The Southern Highland Reader

SYLVA–Don’t get me wrong, I like lists, too. In fact, I remember a teenage addiction to that eighties phenomenon called “The Book of Lists“.

But these days, when publications have less and less money but reader’s appetites for content are growing leaps and bounds, the lists come at you from every direction. US News and World Report, for example, which was a weekly news staple when I was a kid, is now a monthly publication that seems sometimes wholly devoted to lists of schools, hospitals and whatnot.

Sylva and Cullowhee made a couple of lists recently. Cullowhee got a controversial edge over Boone and Asheville in North Carolina as a “better sports town” in the Sporting News, and Sylva was named by the Mother Earth News as one of 11 “Great Places You’ve (Maybe) Never Heard Of”.

The Sporting News list ranks 399 “sports cities” in the U.S., using a methodology that is vague at best. That aside, the upshot is a 199th-place finish for good ol’ Cullowhee, 15 spots ahead of Asheville and 26 ahead of Boone. The howls of wonderment from the Asheville Citizen-Times sports desk will likely brings wails of  self-defense from Western, all amounting to a tempest in a teapot.

Update: Citizen-Times sports editor Bob Berghaus back-pedaled like a slow cornerback today, publishing parts of an op-ed from WCU’s Gibbs Knotts and arriving at the conclusion, more or less, that maybe Cullowhee is a great sports burg, who knows?

Sylva, meanwhile, is unaccustomed to the limelight. The Reader’s home base is a busy working town, described, out of context, by Edward Abbey as having “the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat”. You can get just about anything you need on Sylva’s Main Street, from fresh-brewed beer to fresh-roasted coffee to fresh-baked bread to fresh fish. You can still get shoes fixed here, and the downtown dentist’s family has been at the same trade in the same place for well over a century.

But in this pre-packaged age, Sylva doesn’t fit the mold of a “destination” (a surprise to its many visitors), so the tourism folks don’t circulate its name much.

Of course, the Mother Earth News isn’t all that concerned with tourism. Here’s what it said about Sylva, which was one of two southern towns to make its list:

“Sylva embodies a vibrant small town that engages its citizenry in a variety of ways,” said John Rockhold, managing editor for the magazine. “Mother Earth News focuses on cool things you can do to live wisely and create community, and we think our readers will identify with a place like Sylva.”

Read about Sylva in the Mother Earth News here.

SYLVA–So here it is:

We’re imprinted with this image, those of us who have spent much time around here.

This is Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co., as seen from the intersection of NC 107 and Asheville Highway in Sylva. It’s right up there among the area’s top visual landmarks, along with the view of the courthouse from Main Street and any long panorama of the Great Balsams. To people who have spent decades here, it’s almost invisible, like the last few curves before we reach our own homes.

One of my first memories of this view is clear, though I don’t remember the car I was in, sitting at the intersection. It might’ve been in the Corvair, or the Karman-Ghia. It would’ve been 1970 or ‘71. Regardless, Mead Corporation still operated the plant, employing hundreds of locals but working itself into the cross-hairs of the newly-created Environmental Protection Agency.

Last month, Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co., North Carolina’s largest recycling plant, announced an expansion that will add over 60 full-time jobs. The company makes corrugating medium for cardboard — the zig-zag paper that goes between the two outer layers of liner board to give it rigidity — from 100% recycled cardboard. Jackson Paper says it purchases over 100,000 tons of recycled cardboard each year from recycling centers across the region.

It employs 116 full time employees with an annual payroll of about $6 million.

In its first phase of expansion, Jackson Paper will begin making “complete” cardboard by purchasing liner board material and using its own corrugating medium to make the final product. It will move into and equip the empty Chasam plant on Scotts Creek road for this purpose.

In the long term, Jackson Paper plans to build an additional 139,000-square-foot facility to manufacture its own liner board.

The expansion comes after a year-and-a-half of behind-the-scenes finagling with state and local officials. Sylva Mayor Brenda Oliver played a significant role, and the Jackson County Board of Commissioners went on to lend Jackson Paper a half-million dollars.

And all of this came after an initial plan to locate the expansion at an empty Fruit of the Loom plant in Clayton, GA, fell through when another buyer — a speculator — undercut Jackson Paper’s bid in the last half-hour of bidding. That mill remains empty, and has become the center of controversy that has arisen from Rabun Co., GA’s plans to build a wastewater treatment plant on part of the site and discharge treated wastewater into the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River. (More)

Jackson Paper’s expansion hasn’t been without environmental controversy, either.

When Sylva enacted zoning, almost thirty years ago, the maximum industrial structure height was inadvertently set lower than the existing mill’s height. This was discovered during planning for Jackson Paper’s expansion, and the town of Sylva’s board of commissioners subsequently voted to raise the height limit.

Clean air activist Avram Friedman, Executive Director of the Canary Coalition, took exception, arguing that the zoning height difference was the only leverage the town had to ensure that the plant wouldn’t switch from its current wood chip fuel source to coal or rubber pellets — sources that its current air quality permit would allow, and that might seriously impact the town.

Friedman further contended that the town gave improper public notice of its intention to change the zoning regulations, and asked the town board to rescind its decision.

Friedman’s request died for lack of support, but board member Sarah Graham (disclosure: she’s my wife) moved that Jackson Paper be invited to answer community questions in open forum. That motion passed 3-2. Friedman was dismissive of the idea, calling it “meaningless”, but Jackson Paper hasn’t been eager to act on it either, perhaps validating the Canary Coalition’s concern.

The plant, as it now exists, more or less, began when George H. Mead opened Sylva Paperboard Co. in 1928. A tannery had been there since 1901, and the tannery, which used wood chips to fire its boiler, had more wood chips than it could use. Up north, Mead had discovered a way to make cardboard from wood chips, so he was invited to buy into the tannery operation.

The tannery faded away by mid-century, but by then Mead was the county’s largest manufacturer. This was time when many small mountain towns were centered around major manufacturers, and Mead’s impact was huge. It bought over $1 million in local timber a year, employed over 300 workers, and had a payroll of $1.3 million. Mead owned 40,000 acres of timberland.

But there was a downside. Here’s what Dr. John Bell wrote in the “History of Jackson County”:

… Mead experienced financial trouble because of environmental problems. The manufacturing process produced a by-product of “black liquor” that was discharged into Scotts Creek … In 1937 Mead noted the harmful effects of this liquor on water quality and aquatic life and started treating it. Mead also built a pilot plant in 1950 to remove the solid waste from the liquor, but the discharge still had a dark color and bad odor.

In 1957, Swain County, which is downstream, began making noise that Mead needed to clean up its act, and eventually the state told Mead it had until 1962 to do just that.

Mead got deadline extensions and invested over $2.5 million dollars in new discharge technology, but discovered that while that technology cleaned the water significantly, it simultaneously created very bad air pollution.

Environmentalist and iconoclast Edward Abbey wrote this about Sylva in 1969, after a short stint on the faculty at Western Carolina University:

Sylva must have once been a lovely town. Small, with a population of perhaps five thousand, nestled in the green hills below the Great Smokies, full of beautiful old houses, laved as they say by the sparkling waters of the Tuckasegee River (sic), with the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat, Sylva must have been beautiful. Now it is something else, for the streets are grimy and noisy, jammed always with motor traffic, the river is a sewer, and the sky a pall of poisonous filth. The obvious villain in the picture is the local Mead’s Paper Mill, busily pumping its garbage into the air and the into the river, but general traffic and growth must bear the rest of the blame.

The EPA, founded during the Nixon administration, soon told Mead to clean the air. Mead decided to cut its losses, closed the Sylva operation in 1974 and moved to Alabama.

The facility remained idle until 1978, when Dixie Container Company purchased the mill and converted it to the production of 100% recycled medium. The plant has changed hands twice since that time, but remains North Carolina’s largest recycling facility, with a “closed loop” system that releases no water, and woodchip-fired boilers that release very little ash into the air.

DILLSBORO–I find the Dillsboro Dam controversy a little boggling, and I’m not alone.

It isn’t the fundamentals of the argument between Duke Energy and supporters of keeping the dam that are hard to grasp — although Duke’s relicensing agreement is complex — but more particularly how the Dillsboro situation fits in to the much larger picture of “big” hydroelectric power versus “little” hydro, and how the two are influenced by our insatiable hunger for energy.

I admit a general mistrust of Duke. I also admit that from an environmental standpoint, I’ve long fallen into the less-dams-the-better camp, but without doing much homework on the subject. My friends who have done their homework are more-or-less split over the Dillsboro Dam issue. And therein lies the boggle.

Along comes the invaluable Orion Magazine, with an article in its May/June issue that is well-written well-researched and about time — at least for those of us who are trying to figure Dillsboro out.

A few excerpts from Ginger Strand’s piece The Poetry of Power:

Few things are as beautiful as falling water. That beauty has been making power for thousands of years—first mechanically, with waterwheels, and then electrically, with turbines and generators. Generator, from the Latin generare, to produce, is a misleading word. No device can produce energy; it must convert it from something else. The burning of coal converts millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight into heat. A hydroelectric plant converts the kinetic energy of falling water into electricity.

(snip)

There’s just something about a dam. Dave Brower fought to obstruct them. Edward Abbey dreamed of exploding them. Derrick Jensen dreams of exploding them still. John McPhee wrote that for environmentalists, the Devil’s world is ringed with moats of oil and DDT, but its absolute epicenter holds a dam. The treacherous wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings powers his evil orc factory with a dammed river. “Free the river!” cry the Ents: big explosion, triumph of good. Nothing says eco-warrior like killing a dam.

(snip)

John Seebach, director of American Rivers’s Hydropower Reform Initiative:

“The footprint of all these little dams adds up and chokes up a watershed,” he says. “A big plant provides a lot more power.” That extra capacity means big plants are more profitable. And more profit means they can afford to mitigate the harm they do to the river with measures like fish hatcheries and smelt barging.

He concedes that, done right, small hydro plants can preserve riparian habitat and provide for fish passage. But for John, “done right” is the hitch. Doing it right requires money, and John just isn’t sure the economics add up. As projects get smaller, their price per kilowatt-hour ramps up. Private producers and communities may like the idea of small hydro, but as costs increase, John worries they’ll be tempted to relax environmental standards. That temptation might only grow as more and more states institute renewable portfolio standards—minimum percentages of power that utilities must generate with renewables.

Cost is a highly rational way to make decisions. Big dams may not be ideal, but they’re efficient. Small dams do less harm, but their economic benefits may not outweigh the harm they do. One thing this assumes, of course, is that there’s no relationship between our centralized power grid and our profligate use of power. But it isn’t easy to connect the action of running your microwave to the burning of a hunk of coal two counties away.

(snip)

Lori Barg, principal of Community Hydro, a small hydro consulting firm:

Lori talks a lot about “distributed power”: generating power at thousands of small sites, in a variety of renewable ways, rather than at huge centralized plants. Such a system would not only favor low-impact, greener power, but it would be less “brittle,” meaning less subject to cascading failures when one big plant goes down. It would reduce transmission losses, too, because the shorter the distance power has to travel, the less is lost in the process.

“We’re losing one or two times as much power as we’re using in the end,” Lori says. “If you want to start looking at the economics, is a kilowatt-hour generated in Boston the same as a kilowatt-hour generated in Peterborough, when you have so many losses along the way? It’s like having a leaky bucket.”

Read the whole piece here.

CULLOWHEE–Most mountain towns don’t see a lot of people come and go.

By definition, though, a university town is different; it’s waters are roiled all the time, and the folks who bounce through are worthy of a fat book full of tales.

Cullowhee has seen its share, and three of them came to mind recently, each one as different from the others as he could be.

Abbey

Controversial and celebrated environmental activist Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire — and whom Larry McMurtry referred to as “the Thoreau of the American West” — taught at Western in the late sixties. He didn’t put down roots–mainly because he hated every minute of it– and moved on to write Desert Solitaire in Utah in 1968.

He came back through for a visit in 1969, though, and some of his thoughts were recorded in his memoirs. Blogger Gulahiyi posted at length on Abbey’s stay in Cullowhee recently, and you can read that post here.

Here’s what Abbey thought of Sylva:

Sylva must have once been a lovely town. Small, with a population of perhaps five thousand, nestled in the green hills below the Great Smokies, full of beautiful old houses, laved as they say by the sparkling waters of the Tuckasegee River, with the life of a market center and the dignity of a county seat, Sylva must have been beautiful. Now it is something else, for the streets are grimy and noisy, jammed always with motor traffic, the river is a sewer, and the sky a pall of poisonous filth. The obvious villain in the picture is the local Mead’s Paper Mill, busily pumping its garbage into the air and the into the river, but general traffic and growth must bear the rest of the blame.

Sedaris

Author and National Public Radio favorite David Sedaris attended Western in the seventies, the first in a string of a few schools he went to before winding up at and graduating from The Art Institute of Chicago.

Cullowhee, of course, was a much different place then than it is now, and it’s hard to picture Sedaris hanging out in Cullowhee now.  Since some of his most hilarious work — The Santaland Diaries and Six to Eight Black Men have to do with Christmas, he often comes to mind this time of year.

The other day, a news report of the commencement address he gave at SUNY-Binghamton, in which he touched on his early intention — pursued at Western — to study art. He did the world a great favor by abandoning that aspiration, he pointed out.

“I went to school for art, but actually have no aptitude for it,” Sedaris told more than 400 Binghamton University graduates and their families. “By not painting, I have made the world a better place.”

Johnson

Paul Johnson, an Avery County, NC, native, graduated from WCU in 1979, and is the likely the only one of these three that’ll ever show up in the school’s marketing materials.

Johnson didn’t play football at Western, but he was sports-minded, and he hoped eventually to coach the Avery High Viking football team — his high school alma mater. Instead, Johnson has gone on to become a rising star on the national coaching scene. He did assistant coaching stints at Lees-McRae, Georgia Southern, Navy and Hawaii before becoming head coach at Georgia Southern, where he put together a gaudy 65-10 record.

He went on to re-float a foundering Navy program, and last year took the head coaching job at Georgia Tech, where he aspires to a national championship.

Read a feature about Johnson at the ACC Sports Journal.