Death & Rebirth in the Pigeon River Valley

More on this later.

So today I rode to the most disappointing chili cookoff I have ever attended.

The poster offers false hope.

Every entry was a bland, timid entry suitable perhaps for patients recovering from surgery. Western North Carolina is not country for spicy food; however, they do know barbecue.

Following this, I rode to a very sad town: Canton, North Carolina. The mill in the picture below has closed; the town is, therefore, slowly dying. Main Street still has a few once-nice hotels, an event facility called "the Imperial," and a ballroom. I stopped in to walk the thing before it finishes withering.

"Ninja training," indeed.

"The best therapy is... hitting something hard."

"Papertown" no more.

Though the town is dying, and everyone knows it is dying, the people are not yet desperate. They recently imposed a moratorium on data centers and similar things, though there is simply nothing to replace the dead papermill. It wasn't even their fault; they worked as hard as you can at making paper. The world just doesn't need as much paper: computers and the internet have greatly reduced the amount we produce and consume. Consider our children: my son, now in his mid 20s, has never owned a checkbook. All the bills are electronic; the returns likewise. The nearby town of Sylva also has a papermill, one that is almost entirely devoted to recycling cardboard boxes to make new cardboard boxes. There was just no need for two.

For now Canton is trying tourism, but there's only so much of that to go around even in as beautiful an area as this. Canton is a fifth-tier mountain town physically dominated by a dead industrial mill. People mostly don't go there, feeling I think the sense of bad luck hanging over the place. There's always the concern that sort of thing might rub off if you stay too long. 

Yet just down the road, there's another lesson on display.

Bethel.

⁨That's the Pigeon river valley; the area is called Bethel. I hadn't been through it since just after Hurricane Helene destroyed the region with intense flooding of the aforementioned river. More than thirty people were lost and never found. Homes were physically uprooted and washed away. The destruction was astonishing. 

If you wondered as I did why people would stay there given the terrible flooding that happened after Helene, and just a few years earlier with Florence, and so too just every once in a while, this is why. It’s the greenest grass you ever saw. The tilled earth is dark and rich. Go even a few feet higher and the ground is red with iron. It’s so fertile there: and what happy cattle.⁩

People dare the death because of the rebirth. The good years are very good, and it is the death that brings them about. Nature has that quality: she feasts upon herself.

Industry doesn't. Canton will be a wasteland of increasing poison until her wretched bones finally rust away. For now the mill, which long provided the town with water-treatment services for free since it was treating water anyway, will be partly operated at taxpayer expense -- a further drain on a community that can ill afford one.

Someday, perhaps, nature can return and the floods will again bring both doom and glory. You don't have to travel far to see the wisdom of the earth in the pleasure of the cattle.