Linville Falls

I grew up in the Blue Ridge range of the Appalachian Mountains, in the minuscule and unincorporated village of Linville Falls, North Carolina. I grew up restless and bored where I'm from; queerness and intellectualism weren't welcome. I talk incessantly now about how much I love "going home," though because of the unspeakable natural beauty. The Blue Ridge Parkway cuts right through our town. It blocks cable broadband companies from providing my home-not-quite-town with much-needed access to the information economy. The lack of economic development is inversely proportional to the beauty of the land. There are less people than Christmas trees, and vast swaths of the land are untouched and invisible from any road. The forests are lush and the mountains index an unfathomable ancientness. I've traveled a lot since my upbringing and I've never been anywhere so truly sublime in my life.Despite the pastoral grandeur there is still ecological loss, and two stark memories of this loss stand out from 2003. I grew up in the same house that my grandmother did. She taught me it isn't proper to discuss a lady's age, but for decades before she was born and then all through her childhood, the little old cabin got water from a nearby spring. I was in third grade when it dried up. I remember how fascinated I was when three giant trucks parked in our driveway for two weeks, drilling through the land of the century-old spring to re-hydrate our house with a well. Mom had to have our dirt-road driveway paved for the contractors to access our Hobbithole. The wellhead that now provides the house with water stands like a gravemarker to the springwater. Paving paradise indeed...Later that fall our "neighbor," a cousin living on the adjacent five undeveloped acres, timbered his entire property to pay for his wife's chemotherapy as she fought against breast cancer. This move completely changed the way light and sound traveled to my childhood home; without the protection of the trees the sun and the sounds of the highway are completely unbuffered. Growing up these felt like aesthetic complaints, but it's more than that. Our cousin's wife died from her cancer in 2004, but the implications of the timbering still reverberate. Motorists' litter still blows across our neighbors' now-barren plot like cellophane and styrofoam tumbleweeds. The grass of the hillside where Mom's land meets our cousin's is dead. The earth beneath it is eroding.