Karen Cragnolin

Partial Transcript: I’m Karen Cragnolin. I’m retired now, but I was the executive director and founder of River Link some 32 years ago, 1986. I’m originally from Massachusetts. I’ve lived in a variety of countries and came to Asheville in ’86, and I remember someone telling me if I wanted to find the French Broad River I just had to follow Patten Avenue and I got to a bridge and I couldn’t see it. It’s been out of sight and out of mind for a long time.

Partial Transcript: The French Broad really defines the region for western North Carolina. The headwaters are in the national forest. It’s pure, it’s clean, it’s bubbling, you get a little whitewater. It’s filled with life. And then it meanders through Henderson County where there’s a lot of dairy farmers. Those dairy farms are, I would say, quickly disappearing and becoming subdivisions.

Then it comes through Asheville, which was the industrial hub for the whole region. We had cotton mills. We had canneries. We had all kinds of heavy industry. And then it wanders up to Madison County and it becomes whitewater again because the gradient changes so much. And then into Tennessee.

Eventually it goes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, so its got this odd trajectory where it’s flowing north, and then it flows west and then it flows south as part of a larger system. So it’s been a river that, like every river in America, was part of the sewer system for a long time. Rivers were greatly undervalued, not just here – but everywhere.

And slowly but surely people have begun to appreciate the river for its beauty, for its sustainability features, for its recreation value for its aesthetic. And it’s really exciting to see the river start to make that turn.

Partial Transcript: Well we never had any kind of federal legislation impacting air or water until 1972. That wasn’t kinda old, but it wasn’t that long ago. And so we had a lot of things that were legal then that nobody even considered. We’re the country that invented planned obsolescence. We thought that we had infinite resources and that you could degrade things forever and it was okay. I remember when I first started, people used to tell me that ‘the solution to pollution was dilution.’ And they’d say, oh well the river is big enough to handle that.

We’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned a whole lot. That slowly has turned into municipal ordinances and building practices. It’s not where we wanted to be, but it’s better than it was.

Partial Transcript: Well, they used to say you could smell it before you could see it. And what would it look like? It wasn’t uncommon for people to throw their trash into the river, not just on the banks of the river but into the trash into the river. Livestock that died went into the river. It was constantly moving, you never step into the same river twice. So it was here today, but it was somebody else’s problem tomorrow.

That was typical, that was very typical of the way rivers were treated in the United States and probably all over the world.

Partial Transcript: It’s interesting. The Cherokees knew so much. You know they didn’t build on mountain tops and they did their purification rites into the water. They built their sacred places along the water’s edge. Confluence of two rivers is where we started our project actually for River Link. It was sacred space to the Cherokees. They did purification. They did baptisms, they watered their crops, they built their villages. The Cherokee had a great reverence for the river and for the mountain tops.

Partial Transcript: For the early agricultural uses? Well, it wasn’t exactly the Nile where it would flood once a year and the sediment would nourish the soil. There were smaller agricultural operations, even in the urban sections which became the industrial area. Which you could see from old photographs. You know, it kind of depended. A lot of times the farmers, though, were pretty aware of the impacts of what they did. They may not have been scientific about it or been able to name a lot of things. But they knew what they did to the land was going to impact results along the way, the food they grew and stuff.

But I don’t remember that there was a lot of huge agricultural going on. I would say that we’re in the most botanically diverse place in the world right now other than China. The soils are rich and Wilma Dykeman tells us that the Ice Age ended around here and that we re-populated all of the plants going north. And we have just an incredible variety of things here. It’s lush.

The other day, I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway, probably a month ago, and I saw the Monarch butterflies. It’s special here.

Partial Transcript: Wilma claims that her first words were ‘water falling down.’ She was always curious and her parents read to her and fired her imagination. She really did fire the country’s imagination. She wrote The French Broad seven years before Rachel Carson wrote The Silent Spring, which had an enormous impact. She was Tennessee’s state historian. I’m not sure that she was as well-known and as well-loved in her early years in the Asheville/Western North Carolina area as she was in Tennessee.

She had an enormous impact. She was the first person, ever, that I’m aware of, to articulate that you can’t have a good economy unless you have a good environment.
She made a really terrific argument about that in The French Broad that if your economy is healthy that means your environment is healthy.

She talked about if you have a wonderful place to live, and we’re seeing this now, people want to build their businesses there, they want to vacation there, they want to recreate there. We’re kind of seeing that quality of life as being a super factor in so many businesses relocating here.

Partial Transcript: Wilma certainly did have an incredible grasp of the world. And an incredible ability to look forward. When I think about “return the innocent earth” she was writing about the use of pesticides and GMOs way before anybody was talking about it. She was talking about race relations and world population before anyone was talking about it. She was a pretty amazing woman.

She had a marvelous sense of humor and she was great fun to travel with. I was fortunate to travel with her to Washington. We went to the Library of Congress, we went to a number of conferences. We worked together on the American Heritage River Initiative. She was just funny she was just great fun to be with. She just had an amazing sense, and she never met a stranger.
She loved people. And she loved people in all of their foibles. She didn’t have, she wasn’t judgmental. She knew, but she wasn’t polarizing or judgmental, but she’d let you know where she stood. She was no ‘shrinking violet’ either. She was a powerful advocate for the French Broad and the Pigeon River. Of course the Pigeon River flowed right by her house in Newport and the French Broad part of it, Beaver Lake, um creek, Beaver Dam Creek flowed right by her house. She had to step over a little bridge to get to her house.
She grew up around water. She loved her environs. She wrote about it in a way that made us appreciate and love it as well. She was an incredible woman.

Partial Transcript: She was a pioneer. I definitely think she had an impact. That people read her books, they met her. If you ever had the opportunity to hear her speak. I remember her son telling me one time that they asked her to run for the Senate in Tennessee. Somebody said, ‘is she a Democrat or a Republican?’ And they said, ‘we don’t care, we just wanna hear her talk.’

That was it. She was never at a loss for words. And she was kind but she was insightful and she was sharp. She didn’t let too much pass her either. She wasn’t afraid to speak up. But she did it in a very nice way.

Partial Transcript: I kind of had an odd route to it. I had been living in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates and I started the Chamber of Commerce there. It became the regional Chamber of Commerce for the entire Gulf. My husband was transferred to Asheville, to Hendersonville actually, and I went to the Chamber here and I said, “I’m an attorney. But I’m not going to sit for the Bar here. I’m just gonna be here for a few years do you have anything I can do?”

They said, “Gosh, we have this river that we know we could do something with, but really don’t know what we could do with it. You ought to meet Gene Webb.” So I met Gene Webb and there was a small group of people that were interested in the French Broad River. Saw potential, but saw overwhelming obstacles to it. The downtown Asheville area was dead as a doornail at that time. So there were a lot of people saying, ‘leave the river alone because the downtown has got to happen.’
But I was invited by UNCA to speak with Wilma Dykeman. She went first. And I tell you that I was absolutely horrified that I would fall over speaking because she was so eloquent and so knowledgeable. I was talking about listen I think this river could be an asset. I think it’s a long haul from here to there. But I think with some planning and some funds and some consensus that we could move forward. Lots of communities have done that.

Wilma and I just became close friends. We just kind of hit if off. We liked each other. We were born just a day apart, a few years, but one day apart. And that was my introduction to the river and I started getting on the river and walking by the river.

I was kind of stunned by how neglected it was. How much trash there was. How dirty it was. I had grown up in Massachusetts where the worst part of our city was the old downtown river area, which they called Rose’s Wharf. It was a place that as a kid you would have never gone. Your parents would have never gone. You would not have been allowed. It’s about one of the most inviting places in the city now. That whole harbor area. So I had seen it happen.

I had lived in Georgetown when the C&O canal had gone in and I remember there was a lot of opposition to that. And today it’s oh my gosh, everybody talks about I live near the C&O canal, I ran on the C&O canal. So I kind of knew it could transform.
That was kind of my introduction.

We decided we needed to do a plan to introduce the community back to the river. And so we invited the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects to come to Asheville and to work with local architects and landscape architects in the community at large to develop a plan. And it was a pretty exciting time.

We did a lot of public information sessions for about a week. We got the attention of National Geographic, which was kind of scary to get that much attention in the beginning. But we got a consensus plan. That consensus plan put us in a position to get funding for projects. It kind of went from there.

We did some design guidelines with the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA and we started getting land donated and bringing people to the river. That was always the goal. If we could get you there, we knew that you would become an advocate for the river.

We did a lot of events. We did a lot of planning. We built greenways. We built parks to get you to the river. Because if you got there and you had enjoyment and you got to think of it in a different way, that it’s not just a place to bring your trash, that you would start to be a steward. That has really turned out to be true.

Partial Transcript: We worked out of my house for the first four years. One day, Gene Webb said to me, ‘if we’re going to be a real organization, we have to have a place to be.’ I really didn’t want, the downtown folks were really anxious for us to move into a downtown building, and I really thought if we’re going to be talking about the river and talking about buildings on the river and new ordinances that would regulate that we should be there. That we should be part of the scene.
So we bought an old warehouse and turned it into artist studios. Got on the river and became part of what we were going to subject other people to. Thought that was critically important. We became River Link.
The French Broad River foundation which had been formed years in advance of that with Land of Sky regional council, as a result of a black eye that the Tennessee Valley Authority got. They looked at North Carolina and said, ‘oh we’re going to solve your problem and we’re going to stop the flooding. We’re going to dam the river.’ And the people of western North Carolina said, ‘you are not.’
The French Broad River Defense League sprang into action. They were mostly folks that were in Henderson and Transylvania counties, said ‘no you’re not going to dam this river. We want a free flowing river. It might be dirty and it might be not what we want, but we want it to be free flowing. We don’t want it all dammed up like it is in Tennessee.’
So nobody ever said ‘no’ to TVA back in the 70s. You just didn’t. But they did. And so TVA appropriated funds to go through the regional councils of government, the Land of Sky Regional Council that would create some river access parks in each of the counties. They weren’t much. Some railroad ties for stairs. Maybe a trash can. And maybe a parking space. But it was a system. And all of a sudden, people were using the system. They were getting on to fish, boat, to recreate. It was the beginning.

The Land of Sky did not want to see that effort die after the funds ran out. So they created an organization called the French Broad River Foundation. Gene Webb was the chairman of that. They looked at the entire river. They had two missions. One was to make it a drinking water source, to say it’s going to be clean enough to be a drinking water source and two, to promote public access. [phone ring tone]

Partial Transcript: So the goals for the French Broad River Foundation were two. Really two big ones. One to promote more river access. And two to make the river clean enough to be a drinking water source. That was a big, and it’s still a big issue. I think it’s probably the biggest issue in our watershed is, ‘how do we grow?’
There isn’t a lot of consensus on that, for all the planning and all the rest of it. But I think there was a good deal of thought that if we could tap the French Broad as a drinking water source, then we would have enough water to become big. I don’t think the community at large, particularly the environmental community, trusted local government with the concept of being ‘big’ because there weren’t enough stop gaps in place.
We’re still missing some of those today. It’s better than it was. A lot better than it was. After we did the plan, and we created the riverfront plan, and we had National Geographic here, and we were the demonstration project for the watershed, the French Broad River Foundation said, “we’re just going to fold into you and do River Link.” So we needed then to really have an office. We bought a building. We moved out of my house and we started implementing the riverfront plan.
We took over the ?V-Win? information network. We expanded it into Transylvania County. We added sites in Henderson County. I wrote the first grants to get it into Haywood County. And it got very big. It got so big that UNCA said, ‘we’re just going to take this and do it ourselves. We can actually pay someone to do this.’
Chancellor came along and said, ‘what are we doing, doing this?’ and dismantled the program. It got picked up by another non-profit. But that was a wonderful way to get people engaged. That’s how we started working really with some of the other counties, was through that, ECCO for example. We used to get the money from Henderson county commissioners directly to us and then we handed it over to ECCO so that it was given to the county directly. It was a time of change for the whole country, I would say. There was a lot of influx of people into the region who had been in other places and seen other things. I think there was a realization that the economy itself was changing.
The reason that we needed so much water was that we had so many textile companies here, so many food processors, Gerber was here. The whole apple crop in Henderson county, I think, went to Gerber to make baby food. All of a sudden all of those industries ceased to exist.
So we had, I think the economic development piece of this started to shift with the times. They started looking at other ways of attracting businesses and companies here. The river was a natural to do that. We had 50,000 paid trips in 2017 on the French Broad River. You know, if I had told somebody that in 1986 they would have told me I was batty.
There’s all kind of activity on the river. Restaurants springing up now. And now we have to make sure we don’t love it to death. And that we don’t become the flavor of the month. You know with everything there is an up side and a down side.

Partial Transcript: I think some of the successes, we always said we lobbied by doing. When we said we wanted to have green ways up and down the river, we wanted to bring people to the river, a lot of people were saying, ‘what’s a greenway?’ So we built the first greenway in Asheville at French Broad River Park. We got the community involved by selling benches, tables and bowers and people could put their name on them. It was a wonderful opportunity to get on the river and recreate. We were not sure that people would use it because the river had, well first the park was in West Asheville, which was considered ‘worst’ Asheville by a lot of people.
And it was surrounded by public housing. We had a lot of people telling us, “nobody is going to go there.” So we put a dog park there, with the idea that people will walk their dogs whether it’s raining or snowing. So it’s turned out to be an enormous success.
Then we had an opportunity to buy the old Asheville speedway, which was very controversial. But from us, from our point of view, that was open 20 days a year and the rest of the time it was closed. It was 50 acres on the river. And I will tell you now that it is the most used facility in the region. It’s a place that whole families can go and enjoy. It’s called Carrier Park now. We ended up buying a few other buildings, converting those to other uses that were river friendly, creating more greenways, hosting a national greenway conference here. We had about 400 people from the southeast. We started doing stream restorations.
We have rivers here, particularly some of the smaller streams and feeder rivers of the French Broad that were moved. The Swannanoa is a particular one. It had a lake on it that completely silted over, a 67 acre lake, which caused incredible erosion. and stream bank degradation. We started getting funds to do big time stream restoration. I always laugh and say we ended up on the cover of Caterpillar magazine.
It was a big deal for some of those projects. We built outdoor wetland classrooms because a great place for kids to learn biology is to sit on the river and be surrounded by nature. They’re working and they’re still used as classrooms. We tried to put best management practices for storm water controls and other items in very public places like supermarket parking lots, school parking lots, baseball fields, where we would create demonstration projects. Run tours through them, bring elected officials and legislators through. We tried to bring best practices from around the country and create opportunities for them to happen here, in the French Broad River watershed.

Partial Transcript:

Money is always a challenge. I think every non-profit struggles with money. People are happy to pay for a project but they never want to pay for the people who are going to implement the project. These things don’t happen by themselves, you need people. So we always try to stay really lean and mean. We never had a big staff. The most we ever had, I think, was six. That was a challenge.
There was a huge challenge and push back from a lot of the property owners. They were terrified that we were somehow going to get control of their property. That we were going to have eminent domain potential. That was crazy. The governments didn’t do it. We certainly didn’t do it. So those kinds of fears I think were.
I mean there were ads in the paper about what we were doing and ads in the paper. Meetings and protests. We certainly got beat up a lot over the speedway. But change is hard and some change is incremental, incremental and then happens. Like, the speedway was big when it happened but you know that had been building for awhile. Those kind of challenges.
I think the challenges of today are how do we manage this growth? How do we manage the river in a way that we can enjoy it and it can be a source of enjoyment for our whole community? It’s a melting pot, which is really wonderful to see. It’s every size, shape, race and nationality. I love that. But how do we manage it in a way that we don’t kill it? Sometimes, particularly in the urban section of the river, it is so crowded with tubers and stand up water board people that it’s a traffic jam. Spreading out use of the river in a way like that. Making sure people are enjoying it and not abusing it.
If you’re out there and having a beer and throwing your beer can into the water, then I’m not too happy about that. So it’s managing the growth. I think we want people to use it, we want people to love it. But we don’t want you to love it to death.

Partial Transcript: I think it is. One of the things that I worry about loving the river to death is that we’ve had some threats of hurricanes here. And we’ve had some hurricanes here. We need to have really strictly enforced rules about how we build in the flood plain. If we build in the floor plain. Speculative grading around the flood plain. We’re still doing a lot of that. Flood plain management. I think there’s lots of ways to use the flood plain for the benefits of the community – athletic fields seem to work, the greenways, the transportation, it’s usually the flat area in our mountain areas so it’s pretty much accessible to everybody.
But once we get too many impervious surfaces in and around the watershed and don’t take that into consideration when we’re doing our planning for our cities and our communities, it’s a problem. The run off is getting more and more severe. You can get knocked off if you are standing at the end of a hilly area when it starts to rain with the storm water run off that’s coming down from the hills and surrounding areas. So we have to pay attention to that.

Partial Transcript: There’s a wonderful history associated with the river. We have started a program called “Name that Creek.” So we get a neighborhood together with a creek that doesn’t have a name and we let the neighborhood work to investigate the history of the river, of that creek, of that neighborhood and then ask USGS to change the name based on some historical fact. I think the more we know about our rivers, the more education there is, the more personalization there is, the more likely we are to take care of it.
We’re trying very hard to get a section of the urban French Broad River called the Wilma Dykeman riverway. There’s a woman who certainly had tremendous influence and impact on the world. I wouldn’t just say this part of the world. We need not to forget those stories. We need to immortalize those stories and make that part of the curriculum, for schools, for kids.
I think the things that you know about, tend to be the things that you care about. There’s a lot of history here that needs to be told. I love the idea that we teach biology on the banks of the river. You know we have the largest salamander population in the world here. That’s cool. It’s one of the oldest rivers in the world. That’s kind of cool. There’s a lot to celebrate here and I think the more that we can celebrate that as a community and as a neighborhood as a business even, I think that’s gonna help preserve the river.

Partial Transcript: Wilma’s legacy today is important to remember. First of all what they say, ‘those who don’t remember history are condemned to relive it.’ Historically she had a great appreciation and explained that to the public of the river’s historical context, the heroes, the small town little people. She pretty much invented oral history, I think. Those stories make it personal. I think when it becomes personal, it becomes real for most people. I think it is absolutely essential that we not move back. I think in a lot of ways in the last couple of years I feel like we’ve, the trajectory is backwards where we’ve gone politically nationally.
I really hope that we are not going to do that for the French Broad, or for any river.

Partial Transcript: I had a blast. I had such a wonderful time. I learned so much. We had of young kids that were right out of college that came through our doors with the Americorps program and I loved that energy, I loved that enthusiasm. I would like my legacy to be that there are more and more kids that have an opportunity to have a hands-on experience with the French Broad, no matter what they’re going to do. Whether they are going to be a poet, or a writer, or a painter, or a scientist, that connection to the river I think enriches everybody’s life.

Partial Transcript: Again, I think it those stories are what connects us and gives us lessons learned. People went through a lot, good and bad, in the past and we’re gonna face similar challenges. There’s always gonna be that rub that challenge between protecting the river and exploiting the river. Between protecting our resources and exploiting our resources. If we don’t pay attention to the past and learn lessons from how it worked and didn’t work, then we’re likely just to repeat that. We don’t need to.

Partial Transcript: Well they lose. The next generation absolutely has, for their own self-interest needs to protect the air and water. I believe that in the future that’s where the best places on the planet are going to be – where you can drink the water and breathe the air. We’re already seeing this huge influx of people who are leaving other parts of the country because there isn’t any water. We’ve seen several breweries come from the west coast – no water. We’ve seen lots of people move here because of the clean air and put businesses here.
More and more often business is locating where employees want to live. It’s a big paradigm shift. People used to go where the jobs were. Now the jobs come where people are. It’s important for our economic health, for environmental health and for our lifestyles. to make sure And I think, I really do think kids understand that. My grandson, if he sees trash, on the side of the road, he’s horrified. He’s really horrified. Because he grew up with that.
I grew up with the Bottle Bill in Massachusetts. I remember the first time I saw bottles on the side of the road I couldn’t believe it. He has that same sense of, ‘why would somebody do that?’ It’s kind of nice to see that awakening in that generation.