What My Heart Wants to Tell. Slone was raised just up the road from here in Caney. She was describing in careful detail the preindustrial economy of Appalachia, where a dead turtle’s shell made a soap dish and her father wore trousers sewn from cloth her mother had woven from home-grown flax. “No Pampers hung from tree limbs along the creek,” she said—a telling comment on how the economy of disposability has turned a resilient, self-sufficient culture into a disposable land and, as many would say today, a disposable people. The farther I walk up Buckhorn Creek, however, the less trash I see. In a way, I am walking back into another time—a time when Slone and her family “lived, loved, fought and died undisturbed by the outside world, 8—Chapter 1 protected and imprisoned by its hills.” And it’s true, the steep slopes can feel imprisoning. Across the creek, the bank rises sharply, covered in...