Nature writing is something I have loved since I was young. Throughout elementary school, I went on many nature and poetry walks, where I loved being outside and reflecting on what I experienced through writing. Since elementary school, nature writing has been something I have only pursued outside of classroom settings; I was very excited to participate in this course so I would once again be able to work on nature writing in class. I was also excited to participate in the fieldwork and research components of the class, and to do so with my dear friend as my project partner.

Reilly and I began our project with the proposal to research Craggy Gardens, a location in the Blue Ridge Mountains that is famous for its annual floral blooms. The mission for our project, which involved identifying and tracing human and ecological narratives within the Craggy Gardens “storied landscape”, is something that I am incredibly interested in. I was also interested in exploring the different metaphors we used in our project proposal. The primary metaphor we developed in our proposal was based on William Least Heat-Moon’s “deep map” as a method of exploring place. In our proposal, we also touched on the idea of human and ecological narratives as having been woven together into a single story, which uses fabric as another metaphor for a storied landscape.

I was very excited to begin researching Craggy Gardens and to explore these different ways of understanding place, but was also a little nervous about how our project would unfold. I was concerned that we might have undertaken a project that would be broad and difficult to develop, and was unsure of whether we would be able to find our own voices while writing about a location that had already been well documented. Snow and wintry weather also kept me from visiting Craggy Gardens for the first few weeks after we had decided on our project site.

In the meantime, I took several trips to UNCA’s archives and another trip to the archives of Asheville’s public library. Researching Craggy Gardens through archival sources was a wonderful way of exploring the landscape that helped me understand not only how the landscape had changed overtime, but also how it had meant many things to different people and shaped many people’s lives. I had not travelled to Craggy Gardens before beginning this project so, when the snow cleared and Reilly and I were able to travel to Craggy Gardens, I had a deeper appreciation for the history of the landscape than I would have had before

Our first visit to Craggy Gardens inspired us to reshape of our website. The hemlock and wildflower layers of the deep map of Craggy Gardens combined into a “vegetation” page. A “landscape” page, which we had considered including in our initial project contract but had not added up until that point, became the fifth layer of the deep map of Craggy Gardens. With the vegetation and landscape layers, we were still able to explore two ecological narratives of Craggy Gardens, but were able to do so more broadly. These pages also worked well as physical layers — sky layered over vegetation layered over landscape. We planned to combine these layers with human narratives, which we explored through archival research in the Blue Ridge Parkway and historical activism pages.

After we finalized the layers of the deep map of Craggy Gardens, we began to fill them in with a combination of information from archival sources, information about ecology and personal writing. I hope to be a biologist in the future, and felt that this quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer really encapsulated how I feel about the connection between science and the natural world:

“We measure, record and analyze in ways that might seem lifeless but to us are the conduits to understanding the inscrutable lives of species not our own. Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world. Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species. It can be a path to kinship.” (Braiding Sweetgrass)

Science, as a discipline, also has its limitations, as it relies on hard facts and testable data as its primary source of information about the world. While scientific disciplines give us a very thorough ways of studying and learning, they lack many other equally important sources of information, such as traditional knowledge as well as one’s personal, intuitive experiences of the world. I was grateful to be a part of this class because it allowed me to explore other ways of knowing a place, which include history, stories, intuition and personal reflection. Robin Wall Kimmerer has more thoughts on the intersection of science with other disciplines, which she writes about in Gathering Moss:

“In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. The scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind. In order to tell the mosses’ story I need both approaches, objective and subjective. These essays intentionally give voice to both ways of knowing, letting matter and spirit walk companionably side by side. And sometimes even dance.” (Gathering Moss)

Throughout this project, I felt that the intersection of these disciplines — science, archival research and nature writing — complemented each other so beautiful as methods for exploring place. I loved this class because it gave me the opportunity to travel and write in the mountains with my dear friend. I learned a great deal about using digital tools and integrating those tools with nature writing, and about conducting archival research. I am so grateful to Ken, Joe and Leah for making it possible and for all of their help throughout this project!

I tried to travel to Craggy Gardens to take pictures and videos for this post, but once again found the Blue Ridge Parkway closed due to weather. I drove south instead, away from Craggy Gardens where the Parkway was still open. I brought my camera and GoPro to take pictures and a time lapse video along the Parkway, which are included in the ArcGIS Story Maps Cascade below.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was covered in mist at higher elevations, which I tried to capture through pictures. I really enjoyed using Story Map Cascade because it seamlessly integrates media (pictures in this case) with text. As we continue to develop our project website, it seems that Story Map Cascade will be a wonderful tool to integrate digital tools with creative writing.

My GoPro has a built in time lapse function that is very easy to use – I can alter how quickly the pictures are taken, which will be useful for capturing longer time lapse videos such as blooming flowers. I have to experiment more with the GoPro to see if it can capture close up images because it seems better equipped to capture images from far away. UNCA’s library has tripods that can be borrowed by students, so I need to investigate whether those will work with my GoPro. I took a few time lapse videos, but the one included in the Story Map Cascade was a little wonky because the camera fell throughout the time lapse – that would have been fixed with a tripod! Most of these images were taken with the GoPro, but a few were taken with my camera and the picture of the closed road was taken with my iPhone.

http://bit.ly/2HckIXD

Reilly and I are finally going to Craggy Gardens today! Working together on the project proposal yesterday was incredibly exciting in light of our trip. It has felt like spring for the past few days and I am so looking forward to visiting Craggy to explore and enjoy the sunshine.

In creating our project site, we hope to focus most of our work into sharing a narrative of Craggy Garden that weaves human stories about Craggy into the story of Craggy’s landscape. By sharing this narrative of Craggy Gardens, I hope that we will explore much of what we have discussed in class about re-envisioning the stories we tell about landscapes and people’s sense of place within those stories. I am looking forward to approaching this through the perspective of change, both from urban areas to Craggy Gardens (via the Parkway) and in time through seasonal change and from the 20th to the 21st century.

Reilly and I plan to share most of the responsibility of the project, including collecting archival documents, building our website and using digital tools. We both hope to research the ecosystem around Craggy together, with Reilly researching hemlock tree restoration while I focus on American chestnuts. We have already found information about hemlock trees in the UNCA archives, but will do more digging to see if there is archival information about chestnuts. Additionally, Reilly will focus on documenting the transition from Asheville to Craggy while I document the transition from winter to spring through wildflower blooms. I am so excited that will we be traveling to Craggy Gardens with enough regularity that we will be able to document that change.

Here is the timeline of our project:

March 1 － Contracts due

March 2 － Collect archival documents, meet with the Jackie Holt, Pack Memorial Library, BRP Forest Service, UNCA archives and UNCA Media Design Lab

March 8 － Assignment 5 (integrate writing with a digital tool to convey an aspect of Craggy Gardens)

March 9 － Digital tools (build on Assignment 5 by using other digital tools to begin to build the project website)

March 18 － Visiting Craggy Gardens (have visited Craggy Gardens during the day and night to complete nature writing)

March 27 － Rough draft (complete rough draft of project website)

March 28 – April 16 － Visit Craggy Gardens (visit Craggy Gardens to continue to document the site through writing and multimedia tools)

April 17 － Final version (complete final version of project website)

The mountains here are ancient. Once, millions of years ago, they stretched snow capped peaks as high as the Rockies. Time, and the water and wind that it carried, has dulled their sharp peaks into gentle, rolling earth. Now, well-worn and wrinkled, they descend back into the folds of the earth.

These mountains are the deepest blue, a color of shadows, and bear the name of their color. As they undulate towards the horizon, their deep blue fades so the furthest mountains are almost the same shade as the overcast sky. Like an unmade bed, their wrinkles and folds are soft, cradling one of the most biodiverse regions in the temperate world. When glaciers retreated at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, they left the vestiges of a much colder climate in the spruce-fir forests that now blanket only the mountaintops. The widely variable elevation of these mountains supports the growth of forests that are usually restricted to northern climates as well as one of the richest concentrations of salamander biodiversity on Earth.

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, I feel the magnitude of the mountains as the road traces their contours. I am on a large scale now, observing passing mountains and counting time by the wooden signs that mark each passing mile. Ahead, the road is blocked because of snow and I continue on foot.  

There is the chatter of a stream alongside the road, swollen from winter melt. If you were to sit along its banks, you would be hidden from the road, sheltered within the arms of drooping rhododendron and the trunks of young trees. I descend towards it and sit in a hollow within the roots of an oak, the pull of the water an inch from my feet.

From a car traversing the Parkway, you see only bare trees and thin, spreading grass that clings tightly to the earth, ducked beneath oncoming wind. But there is so much more to see. It is winter, and most living things have retreated from the cold; it is still apart from the water, the rush of life slowed, its colors muted. There is a skeleton of Queen Anne’s Lace here, a cluster of stonecrop cascading towards the stream bank, sumac holding only a bundle of drupes and, beneath it all, a blanket of last fall’s leaves. Most of the green is from ferns that line the water and rhododendrons crowded above them.

But the plants whisper of spring. I can smell their murmurs as the soil thaws, a yawn of life stretching from slumber. Just beneath the leaves is the growth of new ferns. They are curled into themselves, yearning and impatient as if within a moment, their coils could spring open to unravel skyward. But for now, they wait until spring brings warmer days.

Back along the road, there is more water, locked into crystalline ice as it cascaded down a rock face. Even this ice speaks of spring; as I walk closer I can hear the rapid drip of water released from its tips. Beneath the ice, melting water mimics the flow tadpoles, rushing across the rocks and into the soil below. Clouds are gathering overhead and across the mountains; they will release more water tomorrow. I feel the mountains opening in anticipation of rain, readying themselves for water that will flow through their veins to feed the growth of spring.

The Blue Ridge Parkway grew from the need to employ workers during the Depression mixed with rising rates of automobile ownership among American families. Stories like Kerouac’s On the Road and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance speak to the way that road travel is embedded in the American imagination; in a road trip, the road is as much a destination as the journey itself.

The roadway of the Blue Ridge Parkway, situated within a narrow corridor of National Park land, offers travelers a scripted view of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains within a frame of a car window. There is inherent duality in that interaction, where the “nature” exists on the other side of the glass. To leave your car is to become part of the narrative of a changing landscape where time is measured by seasons, the thawing of ice, the ebb and flow of mountains.

Researching Bent Creek Experimental Forest from the perspective of archival documents help me develop a sense of history for area where the Experimental Forest is located. The oral histories included in this timeline describe the work of two young men who were employed in the Experimental Forest within ten years of one another, before and during the Great Depression. Both touch upon the actual labor involved in their job positions and, in addition, describe the culture of “mountain people”. Reading these perspectives from workers at Bent Creek changed my perspective of the location by describing how the Experimental Forest exists in relation to the communities that surrounded it. Since the Experimental Forest is a research station, I expected it to be more isolated from the people who live near it.

I also found that looking through pictures of the Experimental Forest helped to me to construct a mental landscape of the area where research was being conducted. Several pictures within the archives illustrate ways in which the landscape was disturbed by human activity, which began to build more layers into a “deep map” of the Experimental Forest that depicted the landscape as well as changes to it. I also enjoyed looking through pictures that depicted smaller pieces of the Experimental Forest, such as the picture of the trunk of a sycamore tree.

If Reilly and I choose to continue to research Bent Creek Experimental Forest, I could foresee us exploring the StoryMap platform to assemble archival documents about Bent Creek. I attempted to create a presentation with StoryMap for these documents, but had difficulty doing so. If we created a StoryMap, we could visually explore some of the environmental changes that have been and are currently being researched at Bent Creek Experimental Forest and place these changes within a larger map that illustrates Bent Creek’s landscape. Within this map, we could layer in the voices from the interviews along with pictures of how the forest would have looked during the time when William Nothstein and Hugh Creasman were working there.

Reilly and I met with Gene Hyde and Colin Reeve, the Head of Special Collections and University Archivist and the Special Collections and Archives Specialist, respectively. In our meeting, we discussed several potential sites in the Asheville areas to focus our archival research on.

We began by discussing the French Broad River, which begins in the southwestern corner of North Carolina and flows northeast from there through Asheville and into Tennessee. Not only is there a plethora of archival documents available related to the French Broad River that we would have access to, but the French Broad River has been intimately connected with the development of Asheville and the changing landscape of the city over the course of the past several hundred years.

In addition to the French Broad River, we also considered the Blue Ridge Parkway as a potential location for our project. Like the French Broad River, the Blue Ridge Parkway charts a course through North Carolina, passing just within reach of Asheville before stretching northward into Virginia. The Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters, which are located in Asheville, house the largest collection of archives on the Parkway, so we would have access to an assortment of documents to help with our research.

During our discussion with Gene and Colin, we touched on some of the challenges of conducting archival research on large sites like the French Broad River and the Blue Ridge Parkway, which both have a variety of archival sources to dig through. If we chose to base our project on one of these sites, we would eventually pick a smaller site within each of these two areas to direct our research.

Two of the other sites we discussed were the Bent Creek Experimental Forest and Sandy Mush, both of which are near Asheville. Bent Creek Experimental Forest is the largest experimental forest on the eastern coast of the United States 1. Sandy Mush was a tobacco farm before it was protected by the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservatory. The UNCA archives has sources about both of these locations.

Over the next few weeks, we will explore Bent Creek Experimental Forest and the Blue Ridge Parkway and eventually choose one of these locations as the basis for our project. Since the headquarters of the Blue Ridge Parkway are located in Asheville, we will have access to a great deal of archival records about the Parkway. In the Experimental Forest, we can examine the impact of industrial logging and efforts undertaken to rehabilitate the forest.  

Bibliography

1. “USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station.” Bent Creek Experimental Forest, USDA, www.srs.fs.usda.gov/bentcreek/.

I grew up in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest under the languid drip of raindrops on oak leaves, cascading from perpetually overcast skies. Beneath the canopy of Oregon’s old growth forests lay a different world, the floors of which were almost untouched by the sun, blanketed in a carpet of fallen needles that sunk beneath footsteps, the air quiet and saturated with the smell of rain and moss and fir. In these forests, time seemed to pass on slow feet as if the creatures there knew a different pace of time, measured by the lives of trees that grew for hundreds of years.

These rain-soaked forests sheltered the tiny town where I grew up. My family lived in a home dwarfed by the land upon which it sat, which held a grove of young spruce trees, oaks, maples, a redwood and space for my mother’s gardens. That piece of earth held my brother and me for most of our childhood, which we spent running barefoot after garter snakes and skinning our knees on the oak trees we tried to climb. School was half an hour away, the trip there a study of the trails of raindrops that ran across our car’s windows. Another hour past school and we could reach the Pacific coast, where it was too cold to swim but not too cold to camp; at night, the distant drum of the ocean might find its way between the zippers and the mesh windows of our tent, filling our dreams with the mysterious power of the sea. Oregon is a diverse landscape ranging from deserts to forest to mountains to coast and I lived near its west coast, in a region of rain, and the tall trees it nourished.

As a child living and growing in the landscape of western Oregon, I felt deep resonance with the places there where I laid my roots. Home to me are days filled with incessant rain drumming tirelessly on the roof, a ceaseless, cleansing rain that makes me feel as if I could stretch my leaves skyward to bask in the light of shy sunbeams. Home is the earthly smell of this rain and the deep green, eerily beautiful glow of a moss covered forest where I would stand with the trees, hushed beneath falling drops. Home is the deep sense of belonging, the intimate connection I feel knowing myself to be a part of that landscape, not a passerby, but a piece of the green-blue mosaic of western Oregon.

Although I felt a deep sense of place and connection to the landscape of western Oregon, and to the mountains of western North Carolina that I later moved to, I also felt a sense of sostalgia, a term described by Glenn Albrecht and quoted by Robert Macfarlane in Generation Anthropocene. I feel sostalgic when walking through old growth forests; in experiencing how forests would have been several hundred years ago, it is heartbreaking to confront loss the of ancient trees and the ecosystems they cradled. I experience the pain of this loss most acutely in the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina where, a hundred years ago, the forests were dominated by American chestnuts. The pain of this change stems not only from the death of most of these trees, but also because, as Macfarlane describes, “a familiar place” has been “rendered unrecognizable”. There are few people alive today who remember the American chestnut forests of eastern North America; that landscape is no longer familiar and has been lost, to some extent, from the American imagination.

In a rapidly changing world, there are echos of how the landscape used to look, in observing the growth patterns of oaks that have spread across the Appalachians and in, as Richardson writes, “the ghosts of flora and fauna” that are found in the western Lake District of England (Richardson, as quoted by Macfarlane). In this understanding, the earth holds very real memories of what has lived upon it and is shaped by the imprints of past life. In defining the epoch of the Anthropocene, we acknowledge the imprints that human activity will leave on the earth or, maybe more accurately, the scars we carve in the Earth’s skin as we “bor[e]” for oil and “remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain” (Macfarlane). As Macfarlane explains, our footprints will leave a deep imprint on Earth for thousands of years.