Chapter Thirteen

Falling Rock Area

JEFFERSON COUNTY is shaped somewhat like a keystone standing on its smaller end. The Ohio River separates it from the narrow peninsula of West Virginia and from Pennsylvania. Known to locals as the tri-state area, the region is contained in the Allegheny Mountain foothills drained by the river. Ice sheets of the Wisconsinan glaciation 24,000 to 14,000 years ago that crossed two-thirds of the state did not level Jefferson County’s hills. Yellow signs warning “FALLING ROCK” greet drivers on roads walled in by stone. The culture leans toward the east: educational television comes from Pittsburgh, the best newspaper from Wheeling. During the mid-twentieth century, West Virginians commuted or moved to Ohio for jobs; people in Jefferson County reversed this trend and drove across the bridges to Wheeling or Weirton to work in the mills, which, while dingy and polluting, provided their laborers with a good living.

The most notable poet from the area, James Wright, fashioned his artistic voice from the speech of the people of the Ohio Valley and created a landscape, both industrial and pastoral, portraying the mill jobs as dead ends but presenting the workers sensitively as fugitives in their own land. What Wright captures so eloquently about that region, however, is the contrast between the dingy factories near whorehouses, slag heaps left over from played-out mines, and lonely drunken itinerants with the fields and woodlands around them where “citizens” are farm animals and wildlife. Beyond the ugly industrial hell and the banal suburbs rise the beautiful forested hills—at least those not yet logged or mined. It is an ironic pastoral because it is overlooked, preserved more often by neglect than love.

The first white explorers in Jefferson County disembarked from a canoe as late as 1765, when Europeans had long penetrated regions farther west. The history of early settlement contains stories of eccentric people such as Joseph Ross who refused a congressional order to move until titles could be issued for the land he occupied. He, his wife, and son—the first white child born in Jefferson County, in 1784—lived inside a hollow sycamore. Joseph Ross died in 1806 when a tree limb fell on him. John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) planted orchards near what is now George’s Run. The meeting of European and native was bloody. Logan, a Delaware leader who had been friendly to whites until they began to take over, undertook raids referred to as Logan’s Revenge after his family was murdered, but he was defeated in Dunmore’s War. Cornplanter led his people against General Lewis in 1774. General Saint Clair’s forces were defeated in 1794 and his own daughter kidnapped. When they found her, she had learned the native customs and skills at growing vegetables and making clothes. The mother and father of the Riley family were gathering sugar maple sap when they were attacked and killed by Indians. Their son James escaped by hiding in a horse trough, although two daughters were captured. After peace was declared, the commander at Fort Meigs gave James permission to look for his sisters. One had died; he found the other, who remembered her family but refused to return with her brother.

Another pioneer story of the eighteenth century involved James Maxwell, who headed west from Virginia, fought in Dunmore’s War, and in 1780 brought a young bride to the farm near Rush Run, which he had cleared himself. At first the native people were friendly, but during an uprising they burned the Maxwells’ cabin and kidnapped their baby girl. Maxwell’s wife committed suicide with her husband’s hunting knife, after which the farmer embarked on a terrorist rampage. While employed as a scout by Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, Maxwell learned that his daughter was still alive and living with the Wyandots who called her “White Water Lily”; he secured her release and took her to live with him. She married a trader from Detroit, while Maxwell became a hard drinker in his later years. When his body was found floating in the river downstream from his old farm near Rush Run in the southern part of the county, no one could say whether his death was suicide or accident.

The county seat, Steubenville—named for the Revolutionary War general Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben—enjoys the reputation of being a sort of smaller Youngstown run by organized crime and rife with bars, prostitution, and illegal gambling; as a child, however, I was unaware of organized crime and formed the impression that it was the churches that dominated. The city lies along the Ohio River and climbs the hills that rise from the valley. Until the advent of cheap imported steel, the town was kept alive by mills that sent their smokestacks into the air along the river (earning for the town the distinction of being the dirtiest municipality in the country in the 1960s). It seems dingy and run-down, but I think the Victorian houses and crumbling pavements give it a certain old-world charm, as did the horse trough alongside Market Street that stood until the road was widened into a four-lane highway.

I first learned to love the natural world when my father took my older sister and me for a walk in a cemetery near his boyhood home on Market Street, the main road into Steubenville from the west, and taught us the names of the flowers and plants. An ivy-covered stone cottage, now a historic dwelling, served as the caretaker’s residence. Large trees shaded the entrance and several acres at the front. When the landscapers created the park, they left much of the area as it was, taking advantage of natural formations like stone outcroppings, slopes, and creeks. The cemetery thus looked more like a wild garden, reminding visitors of their cultural myth as well as the origin, sustenance, and conclusion of human lives. Once inside, the visitor was unaware of the busy city. Children rode their bicycles there because it was safer than the streets, and although people sometimes disapproved of those cyclists for laughing and shouting, they added the element of youth to a place preserved for memory and tradition and reminded us that the present and future are made of the past.

Just inside the iron gates, the lawn dipped to a creek along which grew flowering shrubs—rhododendron, forsythia, holly, lilac. Where the canopy was thinner, wild plants thrived—pink lady’s thumb, orange forget-me-not, wild lily of the valley. As we walked farther, my father pointed out the black locust, oak, maple, poplar, tulip tree, sycamore, and willow. I began to see beyond the shady mass to the shape of leaves, texture of bark, variations of color. He reached down and pointed out tiny bluebells nearly out of sight beneath mayapple leaves. In the newer part of the cemetery, the trees were fewer and smaller, the landscaping more recent, and the birdsong less varied. Many indigenous plants survive in our time in part because of old cemeteries where every bit of ground has not been plowed, paved, or mowed. Trees and wildflowers provide evidence of the epochs of the forest; if they are destroyed, history will be destroyed with them.

My father had good reason to know well that cemetery in Steubenville. He had grown up in a large, multigenerational house, the veranda of which looked over the park. They had two outbuildings—a barn, which served by that time as a garage, and a livestock shed, which had been converted into a hatchery—on about half an acre of land. Behind the barn my grandmother grew flowers, kale, pumpkins and other squash, gourds, grapes, elderberries, apples, and cherries. My great-grandmother, grandmother, grandfather, great-aunt, and great-uncle—who had grown up on farms—lived most of their lives there. In later years, all were buried in that cemetery, but not before the city had appropriated houses, lawn, outbuildings, orchard, and garden—as well as a sizeable corner of the cemetery park—to widen the road that passed in front of the house and make a cloverleaf interchange. Their descendants have all left the area.

For forty years my parents lived in a farmhouse among hills to the west; although I lived there only eight years, I still refer to it as “home” because I believe that, for all our wanderings, home is the place that forges our character. The owner had sold the hundred or so acres around the house to a contractor, one of those people now called “developers” who buy up land from retiring farmers and subdivide it. He did not begin to build immediately, however, and during the first few summers we lived there, I rode ponies boarded on his land. I also wandered in his woods, which included a rock ledge we called a “cave” and waterfall. The best season was the autumn when the leaves turned red and gold, and puffballs on fallen tree trunks spouted golden dust when I touched them.

Some years later I returned from school to find a section of the woods ripped up by bulldozers. In a single afternoon about fifteen acres of large trees had been toppled and lay on their sides, enormous roots exposed and still clinging to hideous ripped-up clods of earth. Even the crime of the pioneers’ clearing old-growth forest did not seem as bad as this. They at least worked hard to fell trees by hand. I walked among the trunks like battlefield dead, bitter about the maliciousness of destruction. Still, the land was not immediately developed; the owner, a cattle breeder, fenced it off and reseeded it to increase the grazing land for his Herefords. He even left about twenty of the largest trees standing. It looked bucolic for several decades before he finally sold it off in lots where people built what were then called “monster houses” but which are now common. Suburbanization increased even as the population of the area declined. Despite their apparent affluence, residents used the woods as a dump rather than pay anyone to haul away their trash.

Contractors posed a smaller threat to countryside and forests than strip mining, which desecrated more acreage in Jefferson than in any other county in the state. Anyone growing up in eastern Ohio is familiar with it. Strip-mining “shovels” are machines as big as small houses with “buckets” large enough for people to stand in. They devour whole landscapes in order to lay bare the coal that lies near the surface—and in doing so release toxic runoff. Vegetation grows back, however—first shrubby hawthorn and hardy grasses, then black locust and wild cherry trees. My friends and I liked to ride horses on land that had been strip-mined, referred to as “the strips,” because we never had to be afraid of traffic or of anyone stopping us: no one cared what you did on those despoiled moonscapes. By the 1970s bituminous, or high-sulfur, coal, the type mined almost everywhere in Ohio, was already being vilified as the cause of acid rain that was killing the forests of New England. I assumed that strip mining was on its way out.

I was wrong. Years later as I was driving west on Route 22, I looked up to see a vista I had loved for years, four layers of wooded hills rising blue on paler blue in the distance. In a landscape like that, one could believe in eternity or in a garden that was the source of all life. The view had changed, however. The bucket of a strip-mining shovel was just barely visible beyond the last ridge. The next time I traveled that road, the hills had been stripped of trees and leveled.

According to state laws enacted in 1977, strip-mined land must now be “reclaimed.” The strip pits are bulldozed over and landscaped, and sometimes even sculpted back into hills, although not the jagged steeps they once were. A local can tell always which slopes are natural and which are reclaimed strip land. The reclaimed ones have rounded tops, some of them dotted with sheep or cattle. They are seeded and sometimes planted with trees, and so if left alone they may become forests again.

Since I grew up during the movement to restore strip-mined areas and celebrated the passage of the federal Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (1970 and 1977), I believed people were going to reverse the trend toward exploitation of the earth. In 2012 I learned how wrong I was. Jefferson County sits over the Marcellus Shale, rich in natural gas and oil, and is once again being desecrated, this time by horizontal hydraulic fracturing, a technology in which millions of gallons of water and hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals (including carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and neurotoxins) are pumped at high pressure into drilled wells in order to release gas and oil. About 20 percent of this toxic water flows back to the surface along with mud contaminated with volatile organic compounds and must be stored in tanks or injected into old wells which have been known to leak. High-pressure injection also causes earthquakes. Compressor stations that process the gas continuously emit methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Each frack requires hundreds of trips by heavy trucks, which damage roads and increase noise and pollution. Toxic spills and criminal dumping have been recorded in every state with fracking operations. While energy companies sometimes commit to repairing damaged roads and have been forced to pay the costs of toxic spills, they do not bear the health costs of polluted air, and only after extended lawsuits by landowners whose wells have been contaminated will they pay the costs of polluted water. Once containing the largest amount of strip-mined acreage in the state, Jefferson County now has the third-largest number of horizontal gas wells. Texas-based companies do most of the drilling and reap most of the profits.

Harrison County to the west of Jefferson County has also seen its share of deforestation, strip mining, and horizontal fracturing. In 2016, as part of the National Day of Action on Fracking, I visited Bluebird Farm near Tappan Lake, where a man named Mick Luber bought sixty-five acres in the back-to-the-land days of the 1970s—largely second-growth forest—and began an organic egg and produce operation using hand tools, self-built greenhouses, natural fertilizer, and ecological pest control. Believing (as I had) that the era of exploitation was over, he made a living selling organic produce to specialized markets in Wheeling and Pittsburgh. As always, however, Satan appears in paradise: in 2015 the farm was threatened by the Kinder-Morgan Company’s plan to build a pipeline—ironically named Utopia—through Bluebird Farm, which would have been acquired by eminent domain, even though the company is privately owned. Mick and his neighbors launched a campaign to stop the project, including front-page stories in the Wheeling Intelligencer and Pittsburgh Press and editorials on WWVA and KQED. They won, but only partly. Backing down before negative publicity, Kinder-Morgan agreed to reroute its pipeline, but the new route directly adjoins Bluebird Farm. The walker through deep woods listening to the songs of birds comes suddenly upon an enormous gorge carved through wooded hills to bury a twelve-inch steel pipe intended to transport ethylene and propane 270 miles to plastics manufacturing plants in Canada. Four miles from the farm, a compressor station stands on about ten acres carved from an otherwise bucolic landscape. Infrared photographs reveal what digital cameras cannot: these stations constantly emit large amounts of methane. Rural areas over shale deposits across the country have become “sacrifice zones” (a term used by the National Academy of Sciences and the Department of Interior) in which residents are considered expendable so that others in more populated places may live in the wasteful manner of contemporary America, just as those who lived downwind of atomic testing in the 1950s and 1980s were “expendable” in order that the United States might demonstrate worldwide military supremacy.

The shady dell where I first discovered the delight of the earth has been paved over; the forested hills that rose like an eternal promise are a stripped moonscape; the woods I explored on foot and on horseback are now used as trash dumps by the people who built houses on the fields; reclaimed strip mines are turned into toxic waste pits and pipeline corridors. Yet I remember that the second-growth woods sprang from the cut old-growth; the indigenous grasses that we pull from our gardens remind us that their seeds live on in the soil, however much of it has been transformed. Our bodies and our veins hold the remembrance of what the land was and may be again if we can cease to think of it in purely materialistic terms and accept it as a living thing. The earth has made us what we are, sustains us, and will take us back again when we have seen our share of passing seasons.