week of 5/1/02
 
 
 

Road to Nowhere debate divides passions in Swain County
By Dawn Gilchrist-Young
As a small child, I can remember disliking the grave “decorations” that took place once a year at the Euchella cemetery. My dislike probably stemmed from a solitary and jealous nature I have either fought or indulged all my life. I didn’t like it when relatives came from Paw Creek and Mount Holly and Gastonia and took my parents, my great aunt Edna and my great uncles Clyde and Demp away from me, created noisy spaces for themselves at our supper table, and stayed up all night long playing “setback”, singing gospel songs, and playing music.

An unattractive child with stringy hair, freckles, and a penchant for eavesdropping on adults, I was never a favorite among the relatives either. They had driven hours over mostly two lane roads to get there for the decoration services. A few of them were Gilchrists who had lived at Almond. Most of them had left the mountains after World War II when the federal government thanked Swain County veterans for their contributions to the war by allowing the TVA to buy or condemn homes and remove 1,311 families in order to flood over 10,000 acres of land, thus creating the highest dam east of the Mississippi. The other side of the family, the Dowdles, had left the mountains when the National Park Service moved them out of Collins Creek. My family had been among those who rented homes and worked small farms after the logging companies began to leave, and so they received nothing for the lives they had led. Instead, they removed themselves to the cotton and hosiery mills that sprang up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. And so they returned each year to decorate the graves in the southwestern corner of Swain County and to visit with those who had remained in what was then and is to this day one of the poorest counties in the state.

However, even though I nurtured a broad and unwarranted dislike of the relatives with their “beehives,” Brylcreamed hair, and mountain dialects mixed with a Piedmont “twang,” my father and great aunt did not feel the same. For them, it was not only a family reunion that reminded them of times when they had all lived close together, but also a time to recreate in stories the lives of parents and children who had died. It meant a great deal to them, and much time and thought were given to picking out the floral arrangements (mostly plastic, bright, and, even to my child’s eyes, unsightly) that were purchased from Bryson City’s florists and placed lovingly on the graves. I could see the decoration’s significance to my immediate family and those who arrived once a year, but I never identified with their feelings. In our family Bible studies and in Sunday school, I felt my own biases were justified when I read that Jesus told a would be disciple not to concern himself with burying his dead father. Instead, he told him, “Follow me. Let the dead bury their dead.” To me, this meant you should make the most of what really mattered — the life you’d been given — and to leave the dead alone.

As an adult, I have avoided funerals whenever possible, and taken my own daughter to the Euchella Cemetery only once to visit the graves of Edna, Clyde, and Demp, as well as the urn of a stillborn nephew. I upset my daughter and astonished myself with the overwhelming emotions I could not hide, and I began to understand then my extended family’s desire to revisit the graves year after year. Unlike them, however, I vowed not to return there. I preferred to remember people as vital and sentient, not as dead and buried. But this one visit and the feelings it evoked has helped me, even as an environmentalist who opposes almost all roads into protected areas, to understand the passions aroused in those who have worked tirelessly for years to bring the controversy over “The Road to Nowhere” to a satisfactory conclusion for the people of Swain County. Among these tireless workers is a group which calls themselves “The North Shore Cemetery Association,” after the 1943 Agreement, known to many as “The North Shore Agreement” between Swain County, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the U.S. Department of Interior. The Association is made up of people who want to see the North Shore Road, or the “Road to Nowhere,” completed. Their primary reason for many years has been that road completion would allow them ready access to their family members who are buried in what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on land that the park acquired when the Fontana Dam was created.

Nevertheless, even though I respect the tenacity and integrity of the Cemetery Association, there are numerous arguments against completion of the road. Even if one sets aside practical aspects, such as the fact that the road will cost a great deal more than the amount of money recently appropriated, there are other considerations that run almost as deep as the desire to visit the graves of one’s family. For instance, I read recently that North Carolina has more miles of paved roads than any state except Texas. And I also know that there are more than 440,000 miles of roads that cut through our national forests alone. In 1936, an inventory revealed 48 forest areas over 300,000 acres in size without roads. By 1961, the area of roadless wilderness lands had been reduced until only 30 percent of those areas remained. I would be a fool not to acknowledge that roads are necessary for human commerce and habitation, but I also believe that we do our descendants more good than ill by preserving for them at least vestiges of nature that do not bear the marks of human lives and demands. In North Carolina, there are several wilderness areas. The part of the GSMNP that one can enter through the tunnel that ends the “Road to Nowhere” is not one of them, but it still feels like one, mostly because of the absence of roads there. This is an absence that I hope continues, even though I empathize with a population that feels itself both maligned and neglected.

When an older friend who supports the North Shore Cemetery Association learned that I was working on this article, she brought me a copy of the 1943 agreement, something I should have gotten for myself if I wanted to do any credible research before writing this opinion piece. When we talked, I reminded her that I am a wilderness advocate, and so am not in favor of the North Shore Road being completed. But I also told her that I understand the position of those who have family members buried in land that is largely inaccessible to them. As we talked, she told me about the decorations that take place there, and of the hundreds of people, many of whom are now very old, that the Park Service ferries across the lake. She told me I need to come to one of the decorations, that it’s like the old time services, with preaching and singing. And she also told me that many of the people would, at this point, settle for the most primitive of gravel roads.

What they want, she told me, is that a promise be kept. And the ’43 agreement, as it is often called, does indeed promise that a road would be built, thus replacing the flooded Highway 288 and allowing Swain County residents to drive to the family graves that remain. (Of the 2,043 graves in 16 cemeteries that were affected by the creation of the Fontana reservoir, 1,047 were relocated by the TVA, according to the remarkably informative The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains, by Margaret Brown.) And so the Park Service brings them over to Hazel Creek in boats, meets them with vehicles, and trucks them in to the cemeteries (a regular practice started in 1978 by the North Shore Cemetery Association). The people are allowed to hold their decoration services, though even the plastic flowers I despised as a child, (though now I know they are chosen because they last, unlike people and promises), have been yet another point of contention and controversy.

There are a number of controversies in Swain County created by the former actions of large federally funded organizations (such as the Park Service, the Forest Service, and TVA), and by the single-mindedness of many of the people who live there, represent the people there, or who once had family there (such as the North Shore Cemetery Association, former Sen. Jesse Helms, Rep. Charles Taylor). Among those controversies, the one that cuts deepest and foments the most heated debate is still that of the North Shore Agreement. According to a North Carolina Public Television special, the county continued to pay for Highway 288 (even though Fontana Lake flooded it), from the 1920s until 1975, 30 years after submersion. (And keep in mind that this is a county which can only tax 14 percent of its land — 86 percent is publicly owned.) Further, even though the North Shore Road issue has been brought before Congress numerous times, no real settlement has ever been reached. In 2000, Sen. Helms and Rep. Taylor did secure 16 million dollars for completing construction of the North Shore Road, but even though the county commissioners voted in favor of completion, much of the county remains divided as to what should be done with the money, which at this point is still in the federal transportation budget.

From the initial agreement in 1943, to the serious stirrings of the Wilderness Movement in 1966, to the completion of six miles of the road (halted because of the toxicity of Anakeesta rock formations), to the meetings held between Swain County officials, wilderness advocates, and the National Park Service in 1975, to those held with Secretary of the Interior Stephen Andrus (under Jimmy Carter), to the final appropriation of yet-to-be used funding in 2000, the North Shore Agreement has proven itself a real misnomer — the North Shore Disagreement is far more apt.

The road that runs past the high school from Bryson City to the park entrance, sometimes called “New Fontana Road,” as well as the “Road to Nowhere,” is a constant reminder of this disagreement and how it has haunted the people and land of Swain County. Last fall, when I looked out the windows of my classroom, there was nothing but haze and smoke to be seen. Lands Creek was burning. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was burning. Again. One of my students said, “Shorty musta’ set fire to the Park again.” “Who in the world is Shorty?” I asked. Several students laughed, and one responded, ”Ah, he lives under the bridge in town.” To this day, I still don’t know if my students were pulling my leg, or if they actually know a man named Shorty who sets fires, as a matter of course, in a national park that is supposed to belong to all the people of America. But the setting of fires in the Smokies, whether accidental or deliberate, has been a near constant occurrence since the park’s inception. The resentment of many long-time Swain County residents towards the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and TVA is passed down from generation to generation — and not without reason. And even though I understand the necessity of dams to provide hydroelectric power, and even though I am glad that the park exists, and even though I know that if it didn’t, the land there would probably be developed and uglified with Exxon stations and Burger Kings and developments with names like “Creekside Manor,” I still understand the resentment of a people who were made to leave, much as I understand the lingering anger many Cherokees feel toward the whites who moved in and took the best land, contributing to the too-little talked about American Holocaust.

The patronization, to put it kindly, toward the people of Swain County is made clear by Margaret Brown. She points out TVA documents which label Swain and Graham county residents as “submarginal” and living in “southern rural slums.” This certainly was not the case for many of the farms, now underwater, that once prospered in Judson and Almond. Photographs of those places reveal a landscape that resembles Cataloochee and Cades Cove as they are today. Ironically, while there are some residents of Swain County who still literally fan the flames of anger toward the institutions which own most of the land and helped make the county as poor as it is, many people who have remained in the county, and a very large portion of those who come to the county, do so because of their love for that land.

Among the students I teach, my friends who are native or have moved here, and my colleagues at the high school, I find a great deal of hope for the future of land use in Swain County. Many of my students are still connected to the land in more than a superficial way. Those who hunt and fish seem to recognize the necessity of restrictions on hunting and fishing that allow the gamelands they love to continue to exist. Those who have come here for the paddling, hiking, and bicycling opportunities have a similar tie. And those who are here for the astonishing beauty that remains in spite of thoughtless development have perhaps the deepest tie of all, because it is one that is entirely spiritual.

A few years ago, my husband, daughter, and I canoed across Fontana Lake to Hazel Creek, where we met and camped with my sister and her small family for a weekend. By hiking far enough up the trail, we managed to escape the motor noise on the lake and enjoy what we all love about the outdoors — the feeling that we were an extension of something greater than ourselves, and the freeing effects of wild nature on ourselves and our children. Because my daughter’s and nephew’s 4-year-old legs couldn’t do the hike, we didn’t make it as far as Bone Valley, though both my sister and I were intrigued by the name and its history. I don’t know what my sister remembers about the cemetery decorations at Euchella, but since she has always been kinder than I have, she probably enjoyed the relatives’ visits and their lingering in the past.

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey recounts the story of an old man who has died in the desert, and he finishes the story by saying, “his departure makes room for the living ... the plow of mortality drives through the stubble ... a ruthless, brutal process — but clean and beautiful.” Like Abbey and another writer, Annie Dillard, I relish the fact that “the continents plow us under.” It is part of the process of living, and I somehow find it to be nourishing. Many of us love the land in Swain County because we are nourished by its mystery (to badly quote a line from a Mary Oliver poem). And many of us love the land in Swain County because of family ties. And although I have never fully understood the family ties that kept people coming back to the Euchella Cemetery, I do love the mountains where my people are buried. These mountains will be here thousands of years after my gravestone is obliterated. I don’t want to wait for death to believe in paradise. What matters is what we do here and what we leave behind us — whether it’s a road that cuts through an international biosphere, or a legacy that allows that biosphere to continue its recovery back to a wild state. Paradise begins, for people like me, where the road to nowhere ends.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young lives in Cullowhee and teaches in Swain County. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com.)