The Southern Highland Reader

SYLVA–Last year, when automobile gas prices were through the roof, CSX railroad began running obvious ads, making a point the industry could’ve been making all along: it makes more sense to pull a couple of hundred trailers with two or three engines than a couple of hundred trailers with a couple of hundred engines.

Well, no kidding. That’s true no matter how pricey gas becomes.

CSX’s tagline – “our trains can move a ton of freight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel” – has become a fighting slogan for the entire industry lately, as the prevailing economic and environmental winds begin to signal a railroad renaissance.

Financier Warren Buffet’s purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad recently drove the point home. Said Adam Hochberg on National Public Radio: “Buffett’s $44 billion acquisition, via his company Berkshire Hathaway, is one of a number of signs that freight railroads are in resurgence. While they may have been thought of as passé in the 1960s and 1970s, they’re now playing a vital role in the transportation system.”

Lobbyists for the asphalt and trucking companies, who for so long thought railroads were kaput, still make the argument that logistically, trucks work better.

“You can’t back a freight train up to the Harris Teeter,” one industry rep told Business North Carolina not long ago.

But some industry analysts believe that almost any regulations created to fight emissions will favor railroads, and that logistical issues with moving goods on the local level are easily overcome – in fact, are already overcome in some cases by the use of containers that can then be moved to flatbed trucks.

Closer to home, the topic reminds me of a sidewalk conversation I had in Sylva when gas was at it’s peak. “Before long,” my friend told me, “we’ll be able to ride a train to Asheville.”

I’m not sure I’m buying that – the cost of the necessary trestle work between Sylva and Waynesville alone would raise even Buffet’s eyebrows – but it is safe to assume that freight trains (which are allowed to run on ricketier tracks than passenger trains) aren’t going anywhere soon, even from our area.

A representative from Norfolk Southern Railway told me as much not long ago, saying that the line between Asheville and Sylva, which Norfolk Southern owns, is a money maker. The expansion of Jackson Paper Manufacturing in Sylva can only help.

As for true passenger rail, though, most of its advances will be focused on the cities.

Still, mountain residents can catch Amtrak in Toccoa Falls, GA, or Greenville, SC and ride the Southern Crescent southwest toward New Orleans or northeast toward Washington, through the Piedmont and to all points beyond.

Proponents of the long-fought-for return of passenger rail to Asheville are still at it, so that Amtrak spur — which would run up the mountain from the Piedmont — is still a possibility. (The two links in the previous sentence are from the Asheville Citizen-Times, here’s a Twitter report from MountainXpress from a recent Asheville Rail Corridor meeting).

And plans for the long-considered magnetic levitation train between Atlanta and Chattanooga and perhaps on to Nashville just got an infusion of federal cash. Maglev trains, used widely in Japan and Europe, achieve speeds of some 300 mph, mainly by not touching the ground.

If you don’t plan to hop a train anytime soon, but still like to think about them, this post from Ruminations from the Distant Hills and this one from Appalachian History might tickle your fancy. And here’s a history of the WNC Railroad from Tim Osment for WCU’s Digital Heritage.

Here’s a phenomenal flickr set, if you like to look at pictures.

CHARLOTTE-A few years ago, when a consortium announced that it planned to build the U.S. National Whitewater Center near Charlotte, the news came as somewhat of a shock to mountain tourism folks.

“They’re gonna build a fake river?”

The center’s been open a couple of years now, though, and the situation has gotten, if anything, more interesting.

Business North Carolina reported last month that the center, operated by a non-profit, lost $2.1 million last fiscal year, after losing $1.3 million the year before, and hasn’t yet begun paying down its construction loan.

Reported the magazine:

That worries leaders in Mecklenburg County, the city and four local governments in Gaston County. Together, they agreed to cover shortfalls up to $12 million during the center’s first seven years. It increased revenue 17% in its second full year, but expenses grew 23%. Center officials pledged to cut costs, but they didn’t say how.

As for tourism, the Nantahala Outdoor Center’s Charles Conner says there has never been friction between the NOC and the Charlotte facility.

“That facility isn’t really competition for our rafting trips, which are usually part of people’s mountain vacations,” Conner said. “In fact, we helped them set up their rafting operations, and we always hoped Charlotte would act as a feeder to funnel more boaters and rafters up to the mountains. We’re disappointed that it hasn’t been more successful, and we still hope they’ll turn the corner over there.”

” … our sparring partners over the last two years have been the drought and gas prices, not Charlotte,” said Conner.

WILLETS–The Arnold Palmer-designed golf course at Balsam Mountain Preserve, a gated residential community east of Sylva, has been singled out as one of North Carolina’s best by Business North Carolina magazine and an organization called the North Carolina Golf Panel.

In its April issue the magazine recognized the Preserve’s course as the best new course in the state, the eighth best overall in the mountain region and the 24th-best overall in the state. The course is private.

Balsam Mountain Preserve is widely recognized for its relative environmental philosophies. Approximately two-thirds of its 4,400 acres have been placed in permanent conservation easements, never to be developed, and to be overseen by a not-for-profit trust. On the other hand, the Preserve was widely criticized when a retention pond on the golf course collapsed during construction, releasing tons of silt into Scotts Creek and some of its tributaries. The development paid a $150,000 fine to Jackson County.

STATEWIDE-Joseph Mitchell was a Fairmont, NC, boy who went on to be one of the great early staff writers of the New Yorker magazine.

He’s the subject of an interesting piece in the current issue of the Oxford American, in which writer Sam Stephenson visits Fairmont, a small town down east of Raleigh, in search of the ghosts of Mitchell’s past. Mitchell was an obsessive collector of odd little things, which he packaged carefully with typewritten notes to himself. The OA article offers up nice photography of a number of these tokens: ornate knobs, wrought iron hooks, handmade nails and so forth.

Mitchell wrote with similar attention to detail, spending days, weeks and months with the subjects of his profiles until he knew them just so, then capturing their essence in print.

One lengthy stretch of Stephenson’s story delves into Mitchell’s 1956 story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave”, which discusses in some detail the community of Sandy Ground, Staten Island. This community was formed in the mid 1800’s by freed slaves, and the town fathers worked for white oystermen to begin with, before saving the money to buy their own boats.

Some sixty years later, though, the waters of New York Harbor were so polluted that the oyster beds were dying, and finally the New York Department of Public Health traced typhoid to the oysters and condemned the beds altogether. The community faded away.

Hunter, the subject of Mitchell’s story, was one of the final few who could remember the heyday of oystering off Staten Island.

I read the final words of Stephenson’s piece, which cite the inscription on Mitchell’s grave (from Shakespeare): “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sing.”

I then picked up another nearby magazine and it fell open to a short Business North Carolina profile of Martin Posey, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Dr. Posey’s field of study, it so happens, is oysters. He’s working to restore North Carolina’s oyster population, which has dwindled by some 90 to 95% in the past 110 years.

Oysters, the article points out, have a value far beyond culinary. It reads:

… Each mollusk can filter pollutants from up to 50 gallons of water a day, and they grow in formations that provide shelter for young marine life and prevent coastal erosion.

These two quotes are from Posey himself:

“You have the direct fishing industry, but virtually everyone agrees that the economic value is far, far more for habitat and water quality. Oysters increase water clarity, increasing the aesthetic value of the coastal areas. Anyone who knows coastal realty or coastal tourism knows that’s a huge economic benefit that’s hard to categorize.”

“I think we can still bring the native species back. N.C. is still in a position where larvae are present, where we can work with the system. I think it’s just going to take concerted efforts of restoration, putting out shell mounds in the right configurations in the right locations and reducing destruction to the areas where some of those oysters are.”