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Partial Transcript: Well, my name is Robert Morgan, and I grew up here on the Green River in western North Carolina—right here at this house, as a matter of fact, which my parents built in 1949-1950, '51. The house is made out of river rock. My dad hauled up here in a horse and wagon. Those days, we didn't have a truck. But I, as a young person, fell in love with reading and books and the storytelling, grew up among wonderful storytellers here, and eventually went off to college and got more and more interested in writing. So for the past fifty years, I have been writing poems and stories, and also nonfiction about western North Carolina, the Appalachian Mountains, the Cherokee Indians, the settlers, that sort of thing. So I've always been interested in the geography and the history of this region, but I didn't really become a student of the region until I moved away. Oddly enough, I moved to Cornell University in upstate New York in 1971 ostensibly to teach for one year and then come back to North Carolina. But things went well there—I was made a professor in 1973 and have been teaching there really ever since, though I spend a lot of time back here in the mountains in my house on the Green River.
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Partial Transcript: Certainly, I think when I left this region, I could see it more clearly in a way, and I became interested in finding out why the culture here was the way it was—what were the origins, what was the story of the settlement, what was the story of the Indians, what was in the soil—because I had grown up finding arrowheads in the fields as I worked, and pieces of pottery, and I knew that Green River was a translation of the Indian term for "Green River." Even as a kid, the ground here seemed haunted by the indigenous people, not just the Cherokees, but the people who had come long before them, and the Catawba Indians who had also been here on the eastern slope. But, yes, out of homesickness, nostalgia, I think I became a much more intense student of this region than I would have been had I stayed here probably.
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Partial Transcript: The Cherokee never had permanent villages here. Their villages were over the mountains, west of here, that this was a part of their territory and they patrolled it, they came here to hunt and they had hunting camps here, and the Catawbas can tell you how vigorously they defended this territory against other tribes and people encroached on it. This particular valley was settled east of here where the Green River runs into the Broad River before and during the Revolution. During the Revolution, this was still considered Cherokee territory, and only a few families who had some Tory sympathies moved into this area. Some of the some of the Cherokees sympathized with the British and became friends with some of the first families through that connection. But this area was really settled just after the Revolution. It was divided up in tracts given to veterans of the Revolutionary War Army. Four of my ancestors fought at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781, and they were given tracts of land in this area, so that's how my ancestors came in to this region. They had been in the armies and the militias in the Revolution and were given land in this area. It was really heavily settled by the year 1800, I think. Now, it's very important to think of the Revolutionary history in this region because the English colonists, the English-speaking colonists, had only settled on the eastern side of the Alleghenies before the Revolution. There have been treaties coming out of the French and Indian War in 1763 that required English-speaking settlers to stay on the eastern slope, though people like Daniel Boone were going across the mountains and breaking that law, and some of the leaders in Virginia like Washington were hiring surveyors to survey Kentucky and what became Tennessee for tracts of land. But officially, these settlers were forbidden to settle west of the Alleghenies. And the French Broad just across the mountain here in the Blue Ridge runs into to the western, over the western slope. So it was only after the Revolution that people were crossing the mountains, at least officially, and settling in the French Broad because the Green River runs east through the Atlantic. So we're right, you know, almost at the divide, we're within two miles of the Continental Divide where we sit, and of course, the eastern slope was settled first. But Henderson County which came out of Buncombe County was divided, it was partly on the western slope and partly in the eastern slope, so we're right here at the divide of history and the great migration into the interior of the continent and the settlement of what became Tennessee and Kentucky. And that region was settled by people mostly who had lived here on the eastern slope. So I was aware as a kid of that history that this was a sort of a nexus, the meeting place between the Colonial history and the Revolutionary and then the American, the United States history.
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Partial Transcript: Well, it was very important because the land right along the river whose fertile soil, and the first settlers got that land, I mean, there almost was a class system between the people that owned the bottom land along the river, this rich alluvial soil; and the late comers who had to settle that on the sides of the mountains, and the poorer and so on. The bigger farms were further east of here. We're near the headwaters at the Green River and these were smaller farms, little corn patches along the creeks and with the big plantations and bigger farms, more prosperous farms were east of here and down into the foothills a little bit out of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So, my great-great-grandfather, Daniel Pace, moved up here in 1838, he bought this, actually a square mile of land we're sitting on, and it's been divided through the generations, but it was a very good piece of land because he had a lot of bottom land, very prosperous. And he had a peach orchard up on the mountain in this direction. And why would he put a peach orchard on the top of a mountain? People want to know; wouldn't it be colder up there? The reason was when the frost came, you had a breeze that prevented the frost from sticking on the trees. And also on a cold night, remember that cold air sinks into the valley, so you had a better chance of actually making a peach crop on a mountaintop than in the valley. It's sort of counterintuitive that he had a great peach orchard as well as pears and plums and things like that. It was very prosperous farm. Then his son, Frank Pace, was drafted, or he was a drafted, actually he was afraid of being drafted in the Confederate Army and he joined up because he was promised that if he joined up, he would only have to serve six months, and he expected to be back home by Christmas of 1861, but of course all those leaves were canceled and he had to stay in the duration of the war, and was eventually captured in Petersburg, Virginia and sent to Elmira, New York. The first time I ever heard of upstate New York was about Elmira Prison Camp where he spent the terrible winter of 1864-65, almost died of diphtheria, but came back very weakened from starvation and sickness, sort of rehabilitated himself working on the farm here, got married and built the house that I first lived in down near the river. He built that house in 1868 when he got married, beautiful house, the view of the river for the big log barn. And he also had orchard set out there near the place, and those still were growing. When I was a kid, he'd terraced the hillside and they had this wonderful spring just across the valley over there. But it was too far from the house, so he got a long auger, and he bored holes through logs, and fitted the logs together in a pipeline to pipe water from his spring down to the house. So the women wouldn't have to carry water so far for their washing.
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Partial Transcript: I don't know; they were called "pump logs." He would bore holes in the logs, and then fit them together. He may have gotten the idea from somebody else, I don't know. That's the only one I've ever heard of though. He replaced those logs later with iron pipe after 1879 when the railroad came, so the railroad could bring in the iron pipe. And that's what we got our water from when I was a kid—that iron pipe. It came from the spring on the hillside.
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Partial Transcript: Many things happened in the river, and along the river, that were very important. The baptizing was held in the river every year after the revival meeting, you have the great revival meeting in the summer between the time you set the corn bar, you quit cultivating it in harvest time, and after the revival of the people who had been converted would be baptized in the river. So I have a memory of all these baptizing, beautiful people singing, you know, by the river, and the reflections of the trees in the river and the people lined up usually wearing white. But the river, obviously, was the source of water for the fields. We didn't irrigate. We didn't have equipment for irrigating when I was a little kid. It came in later. People got the motors to pump the water out. They got sand out of the river to make concrete. I remember that was very important, you'd have sand pumps in the river. But early on, just catching fish was important. Fish was a part of the diet. And for people like my dad and for his grandfather, trapping on the river is very important. They caught mink and muskrat and sold them. You could take the hides to the store in Hendersonville or in Greenville and sell them—that was a source of income in the late winter and early spring. The river, at one point, carried typhoid. Back in the 1880s, there was a typhoid epidemic that killed a lot of people in this valley. And they didn't know what caused typhoid but they knew it had something to do with water because it came downstream. If it started upstream, then the people further down would be stricken. So they didn't know exactly what germ caused it, but they knew it had something to do with the river.
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Partial Transcript: Typhoid— yep, the typhoid germs were isolated not here but I think in New York early in the 20th century. And they'd learned much more about treating it. But I had a great-uncle who had been trained as a corpsman in the Army in the Spanish war who made a living as a nurse—he's called a fever nurse. He would go from house to house, charged a dollar a day. His name was Volney Pace, and he was a great storyteller. He had lived in Japan in the army, and the Philippines, he had been to Cuba, and he just had a thousand stories. In fact, I have based some of my stories on stories that uncle Vol told. His grandson, by the way, is one of the local historians—Leon Pace—you probably met him. He's the son of Volney Pace. But that the typhoid came back actually in the 1920s, and one of my uncle's almost died of it. They didn't have antibiotics then that would treat it. Of course, once they got penicillin, then it wasn't such a big thing anymore.
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Partial Transcript: There were canoes, but that was for recreation, we're near the Headwaters here. So there wasn't any boating. Occasionally, people might float logs down the river. Though there's so many rocks on the river up this far, we're about seven or eight miles from the head spring of the river here. So it was never important for navigation this far up. Now, east of Lake Adger, I think, they're probably boating on that, but it was not a part of the transportation. Except some of the creeks were used as rows, not the river itself, but the creeks because there were the open places, so you could take your horse, you know, just up the creek, because the woods were so thick and the thickets were so bad that you would actually follow the creek, but that would not be in the river but in the contributory creeks.
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Partial Transcript: Oh, the river was wonderful for fishing and for swimming and for poking around and catching frogs and salamanders. There was always something interesting going on in the river—mysterious, the deeper pools, you could see fish. I remember seeing muskrats all along the river, and also water snakes, big moccasin snakes that would be lying on a limb over the river, and then they would come corkscrewing off the limb and drop into the river and disappear. If you were waiting in the river, sometimes, you would feel one of those snakes rub against your leg as it was hurrying to get under the bank or something. Luckily, we were never bitten by them. There were a few cottonmouths, but mostly these were non-poisonous moccasin snakes—big, long snakes. The river was always a place of fascination. The water's moving, it's always, I think, for all people everywhere, water is fascinating. Wilma Dykeman in her fiction and her nonfiction is always talking about the springs and the streams and the way people depend on water even where you built a house on the mountains dependent over the water was. You have a spring; you had to have a source of water. But the river for kids is just a wonderful place to gather on Sunday afternoons, to swim, to mount rocks across—we learn to do that, you fling a flat rock over and it goes bouncing across. There was always something interesting—a hornet nest growing on a birch tree out over the river and you'd throw rocks at that, if it was far enough away. Lots of ducks on the river and, occasionally, bigger birds. You would see, you know, something really big like an osprey, or something, come along. And another interesting fish would be what we called the "hog suckers" which was this long, narrow fish, you couldn't eat them, they were trash fish, but they might get, you know, eighteen inches long, fifteen to eighteen inches long. Most exciting time I've ever had on the river was when I was about twelve and I went down with my fishing pole, I didn't have a rod. And the water was sort of murky, it had been raining, and I wanted to catch a trout at the pool at the end of our field, and I did catch a small trout and baited the hook with a worm and threw it back in. And suddenly, the line jerked tight, and the pole almost jerked out of my hands, and the line started hissing through the water. I've never seen that before and whatever was on was so powerful. It was just slicing through it, and it went down and it went up the river and down the river and up the river, and I started pulling the line in as this fish got tired, it kept running around, and I pull it out, it was a German brown trout about that long. That was really exciting. And I became addicted to fishing after that, and bought myself a fly rod and became a fly fisherman. Most of my fly-fishing was not in the river but in the creeks that run into it because that in the midsummer when it's hot, the trout go up into the colder streams away from the warmer pools, and I had a wonderful time fishing Bobs Creek and Cabin Creek up here. Because up there, you could not only catch rainbows and a brown trout, but the native brook trout also, which a very different, they're a different kind of fish from rainbows. Rainbows actually come from the West, they come from the American West. Obviously, the German browns come from Europe. No, I've had a wonderful time fishing. Part of the fun of fishing is the mystery of it, you don't know what you're going to catch, you don't know what's in the river, exactly where they are, and you're also out in the woods. And, you know, a small stream, the challenge is to be able to throw your fly because there's so many overhanging branches and rocks and things—how do you actually put a fly exactly where you want it to be in a narrow stream, it's easy in a lake or an open place. But I found that exciting, and every place is different. It's like golf, I mean, you know, every hole is different, every challenge is different in every place. I was really addicted to trout fishing, fly-fishing, as a kid. And I think my dad had been when he was young, and I'm sure my grandpa and great-grandpa also. But they were trappers, and I was not, I never really set very many traps to catch fur bearing animals as they had, but they needed it because it was a source of money. There were very few ways you could make money here except take your produce down to Greenville in a wagon once a year, or make moonshine or dig ginseng. And my family did all those things at one time.
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Partial Transcript: Well, you've wanted to preserve the land because you lived on it. My ancestors had to deal with floods and erosion and the wearing out of land. If you grow corn year after year, it will wear out a patch. And too many people in this region would clear up a place on the mountaintop or this side of the mountain, plant corn for a year or two, and it would wash out, and then ground would no longer be fertile, and they would move on and clear up another place. But the Paces, particularly my great-grandpa Frank Pace, he's very careful with his land. He didn't farm the mountainside, he farmed along the river in the level land, and he terraced the hill where he did farm, and that helped a lot. But he also rotated crops. It's very important that you don't grow corn year after year on a piece of land because it will absolutely exhaust it. You leave it fallow for a year or two or three, you grow something else. And I think this land is still in good shape because of that, I mean, it's still quite fertile, and they took care of it. And when I retire, I think I'll come back and do some farming here myself. I can remember all that work; it's hard work, but it's also fun. We never grew much tobacco here, and that was an advantage, tobacco really exhausts soil, also, because it's mono cropping, and continual mono cropping is very hard. The two things we were very lucky not to have here—tobacco growing and coal.
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Partial Transcript: In my lifetime, I have seen this area go from a farm community of small subsistence farms to almost a bedroom community where people work elsewhere— they work in factories in town. And if they farm, it's still a kind of side thing they don't depend on it. But commercial farming changed as they grew more and more crops for the market. About the time I was a teenager, it really become a very different kind of thing, I mean, instead of growing a diversity of things for your own consumption, you would grow only pole beans our only squash or only— And then eventually, these crops were picked by transient workers, usually, from Florida, particularly Hispanic workers, I think, coming from further south. So that culture is very different, I mean, from the family farm—in the world I grew up in, everybody knew each other. In fact, I'm related by blood to most people in this valley, the older families. On the other hand, it's a much more prosperous place, it's a trade-off. You know, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in compensation for everything you gain, you lose; and for everything you lose, you gain something. And this area is so much richer in terms of cultural things, music, symphony orchestras, theater, you know, in Hendersonville, than it was when I was a kid. On the other hand, that community culture is gone to a great extent. People work elsewhere, the young people leave—like myself, I've been off to college and then moved to upstate New York, so. But I think, the land right around here has been preserved fairly well, and the retirees coming in helped that—they buy places and take care of the land. They changed the look of the mountainside; it's about building houses up on the mountainside. So some of the mountainsides, they're not as pretty as they used to be. But they have an interest, the newer people, have an interest in conservation usually.
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Partial Transcript: Over farming certainly contributed to polluting— This river is no longer a trout stream. It's full of silt and sand. It's not pretty the way it used to be. And that's the result of farming and not rotating crops, not having cover crops, and also construction on the mountain sides—that dirt just flows right down into the river. So, Green River is not as beautiful as it used to be. It's just not as attractive and it's not really a trout stream. It used to be rock, some clear water, and it's just simply silted up. It's the cost of progress, yes.
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Partial Transcript: Well, the bigger rivers like the French Broad, I think, have been polluted in the 20th century, first, by logging—I believe— then by clearing so much land, and then by industry. This beautiful river, the French Broad, heading in the mountains, flowing all the way down to the Holston and the Tennessee, was heavily polluted. One of the first person I know of who became concerned about the pollution of the water in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee was Wilma Dykeman, who in the early 1950s began studying and writing about issues of the environment and particularly the water. I believe about 1955, she published her book on the French Broad which is a masterpiece—that's one of the most important books ever written about this region and about one of the American rivers that it was published in series called American Rivers. It's one of the best of that series. It's a very important book to me when I was a young scholar studying the region and the history of the region. But before almost anybody else became concerned about the water and the river, Wilma was studying it, she was going to meetings, she would belong to committees, and she wrote this wonderful book. So, for me, and for a lot of other people, it was just a part of our education. Talking about the timber industry, agriculture— her family and her husband's family were involved in the agriculture in East Tennessee. But she was not only a scholar and somebody interested in the science of conservation; she was just a very brilliant writer and could really dramatize these issues in a way that made them accessible and interesting to a lot of people. The French Broad is probably cleaner now because of her and of other people who became so concerned about it. It's part of the Tennessee Valley and the Tennessee Valley Authority. And the Tennessee Valley story is one of the most complex, one of the most vexed, because in a sense, they have done so much good in building their dams and controlling the flooding in the Tennessee Valley and creating electric power and recreation. On the other hand, they have displaced so many of the people, both the white people, and the indigenous people. It has really been a very complex issue and is not over yet. I mean, it's still something under discussion. Back to Emerson's compensation, every time you gain something, you also lose something. And clearly, the life of the Tennessee Valley has changed and not always for the better because of overpopulation, over industrialization. You try to find that balance. But this has always been an issue in American history going back to people like Daniel Boone who move into an area— they love the wilderness, they go there because they love the Indians, the woods, the mountains, the streams. And then once the settlement starts, it begins to blight that to really change it. So they kill what they love or they change what they love. It's an issue of American culture from the very beginning. And it is as important now as it was in the 18th century when Daniel Boone began to realize what he had done and was not happy that he had been an instrument for the destruction of the American wilderness.
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Partial Transcript: I don't know enough about that really to be helpful. I have not studied that. I know a lot of it was very controversial as people did not want to give up their land and did not want their towns inundated. That's been an issue from the very beginning. But that's a part of history I don't know enough about to really be helpful. Going back to Wilma Dykeman, what always fascinated me is people who have strong opinions tend to exercise them in a way that alienates one point of the population in favour of another. And what I was fascinated was, she wasn't pointing finger as necessarily just with the loggers, just Champion Paper, but she was pointing it at all of us, right? I think there's that famous quote in that chapter who killed the French Broad that because the river belongs to no one, it belongs to all of us, so you know, we have the responsibility to protect it.
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Partial Transcript: You know, Wilma Dykeman's point of view is very balanced. She writes about the industry, the logging, the agriculture, but also about the culture of the Appalachian Mountains which resists change often. And people who've lived in these mountains resist outsiders also. So you get into very complex discussions of whether people from the outside have a right to come in and tell you what to do with your land or your river. After all, my great grandpa did it this way. I think one of the really marvelous things about her writing is that she gets that comprehensive view of these issues from several angles that, you know, if some local farmer feels that a college-educated scientist is coming in and telling him what to do with his land and what to do with his crop and with his timber, there can be a lot of pushback and resistance to it. So it becomes an issue of diplomacy and sympathy that is very complex. People who have come into these mountains and tried to help. Even in the settlement schools at the very beginning have often found a lot of resistance because they're outsiders. I believe, some of that goes back to very early days in this region when in North Carolina, there was a sense in the mountains that the people were being controlled by politicians in Raleigh, a long way off, who would tell them what they could do and what they could not. This is a central issue in American culture to this day, people of the west, people of the Rocky Mountains resenting Washington telling them what to do. It became so politicized in the era of the Civil War that a lot of people in these mountains were Republicans because the Democrats controlled Raleigh. And you had a lot of sympathy with the Republicans in this region because of that. But also, in a sense that, you know, educated people, articulate people from the north or outside come in and tell them what should be done about the environment. I think, there has always been some resistance that—not universal by any means. So you have here on Green River, you have had a number of controversies about the conservation and some really hot debates between local people and administrators coming from Hendersonville or from Raleigh, people of the state government. Luckily, I think the conservationists have prevailed for the most part in these recent—since I don't live here most of the time, I'm not aware of all the political controversies, but I know there have been several—about preserving the wildness of Green River, not building any more dams on it west of Lake Summit. And I know the discussions of building a dam right here, I mean, and flooding this valley—and that was opposed by the local people. Part of the poetry of the region has been the stories about the farms and the towns that have been buried under the lakes and, you know, the ghost stories—people in fishing boats looking down and seeing churches under them, and seeing ghosts under them, that kind of thing. Yeah, they still tell the story of a church bell ringing.
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Partial Transcript: I think we writers in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee have an advantage and that we come from a storytelling culture. I grew up, and certainly, Wilma Dykeman grew up in the world without television, where people sat around the fireplace and sat on the porch telling stories. Stories were passed down through the generations. So she and I discovered we have all this material in the stories we grew up with. We also had the advantage of a model in Thomas Wolfe—a very gifted writer from Western North Carolina who writes more about the town people than the mountain people. But I have no doubt that Wilma Dykeman was deeply influenced in her early writing by Thomas Wolfe, as I was myself. Not just in terms of style, but Thomas Wolfe gave us the confidence that you could write about the region, that it was interesting that people would be interested. And also, just the scenery, the mountains, the rivers are inspiring for poets and writers. But we're also talking about the context of southern writing and, you know, we have the models of people like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty in the storytelling tradition. And the sense of place is very important that, I think, one of Eudora Welty's more famous essay is called the "Sense of Place." But fiction stories have to take place somewhere, and one of the things that makes a story accessible to people in other places is the specificity—it's a kind of contradiction that the more specific you are, the more regional you are, the more accessible it is to people in other places, because you've got the details, you've got the speech that fill it out to make it come alive. It is a contradiction that we'd like to read things that about people who are superficially different from us. It's one of the great uses of fiction is that we can tell stories about people who may be very different from the reader; but if you bring the characters alive, they're exciting. And, I mean, we read because we want to connect with other people. Writing it and reading it gives us a sense of community with other people who may seem very different, but, in fact, we find a common humanity in the writing. And certainly, for me, as a writer, Dykeman's nonfiction first and then her fictions were inspiring. She showed us how to write about women of the mountains—and most of my fiction has been about the women of the mountains.
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Partial Transcript: I think that is one of the best examples of this trade-off between development and affluence and poverty would be Canton and Champion Fibre. They brought jobs, they brought prosperity to that area, they used the timber on the mountains, they did create this terrible smell that floats over the mountain—it's from time to time—but they also polluted them, you know, all these carcinogenic chemicals. So, again, it's like you gain something, then you lose something. The most important thing, I think, in that issue is health because whether you're wealthy or not, the most important thing is your health. And to bring something that causes cancer into a river valley, that's never good—no matter how many jobs you bring, no matter how much money the people have, you can't enjoy it if people are dying of cancer. So I think the health issue is a major one, even beyond economics, that you just can't enjoy life if you're sick, and the people around you are dying of cancer. So I would rate that as one of the most important issues in our discussion of the region—to keep chemicals that make people sick and cause problems for unborn babies and for the people who work in these factories. I would say that's problem number one, that's issue number one. That is more important than issues of the beauty of the scenery or, you know, how the river looks or whether people are living in affluence, or hardscrabble farms. You don't have anything if you don't have good water. You can't have civilization without good water. And we, as a nation, and as a region, have not been aware of our air and water enough. Wilma Dykeman is one of the first writers in this region to really call attention to that. You can't enjoy anything if you don't have good water to drink and good air to breathe. I can remember flying into this area from up north and seeing the pollution in the air over Greenville because South Carolina has not had as many laws restricting pollution of the air as North Carolina. And flying in, you're high enough, you can see down south, all that sort of purple-brown fog over the Piedmont there. But I would rate that as really the number one issue—the carcinogenic. We have so much cancer. My family have died of cancer from the spray that was sprayed on the bean fields I grew up. An airplane would come and spray the fields down by the river and I could see it coming in. It was so exciting as a kid, you know, this biplane, it looked like something out of World War I, coming in and circling, and come down this fog of—parathion and malathion pesticide would float over the valley. And you could taste it on your lips, we're talking about a very poisonous stuff. And I have so many relatives who have died of cancer, and I suspect that has something to do with it. So those issues, it's more than an issue of money, it's really health.
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Partial Transcript: Now, Wilma Dykeman was not just a writer, she was an activist, and she took part not only on environmental issues but racial issues, civil rights, she and her husband early on. But, yes, it took forty years, but eventually, she and other people, you know, marshal this issue to the point where it became a matter of the courts. But also, you know, the environmental movement nationwide had developed by then. So she and a lot of other people got this underway way back in the 40s and 50s, and it came to fruition many years later, so that the river is now a lot cleaner than it used to be. You know, we live in a time when there's so many bad things happening that we get very pessimistic, but we have seen a number of examples where rivers can actually be cleaned up—the Thames and Britain or the Hudson River. I mean, Pete Seeger and his group actually got the Hudson River cleaned up. And this has happened to the rivers in this region also. It can be done. And to be an activist, you have to believe that it can be done. You can't really get out and work if you think it's hopeless. I mean, you've got to believe that you can have some effect. It may take a long time; it may take 40 years. But if you educate people, they will come around eventually.
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Partial Transcript: The husbandry of lands has been an art and a science for thousands of years—it's not a recent thing. You go to Europe, you go to Italy, and you see people plowing fields that have been farmed from prehistory. Those people knew how to preserve their land. And people have been growing crops in other parts of the world too on land that has been farmed for five thousand years. So it's been known for a long time how you protect land—you terrace it, you ditch it, you prevent erosion, you rotate your crops, you put manure on it, you let it rest for a while. Germany has land that has been farmed for thousands of years, and it's richer now than it's ever been because they have worked at this kind of thing. But in this region, and this country, people originally moved on, so we become partly from a culture of recent immigrants who would clear up a patch and farm it for about four years, and then move on and clear up another. So there was, in this regional culture, a trend that was against that kind of conservation. But many people even then knew better. I mean, I think my ancestors taking care of this valley knew better. They knew that you manure your field, you let it rest from sometime, you prevent erosion. So it's not complicated in that sense. It's like health—I mean, long before modern medicine—some people knew that you ate your vegetables and fruits, and you didn't eat too much meat, and you didn't gain too much weight, and you drink plenty of water. I'm sure that Julius Caesar do this. And people in ancient times live to be ninety years old, also. This wisdom has been around a long time. What was the importance of kosher food? Well, you had to know where the food came from. This was understood a long time ago by the Jewish people.
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Partial Transcript: Right, the Sabbath and every seventh year, you have a sabbatical, yes. And these are things learned by trial and error, you know, a long time—how you preserve things, how you preserve yourself, how you look after your health. So, in a sense, we need to take what we can get from modern science, but also from the folk wisdom that's been with us a long time. The people a long time ago knew that you had to not wear out your land, that you had to be smart in the way you farmed it. The wisdom of people like Wendell Berry, you know, includes that. I mean, these old folk ways work. Just because they're old doesn't mean they're bad. They kept them because they did work. And this is generally true, I think we've moved so fast and have acquired the idea that old is bad and new is good much too much. This is even true in the arts. I mean, you know, in modernism, Ezra Pound's motto was "Make it new." But you could also say about poetry and writing—make it old—because the old writers knew what they were doing. And one way of making it new is to make it old. To read the book of Proverbs and the book of Ecclesiastes, and you realize just how smart people were three thousand years ago, two thousand five hundred years ago—they really had experience, they knew people, they knew themselves. And agriculture and the environment is very much a part of that. I mean, we can look to the past, as well as to the future, and slow down. We move so fast. And most of the people I know spend more time looking at their electronic devices than at the world around them. And I want to say, you know, just stop and don't look at a screen. I mean, there's the sunlight, there the trees, the river, there's other people. When I teach students, that's the kind of thing I often talk about. They are more visually oriented than anything else, because they spend their time looking at screens, computers, phones, smartphones, film, that kind of thing. But I teach writing and I teach literature, and I say, "No, listen, listen to other people, listen to speech; and write for the ear, not for the eye." Storytelling is for the ear. And our sense of language is a very different if we're listening to it as opposed to seeing it on the page and on a screen—and actually, it's the living voice, the music of the living voice. It affects the brain differently of what you're taking in by hearing.
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Partial Transcript: We lose confidence and a sense of ourselves if we lose that connection to community and place—there's a loneliness, a sense of alienation. And so much in our world makes people even lonelier. They say that people who spend the most time on social media are the loneliest people. They don't have that connection. I mean, we feel so much better if we interact with people, if we feel a part of a community or a group as opposed to being isolated with our devices and our laptop and in our cars. People feel very alienated, they literally are isolated even—you know, you see people walking down the street or across campus, and they're looking at their smartphone, and talking to somebody or interacting with them. And that we're mammals, we're social people, we feel better if we're with people, if we feel that connection with people. And I think people are happier—much happier—and more confident in themselves, and they're vulnerable to clichés and extreme politics and things if they don't have that sense of community. They don't have a sense of balance in dealing with other people. We have reached a time when people are so unused to talking and arguing with the people that they can't discuss important issues without getting angry or blocking out somebody who disagrees instead of, you know, talking it out—they don't want to talk it out, I mean, you just denounce. And usually, you go to some extreme and sort of finding some common ground.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I think one of advantage that Wilma Dykeman had was that she had a double perspective. It's very important to have that. She did grow up here in the mountains. Her mother was a native of the mountains; her father was from New York. That gave her, I think, a more complex. But she also went off to Northwestern to be an actress. And acting is very close to writing. The way actors think and the way the writers think is very similar. And she was educated very sophisticated. She's beautiful; she could have been an actress. But she was able to write about the mountain people with a particular insight and sympathy both because she was one of them but because she was not. I think that dual perspective is important to thinkers and to writers and, certainly, to fiction writers, and poets. That we're not just one thing, we know more, and we think more deeply if we're several things. And she's the perfect example of that.