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

CHAPTER 3 A Timbered Classroom

49 C H A P T E R 3 A Timbered Classroom Erik Reece To be a naturalist is not just an activity but an honorable state of mind. —e. o. wilson One Sunday morning in March, I was driving a truck full of college students up a narrow logging road that runs along the western boundary of Robinson Forest. It was the middle of the spring semester. Back in January, on the first day of “eng 401: Nature Writing,” I had informed the class that there would be a mandatory weekend field trip to Robinson Forest. I wanted this small group of students to experience the forest firsthand, and I was hoping that by writing in an untrammeled natural setting, some of them might experience the minor epiphanies that define Thoreau’s writing and that have in many ways come to define this rich American genre of writing. Before we left campus early that Saturday morning, I told the class there would be a two-day moratorium on complaining. This was a wilderness adventure, of sorts, and they were to embark in an intrepid state of mind. But even so, things didn’t start well. I learned when we reached the forest that several of my urban students had serious anxieties about being “stuck” for two days in the wild without tv or cell phone reception . I learned later that one young woman had even tried to convince the friend she was riding with to have a minor accident so they could turn back. No one seemed prepared for the steep slopes that characterize the 50—Chapter 3 terrain of central Appalachia. On the first morning, the group had gone only fifty feet up one slope when I heard a voice below say, “Can you get mud off cashmere gloves?” But by the second day the students were starting to notice things—the different lichens and mosses, the call of a barred owl, the gelatinous eggs of the salamanders that were breeding in small puddles. At night they built a raging fire in the large fire ring at the center of Camp Robinson. Huddled around the flames and with no electronic media to entertain them, they quickly reverted to the ancient tradition of oral storytelling. On the last morning of our trip, I had all but one of my students squeeze into the back of my pickup. I was driving a badly rutted dirt road shaded by hemlocks, oaks, and hickories. The day was sunny, and the students jammed into the truck bed were laughing and howling in exaggerated pain as the tires hit mud puddles. Riding in the cab with me was an older student named Ben, who always wore a black wool cap and a slightly menacing look in class. He had been in the Marines; after that, he spent eight years repairing d-11 dozers and other large mining equipment in eastern and western Kentucky. He was taking the course only because he needed it to fill a requirement for his degree. He was, in his own words, “a right-wing nut job,” and he disagreed with virtually everything I said. But he was also funny and respectful, and I liked having him in the class. And I had the feeling that, despite his better judgment, he was beginning to like me as well. When I reached the highest-elevation tree community, the oak-pine forest, I turned not into the forest but instead onto the vast plateau of the strip mine that covers hundreds of acres along the northern edge of Robinson Forest. A wide, dusty road led us across miles of rocky terrain barren of trees and wildlife. A patchy layer of grass struggled to grow in the crushed shale and sandstone. We might have been driving across the Serengeti. All of the laughter from the back of the truck had ceased. Under the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, mountaintop mines must either be reclaimed to their “approximate original contour” (which never happens) or coal operators must obtain a variance showing they will convert the land to a “higher or better use.” What this has come to mean, however, is that most operators simply do the cheapest A Timbered Classroom—51 thing—they seed the flattened site with some legume, often an exotic species, and call it “pasture” or “wildlife habitat.” Ben was quiet as we drove along; then he...