“And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden.”
-Bob Dylan

January was a cold month in Tuckaseegee, both the weather and the news. Just as I was beginning to feel smug, safe, and secure out here in the Little Canada community, reading about the 4,400-acre housing development being planned for Balsam Mountain on the other side of the county, first word comes of a similar 2,000-plus acre land deal that has taken place over on the Bear Lake Reservoir only a few miles further down N.C. 281 from where I live. “Getting a little too close for comfort,” I think as I hear the news of the Bear Lake development for the first time.

Still, however, our river bottom farming valley in the floodplain where the Tuckaseegee meets the overflow stream from Lake Glenville seems far enough away from Bear Lake and therefore protected from the spectre of subdivisions or any real threat to the tranquil life to which I have become accustomed. With the exception of an occasional gunshot, the occasional powersaw, and the early morning and late afternoon traffic along 281, almost all I hear or see on any given day here in my haven are the sounds and sights of the natural world.

I moved to the Tuckaseegee community because of the ambiance of the rural farming lifestyle and the close access to wilderness  and because it was one of the last sections of Jackson County with affordable housing. Affordable, that is, for someone like myself who lives on what he can scrape together as an artist trying to make ends meet in the midst of American pop culture. The natural world and quiet neighbors feed my solitary needs as a writer, as does my large garden feed my body as well as supplying me with a small income from the supplemental food which I can sell. These things, this place, keep soul and body alive. When I moved here in 1993, I truly felt that this place would sustain me in these kinds of ways for the rest of my life. The urban sprawl moving this way from Sylva, 15 miles away, would never reach the Canada community in my lifetime, I prophesized at the time.

Around the time of the turning of the new year, while up in the study in the attic of this old farmhouse doing some writing, I was distracted by the noise of voices and the sounds of hammers on steel. A quick glance out the window revealed surveyors driving painted metal cornerposts in the ground at the end of my driveway, tying up bright blue and orange plastic ribbon to the trees on the far side of the drainage ditch that defines the western edge of the property. I interrupted my work and went outside to see what the hell was going on. A friendly conversation with the survey foreman told me more than I wanted to know  the 88.3 acres of pasture, woods and mountain next to me had been bought by a land development outfit based in Tarpon Springs, Fla., that was planning on converting the river bottomland and adjoining woods into a housing subdevelopment of 50 lots. In a few minutes time, my happy little life in “Eden” had become more like something from the pages of “Paradise Lost.” So much for “the poet as prophet.”

Instead of the sweet sound of the hundreds of birds that sit in the old ash and pine trees that surround my old farmhouse singing, the yelps of foxes up in the holler, and the rushing sounds of the Tuckaseegee as it flows beside the road that runs in front of the house, I must now accept for the indefinite future, in replacement, the sound of chainsaws, skillsaws and human noise - unnatural and unfriendly sounds that will serve to disturb my solitude as well as my sleep.

The undeniable facts
Since that fateful January day, I’ve spent a lot of time reading the editorial section of this and other newspapers, talking to local activists and advocates of land use planning - trying to get a realistic picture of exactly what has been happening to Jackson County during my long idealistic sleep. What I have uncovered is disturbing. In terms of my philosophy of living out my remaining years here in Tuckaseegee untouched by the outside world, the future looks bleak.

As Scott McLeod has written in one of his recent editorials and as Mark Jamison writes with controlled emotion in a concurrent letter to the editor in the Sylva Herald, Jackson County is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth. In the process, we are losing our culture and our way of life. Small farms and family holdings are disappearing. In their place are appearing housing developments that neither the old people or young families will be able to afford.

My trips to the offices of Mapping, Records and Deeds at the Jackson County Justice Center tell the story of the development boom here in Jackson County. In a printout of aggregate land sales of 40 acres or more within the past year, I have been able to identify no less than a dozen land development companies that have bought land in various parts of Jackson County. None of these companies has bought parcels of land less than 117 acres, with the high end of the list being the projected development areas down the road at Bear Lake (2,400 acres) and the much written about Balsam Mountain Preserve (4,400 acres). Much to my consternation, six of these purchases by land development corporations have taken place here in the Canada community, as well as six more purchases by named individuals for large parcels - all of which may be targeted for new housing developments for all I know.

In the past year alone, there are on record 46 land purchases here in Jackson County of 40 acres or more, with a spread from $2,000 an acre in the remoter sections of the county up to as much as $20,000 or more an acre in the Cashiers community. Pricetags for these developments have gone as high as $9.6 million for the Balsam Mountain Preserve and $9.3 for the Bear Lake development. Staring down the barrel of this multi-barreled gun, what do those of us who live in Jackson County have to look forward to? What kind of picture does this paint?

For those who have been here for generations or have, like myself, moved here because of a slower, simpler lifestyle, we are now facing a perplexing - if not troubling - future. What we have known in terms of heritage, community and the environment may -and most likely will be unless certain preventative actions are taken - be radically changed forever. In these hills, science and psychology have not yet replaced geography. Place names and genealogies that have been a means of orientation and identity for those who have lived in the world of these hills will disappear, will be replaced by something sterile homogenous, foreign, from the outside. These natives, as well as myself and others who have come here in more recent years as “new natives” and have put down roots in order to lift our attention away from the squalor, fear and brutality of the urban life, have only to look forward to waking up one morning in the not-to-distant future to a world of base commerce, overpopulation and a drone-like, money-driven culture that has moved in next door.

What happens when the community that has for generations been Little Canada becomes, suddenly, Little Cashiers? When Gill’s Grill at the intersection of N.C. 107 and N.C. 281 becomes a sushi bar, and Ken’s Shell Station becomes a cappuccino cafe? Before we allow things to progress this far, we must take a deeper look at the overall situation and the options that are available to us.

“At this stage in the population and building boom in Western North Carolina, we need to begin using the ‘Z’ word (zoning) as a consideration and possible alternative to unchecked development,” says Sylva business owner Avram Friedman, who is also the chairman of the Tuckaseegee branch of the WNC Alliance. “Historically, there has been a large populist lobby against zoning in Western North Carolina, and for the most part for good reasons. But things are much different now than they were even 10 years ago, and the threat from outside development interests is much greater and can no longer be ignored. Obscure and romantic bygone notions of individual independence must give way to a larger, enlightened vision of the greater good where land management is concerned. No one of us is more important than the community as a whole, and the whole community of Jackson County is now being threatened from the outside by not only air pollution, but by unchecked land development, as well.”
“We all have a right to live here,” echoes Mark Jamison, newly appointed member of the Jackson County Commissioners Planning Board and a vocal advocate of land management, “no matter what our economic status. With these kinds of developments increasing property values, some say that this ‘rising tide’ lifts all boats. I would counter that this rising tide swamps more boats than it lifts. In making our decisions about managing growth, preserving the environment, or protecting the county, these decisions should be judged against one standard - do they protect people or profit?”

Smart Growth principles
While the problem of stopping, even managing, growth is an ominous one (especially if we consider the escalating world-wide problem of overpopulation), we here in Jackson County may be part of the last line of defense, as it were, in protecting our region from a fate that has befallen the coastal corridors and large interior cities of the rest of the country. To achieve this, political, business and activist groups need to pinpoint environmental quality as a key to the county’s overall quality of life and begin designing strategies linking the conservation of open lands and ecosystems to productive landscapes, agriculture, recreation and tourism. By mixing private and public approaches to conservation and development, Jackson County and WNC as a whole can look beyond legal or regulatory responses to their environmental and social challenges and instead engage an assortment of flexible, responsive techniques  one of the main focuses of this process being maintaining an affordable cost of living for area residents. Here in Jackson County, a first step toward resolution of these problems has been taken with the ongoing “Smart Growth” sessions that have given a public forum to residents of our county regarding the development issue and other concerns regarding community, environment and culture.

In the fifth Smart Growth session held at the Sylva Justice Center, the assembled crowd voted the issues of “preservation of the county’s natural beauty” and “preservation of rural character” as their top priorities and concerns. The second largest number of votes went to the issues of the preservation of the county’s water and air. In terms of strategies cited to deal with these concerns, land-use planning received a high percentage of votes - an indication, at least to this writer, that positive progress is already being made.

While critical issues are beginning to be addressed, the bottom line is legislation. Our representatives need to know where we stand on this issue and need to be held accountable. Western North Carolina will never become a carbon copy of domino development horrors in places like Newark, N.J., its individual horrors could be visited upon us. Before that happens, we need to lend our voices to the outcry against unchecked land development. We need to act.

In his classic book on environmental ethics The Great Work, ecologian Thomas Berry states simply: “We hear a lot of talk these days from political committee members and real estate lobbyists about ‘sustainable development’ as a solution to the growth issue. This is a feel-good spin that attempts to instill in us a false sense of ease concerning some very troubling issues. The term ‘sustainable development’ is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. In our present predicament, any expanded ‘development’ will not be able to be sustained. There are already too many people per square mile on this planet than the planet can carry, can hold. How can we increase development, continue to populate, and be able to sustain ourselves with even the very basics of human necessity?”

Epilogue
Meanwhile, back on N.C. 281 here in Tuckaseegee, during the process of writing this piece, I have seen more surveyors, heavy equipment contractors, builders, and potential buyers scouting the 88.3 acres adjoining the land where I live. It’s only a matter of time before the bulldozers and the powersaws are cranked up, the logging trucks are running continuously up and down the road and the inherent aesthetic communal qualities of this valley are altered irrevocably forever. Like the “twilight of the Gods” in a Wagnerian opera, an era is rapidly coming to an end in the Canada community, as in other areas of Jackson County.

I’m reminded of the words of poets - such as Tennyson (“the days that are no more”) and Sandburg (“our past - like a bucket of ashes”). My worst fear is that I am seeing the last days of any sort of tranquility or rural innocence here in Tuckaseegee, and the mourning period has already begun. Just knowing that I will soon be writing in an unnatural, noise-filled environment has already changed my relationship with this place which has given me, up until now, such a period of joy and reprieve. I will miss this place, even as I remain. Here with my words. Or, in those of the poet Bob Dylan:

“At times I think there are no words,
But these to tell what’s true.
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”

(Thomas Crowe is a writer, poet and editor who lives in the Little Canada community of Jackson County.)

 

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