Sand Gap, the town at the upper end of the valley, is the straggling remains of an old mining camp. Gapites, as the people of Sand Gap call themselves, take note of us as we pass through. We've met up now with Jim Hays, the Nature Conservancy employee who oversees this holding and develops prospects for purchasing other land to improve the integrity of the preserve. I phoned him in advance and he has been kind enough, on a rainy morning, to show us the way into the preserve. Camille and I jostle in the cab of his pickup like pickled eggs in a jar as we take in the territory, bouncing around blind curves and potholes big enough to swallow at least a good laying hen. We pass a grocery store with a front porch, and the Pony Lot Holiness Church. JESUS LOVES YOU, BOND WELCOMES YOU, declares a sign in another small settlement.
Jim grew up here, and speaks with the same hill cadences and turns of phrase that shaped my own speech in childhood. Holding tight to the wheel, he declares, "This is the hatefulest road in about three states. Everybody that lives on it wrecks." By way of evidence we pass a rusted car, well off the road and headed down-hollow; its crumpled nose still rests against the tree that ended its life, though it's hard to picture how it got there exactly. Between patches of woods there are pastures, tobacco fields, and houses with mowed yards and flower gardens and folkloric lawn art. Many a home has a "pouting house" out back, a tarpaper shack where a person can occasionally seek refuge from the rest of the family.
Turner's General Merchandise is the local landmark, meeting place, and commercial hub. It's an honest-to-goodness general store, with a plank floor and a pot-bellied stove, where you can browse the offerings of canned goods, brooms, onion sets, and more specialized items like overalls and cemetery wreaths. A pair of hunters come in to register and tag the wild turkey they've killed--the fourth one brought in today. It's opening day of turkey season, which will last two and a half weeks or until the allotted number of carcasses trail in, whichever comes first. If the season was not strictly controlled, the local turkey population would likely be extinct before first snowfall.
Nobody, and everybody, around here would say that Horse Lick Creek is special. It's a great place to go shoot, drive off-road vehicles, and camp out. In addition to the wild turkeys, the valley holds less conspicuous riches: limestone cliffs and caves that shelter insectivorous bats, including the endangered Indiana bat; shoals in the clear, fast water where many species of rare mussels hold on for their lives. All of this habitat is threatened by abandoned strip mines, herbicide and pesticide use, and literally anything that muddies the water. So earthy and simple a thing as mud might not seem hazardous, but in fact it is; fine silt clogs the gills of filter-feeding mussels, asphyxiates them, and this in turn starves out the organisms that depend on the filter feeders. Habitat destruction can be more subtle than a clear-cut or a forest fire; sometimes it's nearly invisible. Nor is it necessarily ugly. Many would argue that the monoculture of an Iowa cornfield is more beautiful than the long-grass prairie that made way for it. But when human encroachment alters the quality of a place that has supported life in its particular way for millions of years, the result is death, sure and multifarious. The mussels of Horse Lick evolved in clear streams, not muddy ones, and so some of the worst offenders here are not giant mining conglomerates but cattle or local travelers who stir up daily mudstorms in hundreds of spots where the road crosses the creek. Saving this little slice of life on earth--like most--will take not just legislation, but change at the level of the pickup truck.
Poverty rarely brings out the most generous human impulses, especially when it comes to environmental matters. Ask a hungry West African about the evils of deforestation, or an unemployed Oregon logger about the endangered spotted owl, and you'll get just about the same answer: I can't afford to think about that right now. Environmentalists must make a case, again and again, for the possibility that we can't afford not to think about it. We point to our wildest lands--the Amazon rain forests, the Arctic tundra--to inspire humans with the mighty grace of what we haven't yet wrecked. Those places have a power that speaks for itself, that seems to throw its own grandeur as a curse on the defiler. Fell the giant trees, flood the majestic canyons, and you will have hell and posterity to pay.
But Jackson County, Kentucky, is nobody's idea of wilderness. I wonder, as we bounce along: Who will complain, besides the mute mussels and secretive bats, if we muddy Horse Lick Creek?
Polly and Tom Milt Lakes settled here a hundred years ago, in a deep hollow above the creek. Polly was the county's schoolteacher. Tom Milt liked her looks, so he saved up to buy a geography book, then went to school and asked her to marry him. Both were in their late teens. They raised nine children on the banks of Horse Lick. We pass by their homestead, where feral jonquils mark the ghost-boundaries of a front porch long gone.
Their main visible legacy is the Lakes family cemetery, hidden in a little glade. Camille and I wander quietly, touching headstones where seventy or more seasons of rain have eroded the intentions of permanent remembrance. A lot of babies lie here: Gladys, Colon, and Ollie May Lakes all died the same day they were born. A pair of twins, Tomie and Tiny, lived one and two days, respectively. Life has changed almost unimaginably since the mothers of these children grieved and labored here.
But the place itself seems relatively unaltered--at least at first glance. It wasn't a true wilderness even then, but a landscape possessed by hunters and farmers. Only the contents of the wildcat dumps have changed: the one I stopped earlier to inventory contained a hot-water heater, the headboard of a wooden bed, an avocado-green toilet, a playpen, and a coffee maker.
We make our way on down the valley. The hillside drops steeply away from the road, so that we're looking up at stately maple trunks on the left, and down into their upper branches on the right. The forest is unearthly: filtered light through maple leaves gives a green glow to the creek below us. Mayapples grow in bright assemblies like crowds of rain-slick umbrellas; red trilliums and wild ginger nod from the moss-carpeted banks. Ginseng grows here too--according to Jim, many a young man makes his truck insurance payments by digging "sang."
Deep in the woods at the bottom of a hollow we find Cool Springs, a spot where the rocky ground yawns open to reveal a rushing underground stream. The freshet merely surfaces and then runs away again, noisily, under a deeply undercut limestone cliff. I walk back into the cave as far as I can, to where the water roars down and away, steep and fast. I can feel the cold slabs of stone through the soles of my shoes. Turning back to the light, I see sunlit spray in a bright, wide arc, and the cave's mouth framed by a fringe of backlit maidenhair ferns.
Farther down the road we find the "swirl hole"--a hidden place in a rhododendron slick where the underground stream bubbles up again from the deep. The water is nearly icy and incredibly blue as it gushes up from the bedrock. We sit and watch, surrounded by dark rhododendrons and hemlocks, mesmerized by the repetitious swirling of the water. Camille tosses in tiny hemlock cones; they follow one another in single file along a spiral path, around and around the swirl hole and finally away, downstream, to where this clear water joins the opaque stream of Horse Lick Creek itself.
The pollution here is noticeable. Upstream we passed wildcat strip mines, bulldozed flats, and many fords where the road passes through the creek. The traffic we've seen on this road is recreational vehicles. At one point we encountered two stranded young men whose Ford pickup was sunk up to its doors in what they called a "soup hole," an enormous pothole full of water that looked like more fun than it turned out to be. We helped pull them out, but their engine only choked and coughed muddy water out the tailpipe--not a good sign. When we left them, they were headed back to town on foot.
When Tom Milt and Polly Lakes farmed and hunted this land, their lives were ruled by an economy that included powerful obligations to the future. If the land eroded badly, or the turkeys were all killed in one season, they and their children would not survive. Rarely does any creature have the luxury of fouling its own nest beyond rede
mption.
But now this territory is nobody's nest, exactly. It's more of a playground. The farmers have mostly gone to the cities for work, and with their hard-earned wages and leisure time they return with off-road vehicles. Careless recreation, and a failure of love for the land, are extracting their pound of flesh from Horse Lick Creek.
A map of this watershed is a jigsaw puzzle of public and private property. The Conservancy's largest holding lies at the lower end of the valley. We pass through Forest Service land to get to it, and park just short of a creek crossing where several tiny tributaries come together. Some of the streams are stained with iron ore, a deep, clear orange. I lean against the truck eating my sandwich while Camille stalks the butterflies that tremble in congregations around the mud puddles--tiger swallowtails. She tries to catch them with her hands, raising a languid cloud of yellow and black. They settle, only mildly perturbed, behind us, as we turn toward the creek.
We make our way across a fallow pasture to the tree-lined bank. The water here is invisibly clear in the shallows, an inviting blue green in the deeper, stiller places. We are half a mile downstream from one of the largest mussel shoals. Camille, a seasoned beachcomber, stalks the shoreline with the delicate thoroughness of a sandpiper, collecting piles of shells. I'm less thrilled than she by her findings, because I know they're the remains of a rare and dying species. The Cumberland Plateau is one of the world's richest sites of mussel evolution, but mussels are the most threatened group in North America. Siltation is killing them here, rendering up a daily body count. Unless the Conservancy acquires some of the key lands where there is heavy creek crossing, these species will soon graduate from "endangered" to "extinct."
Along the creekbanks we spot crayfish holes and hear the deep, throaty clicking of frogs. The high bank across from us is a steep mud cliff carved with round holes and elongated hollows; it looks like a miniature version of the windswept sandstone canyons I've come to know in the West. But everything here is scaled down, small and humane, sized for child adventures like those I pursued with tireless enthusiasm three decades ago. The hay fields beyond these woods, the hawk circling against a mackerel sky, the voices of frogs, the smells of mud and leaf mold, these things place me square in the middle of all my childhood memories.
I recognize, exactly, Camille's wide-eyed thrill when we discover a trail of deer tracks in the soft mud among bird-foot violets. She kneels to examine a cluster of fern fiddleheads the size of her own fist, and is startled by a mourning cloak butterfly (which, until I learned to read field guides, I understood as "morning cloak"). Someone in my childhood gave me the impression that fiddleheads and mourning cloaks were rare and precious. Now I realize they are fairly ordinary members of eastern woodland fauna and flora, but I still feel lucky and even virtuous--a gifted observer--when I see them.
For that matter, they probably are rare, in the scope of human experience. A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never gasping. My parents taught me this--to gasp, and feel lucky. They gave me the gift of making mountains out of nature's exquisite molehills. The day I captured and brought home a giant, luminescent green luna moth, they carried on as if it were the Hope diamond I'd discovered hanging on a shred of hickory bark. I owned the moth as my captive for a night, and set it free the next, after receiving an amazing present: strands of tiny green pearls--luna moth eggs--laid in fastidious rows on a hickory leaf. In the heat of my bedroom they hatched almost immediately, and I proudly took my legion of tiny caterpillars to school. I was disappointed when my schoolmates didn't jump for joy.
I suppose no one ever taught them how to strike it rich in the forest. But I know. My heart stops for a second, even now, here, on Horse Lick Creek, as Camille and I wait for the butterfly to light and fold its purple, gold-bordered wings. "That's a morning cloak," I tell her. "It's very rare."
In her lifetime it may well be true; she won't see a lot of these butterflies, or fern fiddleheads, or banks of trillium. She's growing up in another place, the upper Sonoran desert. It has its own treasures, and I inflate their importance as my parents once did for me. She signals to me at the breakfast table and we both hold perfectly still, watching the roadrunner outside our window as he raises his cockade of feathers in concentration while stalking a lizard. We gasp over the young, golden coyotes who come down to our pond for a drink. The fragile desert becomes more precious to me as it becomes a family treasure, the place she will always like to think about, after she's grown into adult worries and the need for imaginary refuge.
A new question in the environmentalist's canon, it seems to me, is this one: who will love the imperfect lands, the fragments of backyard desert paradise, the creek that runs between farms? In our passion to protect the last remnants of virgin wilderness, shall we surrender everything else in exchange? One might argue that it's a waste of finite resources to preserve and try to repair a place as tame as Horse Lick Creek. I wouldn't. I would say that our love for our natural home has to go beyond finite, into the boundless--like the love of a mother for her children, whose devotion extends to both the gifted and the scarred among her brood.
Domesticated though they are, I want the desert boundary lands of southern Arizona to remain intact. I believe in their remnant wildness. I am holding constant vigil over my daughter's memory place, the land of impossible childhood discovery, in hopes that it may remain a place of real refuge. I hope in thirty years she may come back from wherever she has gone to find the roadrunner thickets living on quietly, exactly as she remembered them. And someone, I hope, will be keeping downy woods and crawdad creeks safe for me.
THE VIBRATIONS OF DJOOGBE
From Benin, West Africa, eight degrees north of the Equator, you can see both the North Star and the Southern Cross. They crouch above their opposing horizons, ready to guide you north into the Sahara, or south, down a flank of white beach into the sea. You can look for them even from Cotonou, Benin's largest city, where the night sky blazes, untouched as yet by serious competition from electric lights.
My first night in Benin, my eyes returned again and again to the sky, searching for my bearings. The night held the tricky, sensual promise of a dream. A wide-bodied jet had touched down briefly to leave me there, and once it was gone that whole event of armored comfort seemed as fantastic as extraterrestrial contact. Now I was left to walk through Cotonou's hot, rich-smelling darkness on streets lined with women selling ordinary and inconceivable things: grilled bananas, shoes, gasoline sold in liter wine bottles. Each vendor's face was lit by the flame of a small oil-burning lamp; the crowds of tiny lights looked like banks of votive candles in a cathedral, accompanied by a choir of street-smart livestock. Pigeon-sized fruit bats flapped out darkly over the city, beginning their nightly forage.
I walked across a bridge and found the concrete shell of a building that turned out to be a hotel. It looked as if it had been bombed, but that was only a trick of tired eyesight; the building just never got finished. The solemn night clerk showed me to a room with a cot and a sink. He considerately pointed out to me that the door had no lock, and no knob.
At first light, the commerce outside my window rose to fever pitch. The first travelers of the morning were half a dozen small girls driving a herd of pigs; the second, two young men zooming across the bridge on a motorcycle, carrying upright between them a five-foot-square pane of naked glass.
Women crossed the bridge at a more stately pace and moved toward the market balancing gigantic burdens on their heads: bolts of cloth; a mountain of bread; a basket of live chickens with their wings draped over the side, casual as an elbow over the back of a chair. Nearly everyone in Benin dresses in magnificently printed wax cloth, West Africa's trademark garb. Women wrap great rectangles of it around their bodies and heads; men wear it tailored into pajamalike suits or embroidered caftans. The central market is a roar of color, scent, and sound. Next to a pile of dried fish, a tailor works at his open-air table. A woman selling t
apioca also does coiffure: a client at her feet can get her hair wrapped with black thread into dozens of pointed, upright sprigs. The market's outskirts grade into industrial zones: cooking fires and small foundries. Beyond this, pigs devoutly work the riverbank garbage dumps.
This is not a country notably equipped for tourism. Every sizable town has at least an inn or two that can provide a bed, a mosquito net, and a decent meal. But mainly Benin is equipped for the business of living as the Beninois do. It's a place to come and witness: to learn, for example, how people use resources when they have no choice but to be resourceful. How armies of little boys at the edge of the market can constitute a city recycling center. You'll have plenty of time to think about everything you've thrown away in your life, as you wind through a labyrinth of palm-frond shelters where hundreds of families are at work, hammering empty oil drums and tomato tins into funnels, buckets, knives, and votive-candle lanterns to light the streets by night.
Not a cubic inch of space in any moving vehicle is wasted. When you flag down a taxi--invariably a subcompact Peugeot--it already has passengers; three in the backseat will make room for a fourth. For thirty cents, you'll get where you need to go.
To travel to a different village you have to take a bush taxi. Go to the particular street corner where trips are organized for your destination. Make an agreement with a driver there, settle on a price. Are you traveling with luggage or animals? These things figure into the cost. Come back in a few hours, the driver will tell you, or tonight--he needs to line up more passengers. You ask, Which? A few hours, or tonight? He says, Both. Maybe you'll make the trip with three other travelers, or five. The driver is in control of this event, and since he is charging by the head, most likely there will be seven. Someone may ride on the roof. Don't worry, it won't be you; you have seniority.