America’s Great Outdoors: What Makes Here a Special Place?

The America’s Great Outdoors initiative aims to develop a new strategy for 21st century conservation and to reconnect Americans to the outdoors. Conservation ideas and personal stories about special outdoor places are being collected from the American public. They will incorporate our ideas and stories into a report outlining a revitalized national conservation plan that benefits all Americans this fall. Here is my story. Submit yours. http://twurl.nl/0fmiwm

A five-acre sliver of floodplain pasture opens a ribbon of sky in steep forest, deep in this remote valley carved over the ages by two jump-across creeks that meet a hundred yards from my desk. I am not a native here in this county or on this piece of land, and this parcel of mountain slopes is not really unique for this part of the Roanoke and New River Valleys in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia. But I have a deep bond with this particular place because it is and because it is not special.

This land—a place my wife and I feel had been waiting for us all our lives to find, finally, at 49—has become special because we know it well: every tree, every moss-covered boulder and bend of the creek through every season. I have made memories cutting firewood here to warm us through hard winters. I have walked on fog-shrouded mornings in that sweet-smelling pasture among the giant hay bales that make our valley a kind of organic Stonehenge for a few days every summer.

I’ve tasted the fruit of it soils and my own garden toil, know by heart the sound of wind in winter whistling through reeds of oaks and tulip poplars on the ridges, and know where to look for the first bloodroot each spring, when to expect the first Louisiana water thrush or scarlet tanager to call each summer. I love this space in particular because work and play, daydreams and tears, great expectations and front porch conversations with family, friends and neighbors have happened here. This, over time, has made space into a place of the heart.

But I love this place, too, in the ways that it is not special. Where our boundary ends, this country goes on, to the next and the next parcel, over more than 300 square miles of the county that are little changed in use or appearance over generations. The forest belongs to family farms, a patchwork of small woodlands, each with a kindred nature to my own small forest, that others know as well as I know my own. Cattle graze peacefully on a thousand terraced slopes and free-flowing streams run swift and clear. Our economy draws heavily from the soil, and from our Appalachian traditional musical roots, and the outstanding arts and crafts studios that visitors come here to experience.

Unlike many rural places, this land has largely held fast to its former character and charm, its agrarian qualities, pace, scale and authentic rural nature. We are pleasantly distant from the noise and hurry of interstates, rail or air traffic. Change has come slowly, and much thought is directed now toward an intentional and durable future that preserves what is precious in our shared home place so that we can continue to live the “progressive life in the slow lane.”

We have pride in all the things we have—and in all the things we don’t have—in this tapestry land-and-peoplescape that make Floyd County uniquely livable. Our homes are widely spread across the rolling, high plateau of the county, whose largest town of less than 500 boasts a single stop light. We love our own places, but we celebrate our shared natural belonging here to the larger landscape of southern mountains. Neighbors we don’t often see in our coming and going are reliably there when we need them.

It is our sense of belonging to and of responsibility for the landscapes of our lives here that make this southern Appalachian region of southwest Virginia a special space of special places. Those of us who live here understand that to carry forward its prosperity and its character will require finding a balance of sustainable economies, right-livelihood for our young people, and preservation of that which should remain unchanged so that this land-relationship will go on unbroken, so that our special spaces will be the legacy of our children’s children—nameless meadows, wetlands, woods and ridges not known to many but cared for and very special for those whose lives are cast, by choice or birth, on this stage.