Little River, and the Logging
today we lost ourselves in a significant walk
in the valley that Little River drains,
though that apt physical description
does nothing to describe the heart-wrenching reality
of a magnificent river so full of itself and so beautiful
that we keep focusing on its grand reality
as we haul our bodies along the trail by it,
the stream is full and often frothing white,
clear enough to exude a green transparency,
the forest all around softly rebuilds back toward old growth,
125 years ago the wealth in wood here
was too much to be resisted,
so the saws came, the magnificent giants roughly reduced to logs,
the land blighted with the desolation of that physical savagery,
the logs then transported and transformed into lumber,
within which the gifts of the great forest
would be reduced to meeting the desires of the people of the time,
to get the logs out of these high valleys,
man and animal did what they could,
a gargantuan physical effort that used gravity, animals,
and daredevil workers to bring trunks from ridge to valley,
often the logs were floated down high water to the mills in the lower country,
the gentle path upon which we walk
was carved out of the valley for the benefit of machine,
railroad lines snaked along the water courses
and allowed the wooden wealth to escape the mountains,
how many walnut rockers and cherry dining room tables
owe their lineage to the forests ravaged up and down this valley,
so calm and idyllic now as the woods recover?
about two billion board feet of lumber were torn from these woods,
I feel the hope for renewal
and also the tragedy of the cutting, and the waste,
the desecration that happened all up and down this great valley,
a few great trees salvaged from the saw
because of the stubborn will of one owner on Cove Mountain,
and then the angry will of the lumber magnate
who refused to buy the wood after his nemesis died.
by Henry H. Walker
August 24, ‘26
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