week of 3/6/02
 
 
 

A bird’s eye view of a changing landscape
By John Beckman
A recent Sunday’s overcast skies and damp coolness seemed a long way from the day before’s faux summer conditions. I had spent the previous day with a couple of the guys putting up a fence on our farm, taking our breaks in the shade of the truck rather than the overly warm fields of an unusual February. As well as being a part-time fence builder, my friend George is also a licensed pilot, and as we finished the day’s work he mentioned that he needed to take a plane up the following day to check everything out, and asked if we’d like to go along for the ride — I mean flight. Our other friend quickly said he was busy on Sunday, and he wasn’t really interested in risking his life winging over mountaintops. I told George I’d like to join him and see our farm from the air to get another view of what’s happening around Cullowhee and central Jackson County.

Jackson County’s airport sits on a flattened mountaintop overlooking N.C. 107 and Western Carolina University, and as I wound my way up Little Savannah Road around cow pastures and under mammoth power lines, I wondered what the airport would look like perched up here 1,000 feet above the valley floor and the busy corridor below. I reached the unlocked gate and drove in looking for my friend, which didn’t take long since he and another friend were the only ones there.

There were three planes parked, but only two of them had both wings so I figured it would a 50-50 chance of getting on the right one. He was checking the fluids and controls on a 1969 Cessna twin-engine, eight-passenger model, bigger, faster and more powerful than the little single engine personal aircraft I’d been up in before. Equipped with two 300 horsepower turbo engines, this little baby would cruise at 240 m.p.h., making it from Cullowhee to NYC in about 2.5 hours, depending on the wind of course. I was more interested in how long it would take to get the eight miles to Betty’s Creek Road and the base of the Cowee Mountains where our farm is, and was that big gray cloud covering the mountains to the north and headed this way going to have anything to do with pushing a 30-year-old, 10,000-pound cargo plane through the choppy mountain air. My pilot assured me that as fast as this plane was we would be over there and back before the rain got to Cullowhee and that the ride would be mostly smooth.

I’ve spent plenty of time aboard jumbo jets, Airbusses, DC-9s and commercial airliners and always felt fairly safe, but those little planes you can buy for the cost of a nice used car? I always felt like I was trading in a Corvette for a Yugo, at several thousand feet.

Just a couple more minutes and we’d be off. I took the opportunity to walk around the empty airport and the little single landing strip. I saw a large hole in the blacktop surface at the edge of the flat area and knew it to be the section I had read about last year where a piece of the older runway had slid off the mountainside. I walked over and saw a piece of asphalt about 20-feet by 50-feet several feet below the rest of the landing area. It made me question the stability of the surface we were supposed to land on, assuming we made it back. Too late to turn back, time to board. After the pre-takeoff check, we started moving, headgear on, fingers crossed.

We turned around at the end of the black ribbon, and the engines roared as we headed for takeoff and the missing end of the runway. I don’t know if we used all 600 horsepower to get off the ground, but I was glad there was plenty of thrust available as the ground slid away beneath us. We stared down the mountain side at the four lanes of traffic and all the shrinking buildings as we climbed skyward, the pull of gravity plainly apparent. We started to level off — much to my joy — and banked left over WCU’s campus and the Tuckasegee River, a pretty winding stretch of water cutting through a wild series of ridges when viewed from half a mile up.

As the ride smoothed out, a calm settled more fully into my body, and I began to notice the details of the landscape beneath our wingtips. In my mind, I pieced together the roads I knew with the topographic maps I had studied, the 3-D images I had seen on computer and the aerial tax maps from the county Office of Deeds and Records with what my eyes told my brain. This was a new visual image, and it had little to do with what my brain’s logical side had pictured of where I live.

Our area is definitely some wild and rugged looking country from the air, like bony knuckles reaching for the sky, slashed by wind, water and time. I resolved to just soak it in, to leave analysis for later. We could see new roads and homes cut into the hills, worn out pastures with bean-sized cows and cars filling the plethora of roads which ran along the streams, up steep slopes and through the gaps. New land disturbance and poor soil management was obvious from the red stains of erosion streaking toward the waters below.

We swung over Webster, and I saw our farm appear, a lovely high open field in a sea of winter trees. The greenhouse, cabins, gardens and even the little toolshed came into view as we approached at 110 m.p.h. I could see the intricate folds and creases our land made as it wrinkled across the hillside, streams slipping through the crevices. I snapped pictures through the mist trying uselessly to capture the new image burned into my mind’s eye, another way of looking at how land is tamed and used by “civilized” societies. I looked to the east and saw my neighbor’s land with its poorly built roads and little or no erosion control causing washes of clay across the ridges, scars of progress and greed. In winter, the effects of human growth and development are glaringly undeniable from the cockpit with few leaves to hide the mistakes and immense impacts that bulldozers and an expanding housing market invariably bring. George told me that after a rain you can actually see the waters change from blue to brown as you fly across each valley.

We swung back toward the airport just ahead of the rain/snow mix beginning to fall around us. He landed us safely, qualifying him in my mind, at least, as a perfect pilot. We got up, we got down and we lived to tell about it, a perfect flight. I left the airport with a new picture in my mind of the region’s growth and knowing I wanted to continue my efforts to protect the special environment of these mountains, to find ways to help minimize the negative effects growth and development are having here, to encourage others to help with that effort and to talk George into taking me up again soon.

(John Beckman is a building contractor and operations manager at Unahwi Ridge Community in Jackson County. Contact him at www.unahwiridge.com)