Prologue
Gary Breedlove and Friends band playing and singing:
Your structure is finished, the damage is done,
I watch the the trees fall and the animals run.
The tiny snail darter once stood in your way,
So you up and moved 'em and dug 'em astray.
Farewell, little river
Farewell, to the land
Farewell, little river
I’m sorry they did not understand…
(song fades out, sound of rain fades in)
Lumi Lavery: What do I have to say?
Ariel Lavery: Whatever you want!
Lumi Lavery: The rain is raining!
Ariel Lavery: The rain is raining. There’s so much rain today!
Austin Carter: This is our three-year-old host?
Ariel Lavery: (laughs) Yeah, you got it. That’s my daughter Lumi. As you know, Austin, my whole family came along on this reporting trip out to Tellico Reservoir in East Tennessee. It was a big ask for my husband when I said, I’m getting really sucked into this story behind the Tellico Dam Project and I think we all need to go out there so I can talk to everyone and see this lake. And it was a bit of a harrowing journey for us because everyone got super sick, especially my husband! So I had the girls with me for a couple interviews. And by the way, if you, listener, haven’t yet heard parts 1 through 4 of this series, please go back and listen, and this will all make a lot more sense.
Austin Carter: And it sounds like the weather wasn’t great either.
Ariel Lavery: It was pretty rainy the first couple days. Not great for your general lakeside getaway. Oh, and there were those thousands of swarming mosquitoes that got Gene Branson and me!
Ariel Lavery (at the lake): I don't think I've ever had so many mosquitoes.
Gene Branson: …I’ve never had this many at all. No, I haven't.
Ariel Lavery: I kinda still wonder if everything my family went through while we were there was a result of all the bad blood, the sort of strange energy that hangs there around the lake. But, of course, that’s just my own superstitiousness.
(sound of gentle waves on lake fades in)
Austin Carter: Well I’m not going to tell you that it wasn’t. But you did take some amazing pictures out there… kind of ominous and fog hanging over everything.
Ariel Lavery: Yes, of course, the lake is lovely, but I really wanted to experience the river valley that used to be there. It’s been described as one of the most important rivers of our country, due to its 12,000 year history of human habitation and the importance, for British colonizers, of taking control of this river, by force, from the Cherokees. And now, we know that its life also ended amidst broiling controversies that defined what legal protections endangered species have in this country.
(theme music fades in)
Ariel Lavery: This is The Story of Tanasi. The epic battle to save the Little T is over, and the river is gone. Yet, the memories left from this river and their fight are still vivid in the minds of a few. Some of those people remain bitter, but others find themselves better off. In Part 5 of our series: What Remains? A Rock, A Fence, and… a Silver Lining.
Austin Carter: On Middle of Everywhere, sharing big stories from the small places we call home. I’m Austin Carter.
Ariel Lavery: And I’m Ariel Lavery.
(theme music ends)
Scene 1: Words Around the Circle
Zyg Plater: …Record this, because there's a very nice lady who works for National Public Radio out of Kentucky, who wanted to have a sense of the voices around this circle…
Ariel Lavery: A few people who were involved in fighting for the river still gather every few years, even though they’re all spread around the country. They have these potlucks. Actually, one just happened at the end of April.
Zyg Plater amidst a crowd of people: here wetmissed a year. Stick this five years, the center his family let us have the patio again. Because.. Thank you.
Ariel Lavery: And Zyg agreed to help me out by recording everyone’s thoughts as they spoke around a circle at their last gathering.
Zyg Plater: We owe this family so much. (clapping) Look at this place. And there's something else when they were taking a bike ride. Charles and Pamela saw this place and hadn't been intending to buy anything, but they did because they knew we were coming.(laughing)
Ariel Lavery: They’ve been gathering at the home of Charles Swanson and Pamela Reeves. Interestingly, Pamela was an undergraduate and one of Zyg’s students who helped in the Supreme Court case and went on to become a district judge in East Tennessee. And guess who’s bench she took over?
Austin Carter: Oh, I give up.
Ariel Lavery: Judge Taylor, the judge who ruled in TVA’s favor time and time again.
Austin Carter: Well that’s a bit of poetic justice!
Ariel Lavery: Right?! Anyway, Zyg, the tireless fighter, was obviously there, as kind of the organizer. David Etnier, the ichthyologist who discovered the snail darter, was also there.
David Etneir: it's been a very, very handsome animal throughout its entire career…
Ariel Lavery: Despite some rather demoralizing descriptions it’s had to overcome. And Carolyn hasn’t missed a-one of these potlucks.
Carolyn Ritchey: I get rather emotional. When I talk about the river, and our farm, and our community that is now underwater. I am Carolyn Ritchey and my mom and daddy were Jean and Ben Ritchey. And I'm sure TVA has a pile of files, if they've not shredded ‘em, probably knee high or beyond, on mama.
Ariel Lavery: Alfred and Virginia were there as well.
Alfred Davis: My name's Alfred Davis. And the first thing, I want to thank each and every one of y'all for what you've done.
Ariel Lavery: And they all kinda shared their side of the story with everyone and a bit about how they feel today.
Carolyn Ritchey: It was like you sit at the kitchen table when you're little and there's everybody, all of us. Then there's TVA. They had their seat at the table, even though they're no one there. That sound crazy?
Ariel Lavery: I was impressed that they could make light of some of the strange things that happened to them.
Alfred Davis: But it was not unusual to find the fence cut and the cows out, cattle don't use pliers and cut fences. (laughter)
Ariel Lavery: But I also heard something else.
Carolyn Ritchey: So we stayed. We were one of the last three families. Unfortunately, Beryl is gone. Asa and Nelle McCall we became very close with. And she was a little spitfire and they had one daughter, Margaret Ellen, and unfortunately Margaret Ellen is gone and she had no children. So their story has gone. Beryl’s is gone.
Ariel Lavery: I could hear that this story is starting to slip away.
Austin Carter: Yeah. It’s a good thing we have these conversations recorded, and Zyg and Carolyn’s books.
Carolyn Ritchey: Twenty years ago when we met I said I'm writing a book. Well, I am writing a book and I do have the draft.
Ariel Lavery: Indeed. I think this is a story for the ages.
Scene 2: Percina Imostoma Tanasi or The Stupid Little Fish
Robin Criag: I always start with TVA vs Hill because it set the terms.
Ariel Lavery: So we know what happened with the snail darter case as it unfolded, being the first case to represent the Endangered Species Act in the Supreme Court. But what does the case mean for the law and for lawyers today?
Robin Criag: My name is Robin Candice Greg. I'm the Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law in Los Angeles, California. I teach water law. And we have a whole chapter on the Endangered Species Act and how it influences water law, particularly with big river systems where there are multiple endangered species.
Ariel Lavery: Robin said that the snail darter case was an incredibly important one.
Robin Criag: First off, it came very soon after the Endangered Species Act was enacted. And the case really was asking the question of “is there a reasonableness requirement in the Endangered Species Act?”. And so one of the big issues in the case was, could the Endangered Species Act step in at that late stage of the development and basically say, this dam should not be completed? And the Supreme Court said yes.
(ethereal music fades in)
The other thing that was very important about the case was that the Supreme Court said that an injunction is the normal remedy.
Ariel Lavery: This was unique because, in most cases, the normal remedy is for the offending party to pay damages and continue on with whatever they were doing.
Robin Craig: An injunction stops whatever is going on that violates the act.
Ariel Lavery: And that is because…
Robin Craig: These species’ value is incalculable. It is a very powerful law and that’s part of what the Tellico Dam case established.
Austin Carer: But what about the amendment to add the God Committee? Does that somehow dilute the power of the Endangered Species Act?
(ethereal music fades out)
Robin Craig: It gives a safety valve. I think most laws that have very potentially harsh consequences as the Endangered Species Act did after the Supreme Court's decision. It's always helpful to have an escape valve. But I also think it helps with the legitimacy of the act, to say, okay, yeah, if you're really facing an unusual situation, we've got a high-powered body that can hear your case.
Ariel Lavery: Like in the scenario where you might be facing loads of human lives that could be lost if a government project is not undertaken. Which, as we know, was not true of the Tellico Project. But, as we also know, that despite the power behind this law and it’s legitimizing God Committee that did not exempt the dam, the dam still got built.
Robin Craig: So if there’s enough political will to build a stupid project it will get built.
Austin Carter: Wow. She’s quite blunt about that. And when she says political will, it seems like she really means political power.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, I think you’re right. And, funny as it is to hear her call the project stupid, it’s also really sad to think about the implications of what she said.
Austin Carter: How do you mean?
Ariel Lavery: Well, if there’s enough political will, the dying canary in the coal mine, to borrow from Zyg’s metaphor, won’t be enough to get Congress to abort a project that makes no sense. And in this case it wasn’t.
(quiet guitar music fades in)
Zyg Plater: The fish died in the Little Tennessee River.
Austin Carter: So the fish is gone?
Ariel Lavery: Thankfully no. What I didn’t tell you, is that TVA had actually started an operation in ‘75 to keep some of the population alive. They attempted to transplant it to a bunch of Tennessee River tributaries, most of which didn’t work.
Zyg Plater: And so for 40 years, they've been working on a successful transplant operation.
Ariel Lavery: But it is still surviving in three of those tributaries. So, in ‘84 the snail darter was downgraded from endangered to threatened and last year, it was petitioned to be removed from the list, an event that was celebrated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Center for Biological Diversity and, of course, TVA.
Zyg Plater: I have to say that the fish now is surviving. If TVA continues to put oxygen into the river in summer months, and if TVA promises to use the flushing power of the dams so as to have spawning areas available for the fish, then it will survive. But I say to my students, you know, this is not an unmitigated success.
Ariel Lavery: It’s a constant effort to create and recreate the habitat these fish need.
Zyg Plater: Taking endangered species and throwing them somewhere else is not the way to handle preservation of God's creatures.
Ariel Lavery: And this mitigated effort that will continue on indefinitely will come with a monetary cost as well.
Austin Carter: Oh sure, that’s more labor and resources required to create an artificial habitat.
Robin Craig: In a lot of places we’ve gotten to the point where the only reason a species can survive in the wild is because we’re doing extraordinary life support. So, in the river context, it served as kind of a red flag for when, usually dams, but sometimes other projects, have put an entire river at risk, because what happens with rivers is you get one endangered species, then you get two, then you get three. And pretty soon, almost everything that lives in the river is either a candidate for, or on, the endangered species list.
(quiet guitar music fades out)
Ariel Lavery: Kinda speaks to the canary in the coal mine metaphor.
Austin Carter: Yeah.
Ariel Lavery: Zyg submitted a comment, in the form of a five page letter, to the Department of Interior. He outlines all this, but also goes on to make the point that the snail darter will only continue to be protected as long as the TVA is a publicly-funded government agency. There have been a couple of attempts to privatize the agency in the last 40 years, and that would eliminate the TVA’s expensive responsibility toward protecting the fish. A TVA spokesperson told me that they have invested millions in aerating tributary tailwaters on the French Broad, which is now home to the snail darter.
Austin Carter: Wow, and that’s just one river. So why would privatization free TVA from the responsibility to maintain the snail darter?
Ariel Lavery: Well, the snail darter is protected under section 7 of the Endangered Species Act which applies only to federal agencies.
Austin Carter: Ah… and a privatized TVA might not be so interested in carrying on the expensive conservation efforts of the public.
Ariel Lavery: Right. So, to get back to the economic soundness of this dam we’ve talked so much about, here’s yet another example, 50 years later, of why this dam may continue to be an economic burden.
Zyg Plater: It was only four million bucks. Most of the money was spent condemning land and building roads and building bridges.
(mellow, twangy music starts)
Everything that was fine, was good!
Austin Carter: Meaning the other 112 million we heard about was spent to get rid of what was already there?
Ariel Lavery: That’s right. When we come back, we’ll hear from a current TVA spokesperson. And ask them: how does TVA feel about this project now?
(mellow, twangy music fades out)
Scene 3: TVA Answers
Ariel Lavery: Hello! We’re back.
Austin Carter: Back and ready to get more answers. This time from the TVA themselves, right?
Ariel Lavery: Yes. So I spoke with Scott Fiedler who is in media relations at the TVA to understand how TVA frames this project today.
Scott Fiedler: The, the project had its warts. I mean, there's, there's no, no denying that.
Ariel Lavery: What he said is consistent with what they say on their webpage: Telling the Story of Tellico, It’s Complicated.
Austin Carter: Hmph.
Ariel Lavery: This is actually exactly what it says on their websites well. Yet Scott still describes the project on the whole as a success.
Scott Fiedler: Today, the project has been what we would say successful for its, for what it was intended for was recreation on TVA waterways.
Ariel Lavery: And he spoke to the economic prosperity the dam has brought to the region.
Scott Fiedler: You know, looking at the project over time, through the lens of history, it was strife with controversy. But looking at it today, according to a 2017 University of Tennessee study, the Teleco project brings in about $350 million a year in economic development.
Austin Carter: Huh, I wonder how they measure that.
Ariel Lavery: Honestly, I have no idea. But I do know, that that number is not measured against what the river alternative might have brought in. I asked Pat Ezzel, TVA’s corporate historian, if she knew if they had ever run an analysis on the projected economic benefits of the river alternative plan and she wasn’t aware that any analysis on that had ever been done.
Austin Carter: Hmm…
Ariel Lavery: But another thing to think about, outside the purely economic arguments for and against this dam, not to mention the alleged corrupt manner in which it was pushed through, was the way the TVA employees dealt with the landowners. We heard about some pretty terrible stuff that happened to the Ritcheys and the Davis’s.
Austin Carter: Yeah, no kidding.
Scott Fiedler: TVA has learned a lot of lessons from this project, and not only how to deal with the new regulations at the time, but also interacting with the public. TVA is a transparent organization today that engages the public, not only through the NEPA process, which is the National Environmental Policy Act, but also through our website, having public meetings, the board meetings that are public. So there's a lot more transparency within the organization that you would see today than you would have saw decades ago.
Austin Carter: Well that’s a positive I guess.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, hopefully the transparency equates to fair treatment. But, as you know, Austin, maybe one of the biggest questions our whole team has had about this story along the way is, how was the TVA able to create the Tellico Project in the first place? How did they go from this agency that was created in the ‘30s to generate public hydroelectric power to this very controversial new town project that condemned people’s property on the basis of a dam being built, people who really didn’t ever need to move in order for the dam to exist? Some explanation is given in a book TVA and the Tellico Dam. A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America. It was written by historians William Bruce Wheeler and Michael McDonald.
Carolyn Ritchey: And mom and daddy suspicion, everything that they ever suspicioned but they couldn't prove came to be true in that book.
Ariel Lavery: But I really wanted to know, from Scott, how TVA has been able to be so fluid in what kind of projects they undertake. So I asked him if TVAs mission has changed throughout the years.
Scott Fiedler: You know, TVAs mission hasn't changed. It all comes back to that 1933 mission of improving the lives of the people of the Tennessee Valley.
(thoughtful guitar music fades in)
John F. Kennedy said the work of the TVA will never be completed.
Austin Carter: As someone who grew up within the purview of the TVA and knows a lot about the god things they did for our region, but also what the people around Tellico experienced, the mission seems conflicted.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, I don’t think the Tellico project could ever happen today, due to the way the laws that came out during this time are now interpreted. But there are many arguments today, for why TVA is an important agency in maintaining the prosperity of the Tennessee Valley.
Austin Carter: Yeah, absolutely. I mean flood control is one major issue that TVA regulates and saves a lot of property from damage and costs related to that.
Ariel Lavery: The point is, there were so many issues with this project that were sort of partially uncovered nationally, so much that didn’t get looked at, was not fairly assessed when it bubbled to the surface, and now, it seems so obvious that this project never should have happened.
Austin Carter: It kinda begs the question: what is happening today that will seem so obvious in the future! What habitats are we eliminating that we’ll need to recreate for species down the road?
Robin Craig: I personally think it’s a large responsibility that climate change is making much more complicated. Some species need to move. Some species are experiencing temperatures they can’t handle and if we’re going to take on the responsibility not only of quote-unquote normal development patterns before climate change, but now also the responsibility for climate climate change impacts, we really need to get creative.
Ariel Lavery: Let’s not despair too much. Because I’m going to flip this coin over one more time and bring out a silver lining around this history of the Tellico project. And that lining belongs to the Cherokees.
(thoughtful guitar music ends)
Scene 4: The Cherokees
Gene Branson: What we're trying to do and on pathway here, the trail is give people an experience to where they can walk the trail. This was a major artery, this little Tennessee River.
Ariel Lavery: Remember I mentioned at the very beginning of this series that I visited the memorial sites?
Austin Carter: Yeah.
Ariel Lavery: Gene Branson, the chair of the board of the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum was the person who went out there with me, and this is where we were attacked by mosquitos.
Gene Branson: There were towns all up and down through here, some close, some a little farther apart. But Chota was the main capital town and then you had Tanasi downstream. They were out where the water is now. And downstream Tanasi as well. And that's how the state of Tennessee got his name from Tanasi…
Ariel Lavery: Right.
Gene Branson: …like that…
Ariel Lavery:. And Gene lives in the area, so he showed me everything he could about what they were trying to accomplish. Here, he was showing me how they planned to create a hiking trail to connect the two sites that are, right now, only connected by road.
Austin Carer: Ok. So do they own all this land now?
Ariel Lavery: Technically, no. The land these sites and the museum are on are in permanent easement to the Eastern Band. Back at the museum, Gene showed me some maps…
Austin Carter: Ah, more maps!
Ariel Lavery: (laughing) Yeah… of the land easements they currently have.
Gene Branson: The paperwork was signed in the mid ‘80s. Chief Youngdeer to put this acreage into permanent easement so that TVA could close the locks and back up the water. And the paperwork said that it would go into permanent easement, with the understanding that it would go and I believe I'm choosing the right words immediately into land into trust. The land into trust was never accomplished. At the time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs said it would just take too long. Well, that was the mid ‘80s. And it was originally all Cherokee land anyway. It’s kinda funny that we have to go through procedures now and buy back land that was taken from us to begin with.
Ariel Lavery: Gene and the tribe are doing all they can to get those land parcels into trust. I talked with the Principle Chief, Richard Sneed, about this issue as well.
Chief Richard Sneed: We have some issues, political issues, obviously with trying to get the land in trust.
Ariel Lavery: So there’s a good and a bad. But another good is that the TVA also gave the Eastern Band the option of a 100-year lease on some of their property on the lake. This gives the Eastern Band the option of making money from commercial development. And last year, they announced they would begin building a campground that showcases the Eastern Band. So they can start bringing in revenue once that’s up and running.
Austin Carter: Well that’s great.
Ariel Lavery: It is! But, on the other side of the coin again, Carolyn pointed out to me that this kind of commercial development and building up of historical sites was all part of the river alternative plan they had submitted to Congress and to the God Committee. And maybe, had the river alternative happened, the Eastern Band wouldn’t have had to wait 50 years for this kind of development to happen.
Austin Carter: Well, that’s a good point. But I feel another coin flip coming here.
Ariel Lavery: You’re right! Catching on! In my mind, had the river alternative plan happened, I wonder if the Cherokees would have gotten the land easements at all. Because what Chief Sneed described to me was a hostile compromise.
Chief Sneed: Yeah, there were threats of violence and everything else. People who were close to the situation, said things had gotten very heated with the protests. And so when the opportunity presented itself to just accept the easements from TVA, that seemed like the reasonable path at that time. But the promise was that the land would be taken into trust.
Ariel Lavery: You can hear a bit of disdain there. Yet, another part of the silver lining for the Cherokees comes directly out of the development, which we haven’t yet talked about, that is there today, Tellico Village. That’s the main housing division that was finally developed, with its first residents moving in in ‘87.
Austin Carter: Wow, almost a decade after the gates were closed.
Ariel Lavery: Yes. And Tellico Village has been a great resource for sustaining the museum.
Bob Blankenship: We had no operating money from the tribe then. The tribe didn’t have any money. We had what little TVA had given us, and lived off that as long as we could. That’s where we had our meeting initially, down at the yacht club at Tellico Village. And they would have auctions to help us raise funds. They would give boat rides from the yacht club up to Sequoyah Museum site. We’d have a picnic.
Ariel Lavery: Tellico Village, which is a retirement community, has really been kinda pivotal to the museum’s continued operations, which has also taken a part in educating Cherokee youth about their own history. Something that definitely was not happening 50 years ago.
(etherial guitar music fades in)
Chief Richard Sneed: When I was growing up, there wasn't there was not a great deal of emphasis placed upon embracing our culture, in fact, just the opposite. And it was something that I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t understand why it was that way. There have always been members of our community who are very traditional, and they cling to traditional beliefs and our language. But you have to keep in mind, I mean, there was a concerted effort by the federal government, when you think about the assimilation period, to wipe out everything native.
Ariel Lavery: Ceremonies are now held at the memorial sites, where youth learn about and participate in the traditional practices of their tribe.
Gene Branson: You can almost feel what these the children would do and the adults.
Ariel Lavery: So with their very convoluted history of displacement and development of this valley I tried to get clarity on the overall Cherokee position on the dam. I asked Bob, Gene and Chief Sneed about that.
Ariel Lavery: You’ve been connected to this lake for quite some time, Do you think the TVA has done right by the Eastern Band and the Cherokee?
Gene Branson: I do, yeah. They didn't have to do what they’ve done, TVA didn’t, I guess. But I think now they’re in a mood to where they want to do more protection, more cultural preservation.
Bob Blankenship: Yeah, we happy as hell right now. Because we know what our history was over there, we know where the where the villages were. We know where Sequoyah came from. We know that Chota was an Tanasi wereI capitals of the Cherokee.
Ariel Lavery: I guess there’s two parts to this question, do you believe the TVA has done right by the Cherokee, and do you believe that they have righted the wrong, all the wrongs? You know I mean I’m thinking about recent history, but also the deep history of the Cherokee in the valley?
Chief Richard Sneed: Well, short answer? No. The reason it's an easy, no to say they haven't is because of what I mentioned earlier, which was the mindset of the government and Europeans in the way that the government viewed indigenous people as inferior and so forth. Do I think that they're they're working to right the wrongs? I believe so. History’s complicated, you know? And if we’re going to be honest with ourselves there’s not a people group on the face of the earth that has clean hands. The damage is done.
(etherial guitar music ends)
Scene 5: What Remains?
Ariel Lavery: One thing there’s no disputing is that Carolyn is still mourning for the loss of her home. She used to go out with her mother and sisters and collect Easter flowers every year from their homeplace. They did that for 42 years! …until excavations for a new house tore them all out. The barbed wire fence her father put up is still there in an open lot. She took me around the Tellico Village area and showed me where various places were, while I had a baby strapped to me. (sound of baby Calliope crying) We drove out to this boat launch where you could see some of the huge houses across the lake, and a small island about 20 feet off shore.
Carolyn Ritchey: And Miss Nellie, the one that was very outspoken, their house was there.
Ariel Lavery: So their house was on that island?
Carolyn Ritchey: their house was on that island. And these Tellico Village people call that Blue Heron Island.
Ariel Lavery: And she took me to her homeplace. Which now is right smack dab in the middle of Tellico Village. Now unfortunately, I failed to get this part recorded I guess because I was a bit distracted with the baby, but Carolyn did indulge me later and recorded herself driving out there.
Carolyn Ritchey: …pulling out on 444, which is Tellico Parkway across the road used to be Lee Stewksberry’s… There are small lots, little teeny, what are called postage stamp …There's a man out here walking his dog… my goodness, you could whisper at some of these houses. And you could hear in the other house, they are that close… They've rearranged the landscape before they turned it over to the CRDA because our land was not this roly poly…I've just made a left that's gonna go into this little cul de sac…Oh, my goodness…
(thoughtful guitar music fades in)
And now we're circling around and this is where our old barn used to stand and there's a house there. To the left is the pasture where the cows meandered around and had their life and then we're up to where there was another barn. A second big barn. And then to the immediate right is where the house stood up in the big maple trees are still there…I'm here to the rock..
Ariel Lavery: This was a big limestone rock, which stuck up out of the earth and was centered right in the middle of this cul de sac. Carolyn and her siblings used to climb up onto the rock every morning when they went out to milk the cows.
Carolyn Ritchey: it's the only thing that… the only thing that has not changed.
Ariel Lavery: When we were out there looking around she climbed on top of that rock, holding a picture of the rock from when it used to be their farm. In the photograph you can see her father’s fence, and behind it the big rock, and behind that, cows dotted against the open landscape. And for a moment, while Carolyn stood up on that rock, I saw the young girl standing there, looking proud as ever, but carrying a grown woman’s deep well of heartache. And as she stood there, she was surrounded by a community of ghosts, past, present and future – the generations of lives molded by this river valley – that now lies dormant beneath the surface of a lake.
Carolyn Ritchey: (emotional with background noise from potluck) The river and the land is just part of you. It’s like you wear it around. It’s just, uh, something that doesn’t go away.
(music swells and ends)
Ariel Lavery: This episode was edited to reflect that the snail darter was petitioned for delisting in 2021.
Credits
(theme music fades in)
This was our last episode of this season. Thank you so much for listening and for going on this journey with us through some of Americas rivers. We hope you have been inspired and moved by the stories people have shared with us. In case you missed any of this season's earlier episodes, they are all available on our website, Apple podcasts, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. There you can also find our Season One episodes AND submit future episode ideas because we are going to get right to work on Season 3!
To see images of the remaining fence and limestone rock with Carolyn holding the picture of her family’s farm visit on our website at middleofeverywherepod.org or on Instagram and Facebook at @middleofeverywherepod @middleofeverywherepod and Twitter at @rural_stories. And I highly encourage you to sign up for our newsletter. Our marketing director, Dixie Lynn, has been putting together incredibly detailed newsletters that give you even more backstory on this series that couldn’t be included in the episodes. You’ll see extra images, read side stories, and get to know more crazy details. This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me, Ariel Lavery, with editorial help from my co-host, Austin Carter. Our editor is Naomi Starobin. Thank you to Elijah Borwick and Zacherie Lamb for their excellent voice acting, and of course Zyg Plater for playing himself. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky. Other scoring was from APM music. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.
(theme music fades out)